Controlling two devices - one switch?

Switches Wiring Discussion
,
1

Hi,

I have a someone unique situation. I have a laundry room that has a fan and an led light strip.
The Led light strip is physically wired to switch #1 on a wall that is not next to the doorway of the room. By itself, this switch does a nice job of controlling the LED light strip. Currently it is a red dimmer (pre-presence sensor).

Now for the challenging wire situation.
I have a light switch by the door that controls a fan. Right now, this is a dumb single pole switch. Power comes into the switch and switched power goes to the fan.

What I would like to do is put a blue dimmer in place of the dump switch. But here is the catch, since we almost never turn on the fan, I would like the primary action of the switch buttons to control the LED switch (through a connected hub automation) and I want the double press of the switch to turn on / off the fan.

Is it possible to wire up / configure the blue dimmer to do that? I am positive that I could wire it up / configure it such that the primary press turns on / off the fan and the double press turns on / off the LED strip, but that is going to drive my wife crazy. :slight_smile:

I was thinking the other way I could go is to wire up the fan to a relay and not conntect the blue dimmer to the fan at all. Then everything would be controlled through automation. but, I would prefer to do it without the relay because I am not sure I have room in the electrical box for the relay and I don’t think I can get to the connection point of the wires to the fan easly to inject the relay there.

I am currently using the Homey Pro as my hub, but I also have a hubitat.
Any insight or suggestions would be much appreciated.

2

I’m not sure about your hub specifically, but with Home Assistant at least, this is possible. I’ve got all of my switches set to control a different switch if you double tap top/bottom. I even have a double tap on the config button to pause/unpause my TV.

Setting Up Multi-Tap Scene Control • Hubitat | Inovelli Help Center seems like it might be helpful for Habitat.

3

The blue dimmer is not rated for use on fans. You could use the blue fan switch or the upcoming blue on/off switch to do this.

1 Like
4

As @Rohan said, you’ll need to use the fan switch. Add it to Hubitat, as I do not think Homey supports Inovelli capabilities yet.

Disable local control on the fan switch so that paddle presses do not turn the fan on or off.

In Hubitat, configure single presses up and down to turn the other switch on and off. Configure double taps up and down to turn the fan switch on and off.

2 Likes
5

@Bry That sounds exactly like what I am looking for.
I was just looking through the parameters trying to see which one you are refering to.

Is it Local Protection that you are saying I would set in the parameters?
But this paragraph makes it sound like the singe press actions might be disabled when the local protection is enabled:

Parameter 256 - Local Protection

To disable button presses at the Blue Series Fan switch (ie: local at the switch), turn Parameter 256 to 1. By default this parameter is set to 0, which disables this feature. Please note that this is different than Smart Fan Mode (Parameter 52), which still allows commands to be sent when the switch is pressed locally.

6

That is the parameter. But looking at the description, I’m wondering if this will work with the Gen 3’s. You don’t want the paddle to affect the wired load, but you still want it to send button commands. But try it and see what happens.

I’m not in a position to test right now, unfortunately.

7

@Bry I have a Gen 2 red 2n1. I just moved it back to hubitat so that I could test it out. On the Gen 2 red 2n1 (LZW31), I was able to set the disable local control and then setup rules to turn the switch on and off when the paddle was activated.

So, thank you very much for your suggestion. Based on it working on the red, I have gone ahead and ordered the two blues. fingers crossed it works on them too.

8

Good. We’re trying to figure that out now. If it’s different on the 3’s hopefully they can fix it.

9

when I receive the devices and get them installed, I will come back and report the results.

1 Like
10

I received the switches yesterday and installed them today.
I verified that the Blue 2n1 switch works great when I disable local control and then build automation rules to turn on and off the load connected to the switch.

I think the Blue Fan switch will work the same way, but right now Hubitat is not receiving any of the switch press events. I had some problems adding the switch to hubitat, it didn’t recognize that it shoud use the loaded driver for the fan switch, but once I changed the Type to the Inovelli driver, I was able to change all of the parameters. I just don’t receive any notification for the button press.

I was able to disable local control and then simulate a button press on the device that then triggered my rule to turn on and off the load. So I am pretty sure that the Blue Fan switch works the same was as the Blue 2n1 and the Red dimmer.

Oh and for anyone in Canada, I highly recommend Aartech. I ordered the switches thursday morning, paid their standard $10 shipping and they arrived Friday afternoon.

1 Like
11

Been following this thread because I have a similar, albeit slightly different use case.
I have a blue 2in1 switch with zigbee bindings associated with a blue canopy light/fan switch.
All is working well.
The switch is also physically connected to another light in the room. So when I tap-up, both lights turn on (and a tap down turns them both off).
However, I’d like to only use the single up/down tap on the switch to control the canopy module, and use a double-tap up/down to turn them both on and off.
If I disable local control on the switch that seems to knock-out the bindings to the canopy – which kinda surprised me.
Is there a better way to do this? I COULD follow the approach here and use scene control, but prefer to keep the bindings if possible so the switch can directly control the canopy.

12

Sorry, I have no experience with the zigbee bindings. I was going to suggest what you suggested in your post - use the scene controls and have automations on the hub do all the work.

I will warn you that one thing I noticed is that there is a lag turning the lights on and off. I have done my best to minimize the lag, but there is still a lag. The worst part of the lag comes from the minimal delay that the switch requires for multi-tap detection. I changed this to 300ms, but that means that at a minimum, when I am turning a light on or off using the local-disabled switch, there is a 300ms delay.

It gets worse for me because I am turning on a cob light strip that is controlled by a transformer that seems to have a fraction of a second delay before it sends enough power to the strip to turn it on.

I did set all the other parameters to “immediate” so that the power doesn’t ramp up. I found that with the power ramping up, it just made the delay worse and then the transformer snapped on at a certain point, even though the transformer is dimmable and dims fine between 100 and 20%.

13

I have something almost identical with a blue fan switch and local protection enabled. Here’s something you can start from if you’re using Home Assistant.

alias: Rewrite Laundry Switch Behavior
description: ""
triggers:
  - device_id: YOUR_DEVICE_ID
    domain: zha
    type: press
    subtype: Up
    trigger: device
    id: turn_on
  - device_id: YOUR_DEVICE_ID
    domain: zha
    type: press
    subtype: Down
    trigger: device
    id: turn_off
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - light.laundry_overhead_light
    to: "on"
    id: light_on
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - light.laundry_overhead_light
    to: "off"
    id: light_off
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - number.downstairs_hallway_overhead_default_all_led_off_color
    not_to:
      - unknown
      - unavailable
    id: update_led_off_color
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: turn_on
        sequence:
          - action: light.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: light.laundry_overhead_light
            data: {}
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: turn_off
        sequence:
          - action: light.turn_off
            target:
              entity_id: fan.laundry_fan
            data: {}
          - action: light.turn_off
            target:
              entity_id: light.laundry_overhead_light
            data: {}
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: light_on
          - condition: state
            entity_id: fan.laundry_fan
            state: "off"
        sequence:
          - action: script.notify_via_switch_leds
            data:
              notify_available: true
              entity_id: fan.laundry_fan
              leds:
                - color: "{{ states('number.laundry_fan_default_all_led_off_color') }}"
                  effect: solid
                  duration: 255
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: light_off
        sequence:
          - action: script.notify_via_switch_leds
            data:
              notify_available: true
              entity_id: fan.laundry_fan
              leds: ""
      - conditions:
          - condition: trigger
            id: update_led_off_color
        sequence:
          - data:
              value: "{{ trigger.to_state.state }}"
            target:
              entity_id: number.laundry_fan_default_all_led_off_color
            action: number.set_value
mode: queued
max: 10

It has some custom stuff in it that’s related to my config like the script.notify_via_switch_leds which you would need to replace. It also updates the all_off_led_color to match another switch (because I have those change in the morning & night).

Hope it helps someone.