Hi, folks!
I’ve got a 3-way situation I’m not sure how to deal with.
New house, conduit everywhere, individual wires. No romex.
Using LZW30-SN on/off switches.
One box has Line and 2 travelers T1 and T2, no neutral.
Other box has Neutral, Load and 2 travelers T1 and T2
I don’t see this layout addressed in the wiring diagram examples, and I’m stumped.
Any advice here? Can the travelers be used somehow to implement a solution using an aux switch?
Thanks!
Romex or individual conductors? You’ll need to post pics and or a drawing. If there is a 3-wire between the two switches, the neutral will have been sent via one conductor. The light has to get the neutral somehow.
Thanks, Bry. I’m no artist but I did my best to add a drawing.
I’m assuming the neutral on the right goes up to the light.
Is that neutral in the switch box on the right? I’m not sure what “I’m assuming” means. Assuming doesn’t work so hot with electricity . . .
There’s a neutral in the box on the right. So, box on the right has neutral and load, box on the left has line and no neutral. Two traveler wires run between the two boxes.
I was wondering if one possible solution would be to use the travelers to carry line from the left box to the right box, and neutral from the right box to the left box.
This way I’d have line and neutral in each box, but no travelers.
Then I’d wire up the Inovelli as a single-pole switch in the box on the right.
On the left, I might install a completely separate Z-Wave switch that doesn’t physically control anything, but instead just talks to the right switch over z-wave to control the light.
Is that up to code?
Ok, so even though it’s not wired that way presently, you really can have a Line and Load in the same box on the right. This will give you a neutral installation in the right box into which the Inovelli will go.
The only thing I’m seeing right now is another Inovelli in the left box. You will send the Line to the right box over one traveler and send the neutral back to the left box via the other traveler. The “primary” Inovelli will have to go in the right box with the Load. You’ll have to associate the left box Inovelli via direct association.
Cool. I haven’t played with any of the group features or association features of Z-Wave yet. Any quick advice? I’ll be using zwavejs2mqtt on a RaspPi if that helps.
Thanks for the tag. So just remember that association is in ONE direction, meaning that you associate a MASTER device to a SLAVE device.
Groups vary by device, but the LZW31-SN has groups 1-4, this is my plain english translation:
Group 1: Lifeline - don’t really touch this.
Group 2: On/Off control
Group 3: Slave level control back to master to keep devices in sync
Group 4: Master level control to slave(s), which could be lights or other switches.
Associations work outside of the hub, so they should be near-instant (50ms or so) and should not be noticeable if linked up properly to an average end-user (WAF). For 3-way associations the typical setup is as follows:
Group 2 Master to Slave
Group 4 Master to Slave
Group 3 Slave to Master ← Different direction
Some people have had looping issues, so they set the slave parameter to a different value, but I’ve not experienced it in personal testing, so I need to work to understand if/why this is occuring.
Tag me if you need anything further! Manuals are a great resource for this!
