Blue series Smart Dimmer - odd behavior

Product Support Wiring Discussion
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1

I’m guessing this has been discussed, but can’t find it in the forums.

I have a Blue series Smart Dimmer installed at the line side of a total of 4 dumb non-lighted switches controlling 7 canister lights in the ceiling. The switch is integrated into my Home Assistant through Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 (Zigbee). In certain (but relatively few) on/off configs of the dumb switches, the Blue switch works as expected. In most configurations, the Blue switch will behave as follows…

When lights are on and you push down on the paddle, it will turn them off, but then the blue LED clicks back on. Now, with the lights off, pushing up on the paddle does nothing. Pushing down on the paddle will turn the switch off and then it will turn itself back on and the lights will come on.

I’ve verified the traveler wires and that the black wire connected to the common screw on the 3-way switch at the other side of the switch circuit goes to a separate cable - presumably to the lights.

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

2

I’ve seen this exact situation before, and it’s been brought up a few times on the forums, with no real help or answers from Inovelli:

I assume it’s something to do with long lines / extra capacitance or inductance in the wiring, and the current detection (how the switch knows if you’ve tripped a dumb-3-way switch) gets confused.

@EricM_Inovelli is there anything that can be done here? I stripped about half of my mutli-way setup to make it work, and there’s been suggestions of using aux switches instead of dumb switches should make it work, but it seems like a firmware / hardware problem across several product lines at this point.

3

There is a configuration option in beta 3.07 that adjusts the 3way dumb switch detection. Feedback on it would be great. If you are using Z2M it is super easy to install, but can be done with ZHA as well.

Both should have a “dumb detection level” that you can adjust to see if you can produce different results.

4

I am using ZHA and don’t seem an obvious way to update it to a beta version. Looked around the support archive and couldn’t find it either. Can you put me in the right direction?

5

I will send you the instructions.

6

Thanks for the instructions. I was able to get the switch to update and verify the new firmware number.

The behavior of the switch after the former update remains the same. I did not see any new settings in the configuration for the switch. Let me know if I missed something.

With some more testing, I have determined that with all of the other switches in the up position, the blue switch works correctly. If any of the other switches are in the off position, it does not.

7

Some of the less used advanced settings are in the manage zigbee device window for the device:

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8

I assume the default value of zero means not to treat it as a dumb switch. I changed the value to one and the end result was the same as before

9

I updated to 3.07 just now, and setting dumbDetectionLevel to 2 fixed the issue for me.

Firmware changelog for 3.07 says “start [dumbDetectionLevel] with a value of 0 and increase the level until the Dumb Switch function operates normally.”

My particular issue on my 4-way installation (line in first switch, load in 3rd switch) had the Blue switch always detecting “On” when it was sending power to the traveler wire, and detected fine when when sending power to the load wire.

10

Not sure how I missed the changelog. Thanks for pointing that out. Trying increasing values now.

11

Eric - after incrementing the value and testing, the light started working as expected at value “4”. Thanks for you help with the fix!

12

Great to hear!