Blue Series Dimmer - Lights won't turn off

Switches General Discussion
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#1

Neutral-wired 3-way dimmer with dumb switch, properly wired and for the most part, things work as expected. This is being used with 6 Feit LED lamps in can lights in my living room.

At max brightness, I got the flashing light problem, which was resolved by reducing the Max Load dimming level to 200. If I use the paddle, I can reduce the brightness as expected, but the lights won’t go low enough to actually go out. If I use the dumb switch or trigger the switch from HA, then they turn off just fine.

How do I get to that point from the paddle on the 2-1? I feel like there’s some logic or setting I’m missing.

Thanks!

#2

Can’t tell for sure from your description, but it sounds as if you are confusing holding the paddle down and a single press down to turn off. Holding the paddle down will only dim down to the minimum value. To turn the lights off, you need to do a single press down.

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#3

That’s entirely too easy–which is why I missed it completely. I tried that and it worked perfectly–thank you!

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#4

I have another data point now–this evening, I installed four more Blue 2-1 dimmers in another room. Each dimmer controls the same kind of Feit LED bulbs used above in varying numbers. I can dim each of them down to barely glowing, and if I hold down the paddle long enough, the lights go out completely.

This is quite a bit different than my living room, where the bulbs will dim to (just eyeballing it) about 1/3 brightness.

I can’t tell if it’s related, but the living room dimmer is in the “bad” group, going by the IEEE number. I have one more Blue 2-1 that I can swap it with to compare results, and will do so this weekend to see if it makes a difference.

#5

It sounds as if you need to adjust the MIN value in both cases. For the first, raise it. For the latter, lower it.

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#6

I figured that was probably the case for the lights that go out; I’ll just need to find a workable minimum value. For the living room lights, the minimum is already set at 1 so I don’t have a way to reduce the drive to the lamps any further. I think a differential test with a different Blue dimmer will tell me whether it’s some combination of circuit and lamps, or whether it’s the dimmer itself.

#7

Update!

I exchanged the dimmer with another Blue that I hadn’t installed yet, and kept the same dumb switch in place for the 3-way. Got exactly the same result as before–at their lowest, the lights only dim to about 1/3 brightness.

As it would happen, I had an Aux switch handy, so I exchanged the dumb switch for the Aux switch and corrected the wiring accordingly. This got an entirely different result–now the lights will reliably dim all the way down to just barely glowing, which matches my single-pole installations.