Added 3 Innovelli Red LZW-31 SN Dimmer switches today.
All three were installed in a 3-way manner using dumb switches as the slave and using a neutral wire.
I was confused when I first installed them, that the dumb switch controlled the power to both switches, until I saw the insert that explained that you have to configure the switch for the power settings, 3-way, neutral wire, power on settings, and a dozen other options.
I still don’t understand the “child device” options, but they do everything I bought them for, and I didn’t have to buy an add-on switch for each.
All work great!
My setup was:
Main box
Line x2
Neutral bundle
Load (black load twisted with red traveler)
Bare ground
Slave box
Load (black load twisted with red traveler)
Neutral bundle
Bare ground
I was able to connect the LZW in the main box without touching the slave box.
Child device options allow you to expose certain settings of the switch so that they can be manipulated by 3rd party devices. Here is an example:
Disabling local control can be done via the switch’s settings in the hub. That is the setting that keeps the paddle from turning the wired load on and off. Sometimes that is used with smart bulbs where you just turn it on and leave it, but there are other uses where you might want to turn it on and off with some regularity.
Let’s say that you have a toddler that likes to play with the Inovelli dimmered overhead light switch at nap time. So you could go into the switch’s settings via the hub and turn on disable local control. But if you have to do that regularly, it’s unwieldy.
So you turn on the child device for disable local control. The creates a child object for your hub. It still looks like a switch, but turning it on enables local control and turning it off restores local control. These child objects also get exposed to linked services such as Amazon Alexa. So if you have the child object enabled for disable local control, you can keep the toddler from turning on the overhead light by saying “Alexa, turn on the whatever light disable local control”. To resume normal control, just tell Alexa to turn it off.
There are also child devices for LED color when on or off. That makes it easier for some to set the LED bar color for notification purposes.
Is there the way to turn off “Smart bulb mode” manually from the device?
The issue I experience if inability to control lights at all when there is network or smarthings outage.
Smarthings hub is not able to send scene to smartbulbs and at this time I want to switch to manual mode.
But when I press config C button for 8 times, behavior doesn’t change. LED light confirming that “Disable local protection” setting is changed by signaling greed/red, but switch works in same manner, not cutting off power to the bulbs.
Is the only way to resolve this to turn off “smart bulb mode” and use “disable local control” option only?
My setup is non z-wave smart recessed lights controlled mainly by alexa + inovelly red switch in “smart bulb mode”.
When ISP has problems (quite often) or just smarthings hub (way more often) and there is no internet, the switch is basically useless. I can’t turn on/off lights at all.
actually cut power to the smart bulbs?
Yes.
I’d like to return to basic button 1 behavior → turn on & off electricity.
Without “smart bulb mode” I used option to press config button 8 times and switch was changing modes between “disable relay on/off”.
With smart bulb mode on it doesn’t work, it seems that switch completely ignores setting of “disable local control”
What hub? You may be able to setup a scene (say 6 down taps) to disable disable smart bulb mode. That way you can disable and then turn off your non z wave bulbs.
Your scenes won’t work locally offline since they’d have to go through the hub. Best bet in that case would be either going with zwave bulbs and looking into associating the bulbs with the switch, which would remove the dependency on the hub as they’d be communicating directly, or swapping to a local hub like Home Assistant or Hubitat if those are options? That removes the internet dependency and as long as you have power to the hub then all of your scenes would still work (just a matter of making sure your devices are supported on that platform).
I assume the bulbs automatically come on when power is restored, so by re-enabling local control (config button 8x) it’ll cut power/restore power causing the bulbs to turn back on?
I could be WAY off on all of this since it’s been a minute since I’ve gone through it… But I believe when SBM is enabled, the local protection state is always on no matter what. Disabling SBM should allow you to change local protection from the switch. So what you’d want to do is disable SBM, turn the load on at the switch, and then enable local protection so pressing the switch won’t turn the load off. Then when you have a hub outage, you should be able to disable local protection and cut the load to the bulbs.
Now my personal opinion… instead of trying to make your switches work for WHEN your hub has an outage, work at moving to local control. I believe smartthings has local control for lighting available, but other hubs like Hubitat and Home Assistant definitely do. You can also use zwave bulbs and setup association so it bypasses the hub completely. All of these are better options long-term.
For local control in SmartThings, so would need to be using an Edge driver. As of last report, Inovelli released an Edge driver for the switch. I believe an Edge driver for the dimmer is coming soon.
Yes, I went with this direction.
I personally think when SBM mode is enabled, then “config button 8x” action should turn on/off SBM mode together with local relay.
I originally started with the simplest possible path - smarthings, but apparently it is not enough. Considering going into local hub direction, as with ~1 year with smart home, I see significant issues with basic functions (not only inovelli & smarthings) with internet outage.
The development of Matter standards are keeping me cautios for now, as I don’t want to do change full house to new smart standards in a year or two again.
I was not able to find any z-wave recessed bulbs that provide same functions as others, like dimming & different colors.
Using lumary recessed lights now, but would switch to z-waves right away if there would be any good lights on the market
If you have an old pc, old laptop, or any sort of hardware kicking around you can setup home assistant quite easily. There is a smartthings integration that will connect to your smartthings hub and expose all the devices to home assistant. This would give you the opportunity to play around with it, get comfortable with how automations work etc without really having to mess with anything in your smarthome. When you do get comfortable, then all you need to do is pick up a zwave/zigbee stick, pair your devices and away you go with full local control.
The upside of Home Assistant is that you’ll be able to continue doing Zwave/Zigbee/whatever else you have and then also run Matter from the same hub. Either from a new stick to plug in, or at least with some Zigbee sticks they’ll be able to run Matter side by side on the same stick. Even if Matter takes off, I don’t see that deprecating current devices regardless though?
You Home Assistant fanboys crack me up
Multiprotocol support is not something special or unique about Home Assistant. That is the upside of most smart hubs out there.
You’re right, but none of them do it as good as Home Assistant
If compatibility is the goal, no hub even comes close to Home Assistant.
I’d even argue that ease-of-use for basic stuff is almost on par as Smartthings or Hubitat now as well. Maybe even easier since if you want to add custom drivers to either you’re messing with driver code in the IDE/Device Manager, where a lot of the HA integrations are now fully configured through the GUI.
I absolutely agree and am sure we’ll see most if not all the main hubs support it. It’s just tbd on other hubs supporting it out the gate or with the same hardware while HA already has the basic integration built and did a example to follow along with for anyone interested in matter so there’s no speculating since it’s already done.
And between Hubitat and HA in my personal experience I had more luck with integrations and appreciated the UI and control I got from HA. I think Hubitat was easier to approach when I started, but HA has made some huge strides In making it a lot more accessible since then and I think that’s awesome too. Ultimately the more the merrier
Haha. Now you’re pushing it I don’t deny HA is very powerfull with more integrations than any other platform. But “ease-of-use” is not one of its hallmarks. Its notorious for having a very steep learning curve and not well accepted by non-techy people. Quirks, Json,YAML, HACS, ZHA, MQTT Geeks love it… but Its gibberishish to the average joe homeowner.
Its notorious for having a very steep learning curve and not well accepted by non-techy people. Quirks, Json,YAML, HACS, ZHA, MQTT Geeks love it… but Its gibberishish to the average joe homeowner.