Any issues with White on/off Switches or Dimmers for my applications?

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I’m looking at putting in 13 White on/off switches and dimmers and connecting them to a SmartThings Hub (Matter over Thread) and was hoping to get some feedback if I might run into any potential issues.

All setups have a Neutral and Line in the box.

1.Most of my setups will be a single on/off switch directly controlling an LED light bulb.

I need 100% uptime, I can’t rely on and sort of hub or automation that if communication is lost the lights don’t work.

Has anyone had any problems at all with 100% direct control? (which would mostly be mechanical failures I think)

2.I’ll have two 3 way setups that would use a white on/off and an Aux switch WITH a traveler.

Again I need 100% uptime on this, no automation or hub.

Has anyone had any problems at all with 3 way 100% direct control? (issue between a hardwired aux and on/off switch)

3.One location will been an on/off in Smart Mode always powering a Hue Light.

It won’t actually be controlling the Hue light through SmartThings, I have the Hue tap dial for that. I’m only powering the lights through the on/off switch so I can air gap the lights if needed rather than flipping a breaker.

Has anyone had any issues with the white on/off switch holding it’s relay on indefinitely?

I can hardwire the hue lights and not use the relay at all if there’s any risk of failure for the relay being continually energized.

4.I have one 4 way location that I plan to use 3 white dimmer to control 2 hue bulbs.

The dimmers will control the a hardwired Hue lights through SmartThings (hue bulb not going through the dimmers direct hardwired). I have a Hue hub so it will be local with SmartThings.

Has anyone had any issues with 3 dimmers controlling 2 hue bulbs through SmartThings with local automation?

I understand that both SmartThings and Hue hubs need to be up for it to work. But is there issues when everything is up and things just don’t work and need resetting?

5.For all the switches I plan to use the LED bars through SmartThings to indicate when doors are unlocked or open. Some will be a single SmartThings door contact, others will look at multiple ones (if any 3 are open it’s red to indicate something is open). Then when they are all close they will either turn off or go green, something like that.

Has any one had any issues with controlling the led bars on the on/off switch or dimmer through SmartThings to indicate if a door is open or unlocked?

Is it fairly quick response? Like within 1 second?

I’m doing a door lock now with the light on a single older on/off Red switch (with the tiny led on it) and it works about 95% of the time, but would be taking it up a notch with all all my locks and door and window sensor.

Just trying to get an idea of what issues I may encounter.

Thanks

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Hope this helps answer some of your questions, even though I don’t have any first hand experience with their line of White switches and dimmers (I use their Blue line)

  1. I don’t recall reading any issues where physical control at the switch has been an issue except in specific cases (see answer to point 2). So long as you don’t do something like “enable local protection”, then you should be fine. As the switches are controlling the lights through its own hardware, there should be no issues physically controlling the lights if the hub is offline.
  2. Regarding the reliability issue, I know that at least with their White Dimmers, there have been issues with newer firmware that have caused issues in multi-way setups using Aux or “dumb” switches, where the main switch isn’t properly detecting the other switches state changes, but I believe the newest beta should have adjustment settings for both use cases. I don’t know if this affects the On/Off switch as well, or if there is an updated firmware if it does…
  3. Not sure why you wouldn’t also want to control the light from the switch, as that has no bearing on being able to air gap the light, but if that’s what you want… If you are worried about the physical relay on the On/Off switch, you could try the Dimmer instead as it should operate just the same in smart bulb mode.
  4. You mention Dimmers specifically… as these are Matter over Thread switches, and I assume the Hue lights are Zigbee, you may have issues achieving any kind of smooth dimming as it will all need to be triggered by automations. For truly seamless dimming, you would want both the switch and light to be controlled by the same hub (Zigbee or Thread) and bound together. While I haven’t used SmartThings, I would assume you would be able to group all 3 Dimmers together and control the automations for the lights from any of them, while still having the other 2 Dimmers update their states based on the switch you physically interact with (or your hub interacts with)
  5. I don’t have much experience with using the LED strip for notifications, so can’t really add anything here.
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Thank you for the reply.

1.That’s good to hear there’s no issues that you’ve heard of.

2.That’s not great to hear, hopefully this is fixed, I’ll have to check into this deeper. I can’t have “hardwired” switches and aux not work or have things like this break in the future after I buy all the switches.

3.I’m not using the white switch to control the hue lights through SmartThings in this location because I already have 2 Hue Tap dials on the wall for them which work “directly” through the Hue Hub, it has 4 buttons which can all have multiple taps for setting scenes, a rotary dial for dimming and can be pulled off the wall and used an a remote. I didn’t want to go with the white dimmer for this setup because I’ve read there “could” be issues running bulbs through the dimming circuit even if you set it to sin wave. Probably a slim chance but a relay would be the safest option for compatibility as long as keeping it energized indefinitely isn’t an issue for it. The other thing is I believe the dimmer circuit generates more heat and this would be in a 3 gang box with 2 other white on/off switches, so it will be tight in there and lots of wires, not a lot of room for heat dissipation which can “possibly” lead to premature failure, probably won’t but it’s just one of the could happen things.

5.I’ll have to check deeper into this, I was hoping the dimming through SmartThings would be seamless.

Thanks again!

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Revisiting #3 really quick, I would still suggest setting it up for even for basic on/off functionality even if also controlled by the other switches. This way, any guests you may have over who may be unfamiliar with the Hue tap dials will still know how to turn the lights on, or if for some reason they were “removed” to use as a remote and not otherwise easily accessible.

Not saying this will be an everyday occurrence, but that 1 out of 100 times it comes up can easily be solved by a small initial time investment to set it up…

My thoughts are that any basic setup (like for lighting) should be operable by a 5 year old, if needed.

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Oh ya, probably makes sense to give it basic on/off control (through SmartThings), I didn’t think about that. Hopefully then the relay is good to stay energized with a load through it for basically forever :slight_smile: