An AC ceiling fan/light with a 14/3 wire running to the switch box (separate hots for fan and light)
A 2-gang switch box that currently has a VZM31-SN blue series dimmer and a VZM35-SN blue series fan switch in it.
I have a neutral in the switch box, and meticulously labeled wires.
Currently the fan motor is wired to the fan switch, the fan light is wired to the dimmer switch, and the smart lights get constant power. The dimmer switch is bound to the smart lights. This works OK, but the problems are:
My spouse regularly hits the top of both paddles as an intuitive way to “turn all the lights on”, which also turns on the fan.
The effective dimming range for the bulbs in the fan and the smart lights are totally different. The smart lights produce meaningful amounts of light down to 1%, and the fan light really doesn’t.
I can’t control the fan light without also controlling the smart lights (since the switch repeats commands sent to it via zigbee to the bound devices. Is there a way to turn this off like there is in z-wave?)
The behavior I’d like to have is:
One of the zigbee smart switches controls the zigbee smart lights via binding.
The other zigbee smart switch controls the light in the ceiling fan
I can control the ceiling fan using the config button on one of them.
Is this possible with my current hardware? It seems like I should be able to do it from a hardware point of view with my current wiring. I’d need to bind the fan switch to the smart lights (easy enough), but then get the “use the config button to choose the fan speed” behavior to set the speed of the switch’s output, not just send a zigbee command to a bound device. And then somehow that would need to be decoupled from the level shown in the indicator bar, changed by holding up/down, and sent to the bound lights.
I might be over simplifying but see if this makes sense.
Disable local control on the light switch. Now the paddle will just control the bound smart lights.
Disable local control on the fan switch. Program a single tap up and down to turn the light switch on and off. This lets you control the light on the fan using the fan switch.
Program fan speed automations using the config button or multi-taps on the fan switch.
What do you mean by “disable local control?” Are you talking about the “Local Protection” feature built into the zigbee standard? Or something more specific in the Inovelli manufacturer-specific cluster?
The only way I can think I of that would make your suggestion work would be to use the dimmer switch to control the fan light, enable local protection on the fan switch, and use automations to control both the fan and the smart lights based on events from the fan light.
I think that would end up being worse than what I have now. The smart lights are the primary light source for the room, and I’m not willing to sacrifice the reliability and low-latency of having them controlled by binding.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that it can’t do what I want.
Ultimately what I want to be able to do is to use the VZM35-SN’s LevelControl cluster (including its integration with the LED bar and the paddle) in a way that’s completely divorced from the output on the load terminal, and ALSO have some way to control that output that’s more nuanced than “always on”, which is what smart bulb mode does.
I’m trying to think of how Inovelli could potentially implement this… Maybe an additional value for the Smart Bulb Mode parameter that would cause the fan speed in the output terminal to track the speed in the Fan cluster, or in the endpoint 3 LevelControl cluster. From a software architecture point of view, though, it seems to be getting quite messy, so perhaps it’s not worth the added complexity.
In the meantime I think I’m just going to buy a canopy module. It feels so strange (in a good way) to have new Inovelli products that are actually in stock, not just Coming Soon™!
I basically did a similar implementation as yours with two blue 2-1s and a canopy module. I think you’re on the right track by ordering the canopy module.