I’ve got some undercabinet lighting in my kitchen that I’d like to use my Inovelli 2-1 Blue Series switch with. I wired it up and it functions, the lights turn on or off properly. However, the transformer makes a loud buzzing sound when the switch is “on”. When it’s off, it’s quiet. When I disconnected the switch, after it had been on for a couple minutes, it felt warm to the touch.
Is there something I’m doing wrong with the wiring or is that just not compatible with the Inovelli switches? When I wire it up to a regular dumb switch, there are no issues.
The wiring is a single pole, neutral set up – power source wire goes into “Line”, wire going up to the transformer goes in “Load”, wire going to the other neutral wires in the box goes in “Neutral”, and ground to ground.
I’ve attached a few photos of the transformer in case they help. If you’d like a video to hear the buzzing sound, I took one but didn’t upload it here, so just let me know and I can provide it.
Let me know if you need any other details to help me troubleshoot…thank you!
I did upgrade it last night, but I didn’t make any config changes this morning when I tested it. Is there a setting I have to make in the Z2M interface?
Ah ha. I’m running a custom converter. The updates for the 2.14 firmware were merged after the 1.30.3 release. You can either use Z2M Edge or wait for the May release.
One of my switches was faulty so I had to get a replacement from Inovelli. I’m finally ready to test it with the lights that were causing the buzzing sound!
Except that I can’t upgrade its firmware to 2.14 because apparently Inovelli has pulled it or something? It should be located here according to the logs in Z2M: https://files.inovelli.com/firmware/VZM31-SN/Beta/2.14/VZM31-SN_2.14.ota. Anyone have any insight into when a new version will be made available?
That said, I do see the option for this switch to put it into “Single-Pole Full Sine Wave”…so I did that. But now the switch doesn’t work at all - the LED turned off and the switch doesn’t turn the lights on or off.
No, the first one seemed to have been DOA. So while I was waiting for the replacement, I took the switch that I was going to use for these under cabinet lights/transformer and moved it to the other lights since I didn’t want to listen to the buzzing sound.
The problem you are facing is that you are trying to use a switch that is not designed nor rated for inductive (transformer) loads. You need either a true on/off switch or a dimmer that is specifically compatible with your transformer.
Yeah, Blue dimmer switches shouldn’t be used with magnetic/inductive loads… But this latest issue sounds like it could be an unrelated firmware bug:
(EDIT: @mamber confirms in a later post that the switch firmware does behave correctly in this scenario, so my theory here is unlikely to be the explanation for this failure)
This suggests to me that the switch firmware might not be validating/range-checking its configuration parameters before using them. So, if you use a new driver with an old switch firmware, you run the risk of sending an invalid config to the switch by enabling options that are only supported by newer firmware.
Z2M at least doesn’t tailor its config page to the current firmware version that is actually on the switch - it just assumes that you’re on the latest it supports (2.14 at present) - so it can show you options that aren’t actually supported by a switch running older firmware.
This should be harmless - the switch should just reject/ignore any configuration that it doesn’t support. It certainly shouldn’t brick itself.
Does the switch show any signs of life? Does the LED notification bar on it do anything?
Can you use the Quick Tap Sequences to get back to the default Single-pole On/Off mode?:
Are you sure you’re doing the factory reset correctly? It is a little tricky - the order you press/release the buttons matters. Quoting Bry’s instructions from another thread:
Does the switch show any signs of life? Does the LED notification bar on it do anything?
Nope… nothing lights up at all.
Agree this sounds like some sort of bug with the firmware/z2m/something that bricked it, even though it shouldn’t be used with a transformer (considering it worked fine prior to that setting). I’m in touch with inovelli support and hopefully they’ll work with me to get a replacement/credit for the next time i need a switch (since I clearly won’t be trying this location again).
It does ignore completely new parameters (in my experience, Z2M returns an error if you try to change a parameter that the firmware doesn’t support) - but what does it do if you try to set an existing/supported parameter to a new/unsupported value?
For example: say you have a switch running FW 2.08 and you try to set switchType to “Single-Pole Full Sine Wave”, what happens? switchType is an existing parameter that FW 2.08 supports, but you’d be trying to set it to a value outside of the range that 2.08 supports.
I’m not saying this is definitely what happened (sorry if my previous post made it sound like a definitive diagnosis) - But it does look suspicious to me (as someone that has written, reviewed, and debugged a lot of embedded firmware). It should be easy enough to test - though with the risk of bricking a switch, I’ll leave that testing up to someone that has the hardware required to manually reflash the switch if it does fail.
@smenzer , do you recall what firmware version your switch was on before it failed? And what date code is on the sticker on the front of the switch?
