Red Series 2-1 Notification LED Game Changing

Switches General Discussion
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Just wanted to post here on the forums that after installing 20 z-wave red series 2-1 switches for nearly every single light switch in the house, the 7 programmable LEDs are absolutely game changing in terms of home automation and at a glance view of the state of the home.

I’ve been using home assistant and zwavejs ui and currently have the following notifications setup that apply to all switches:

  • Home Alarm Pending (exit delay) - Pulse Entire Switch LED Yellow
  • Home Alarm Armed - Standby Color of LED changed to Red
  • Door Unlocked for 2 mins - Fast Blink LED 7 Red
  • House/Garage Door Opened - Pulse LED 6 Red
  • Fridge Door left open for 2 mins - Flash LED 6 Yellow
  • In a work meeting (I work from home) - LED 5 Solid Blue
  • Doorbell Rang - Fast Blink LED 5 Yellow
  • Tesla Precooling - Pulse LED 2 Blue
  • Tesla Precooling Requested - Blink LED 2 Yellow
  • Tesla Charging - Pulse LED 1 Green
  • Tesla under 30% battery - Pulse LED 1 yellow

Other Light Switch Specific Notifications:

  • Shower Start - Falling Entire Switch Blue
  • Shower after 5 mins - Falling Entire Switch Green
  • Shower after 10 mins - Falling Entire Switch Red
  • Washing Machine Done - Pulse Entire Switch Purple

Coupled with scenes for various things with multi-tap of the config button or the paddles makes for some absurdly powerful automation, such as:

  • Precooling the car when the config button is pressed 2x on any switch in the house
  • Lock the doors if unlocked when the config button is pressed 1x
  • Turn on night light mode (100% brightness white LED on switches) when paddle is pressed 4x up.
  • Turn off night light mode (100% brightness white LED on switches) when paddle is pressed 4x down.
  • Rainbow Aurora Mode on when paddle is pressed 5x up.
  • Rainbow Aurora Mode on when paddle is pressed 5x down.
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HA also has direct access to the effect parameters too now. This makes it so easy to set effects. They are cut off so hard to see but this is the 4 parts needed to set all LED effects. You have to enable them. Just pick the +xx entities not shown, click on each one and hit the gear to get the window that lets you enable each one. Kind of pain to enable but worth it to use.

effects

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How do you figure out what each number means for each parameter?

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I experimented with using the notification LEDs for various things, but ultimately found few cases where they worked better for me as an LED notification vs a push notification to our phones. There is a niche there for non-critical things you want to be able to see at a glance in a specific part of your house- I just don’t have those. I have kept one that dances the led on our porch light switch to indicate the outdoor speakers are playing, but even that is redundant as I also push a persistent notification to my phone that has volume controls integrated into it. Certainly fun to play around with, regardless!

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Similar feelings here… I just have a few LED bar notifications set up. But they are great, and very helpful - I’m a big fan, no doubt!

But just like 5-tap-up/down automations sound useful at first glance, having to keep track of lots of different settings (“ugh, what does that mean again?”) gets arduous pretty fast!