Hello! A newbie here. I first bought some Inovelli switches a couple of years ago (5 On/Off and 3 Dimmer, all 1st Gen). Life got in the way and I have had them in storage until recently. With lots of spare time at home, I decided now was the time to put them into action. After getting over a few hurdles to start, I was able to wire up all of those switches and get them to work with Hubitat and the Echo except one Dimmer which would not get “discovered.” I tried everything and decided it must be defective. Oh well.
I was pretty happy with the results overall so I ordered some Gen 2 switches (2 On/Off (Black Series) and 2 Dimmers (Red Series)). The On/Off switches installed without a hitch and work like a champ. The Dimmers, on the other hand, have been curious to say the least.
Last night I was able to get the Dimmers installed and they appeared to work. I was also able to get them to work with the Echo EXCEPT Alexa kept claiming they weren’t responding (even though the actions were still occurring). It is now an intermittent thing where Alexa says they aren’t responding or sometimes she says they are but they always appear to respond to the voice commands. Has anyone else seen this behavior? Is there some sort of time-out occurring here?
And last but not least, one of those same dimmers this morning refuses to turn the light on at all. The LED is still lit on the switch. It is in a 3-way configuration with a dumb switch. I don’t know why it would have changed while I was asleep. This is a little frustrating to say the least.
I am hoping this can be resolved because I already made a large order of new switches (Red Series) and hope I won’t regret it.
This is something Hubitat users occasionally report with various devices (search their Community forums or FB Users Group and you’ll see the same). I haven’t seen any official answers, but my guess is that their implementation of the Alexa skill expects a report back from the device in a specific amount of time and causes this “not responding” response to be spoken if that doesn’t happen — so basically the same as you’re guessing. But that’s a guess. (Reducing the “ramp rate” on the dimmer may help with that; I normally do because I find the defaults unbearably long for both physical and digital actions, but your preferences may vary. This is the only thing I can think of that might affect this on the Inovelli side.)
I don’t have any ideas for this either, so hopefully someone sees it who does, but if it were me, I might start by pulling the air gap for a few seconds, then pushing it back in (basically “rebooting” the dimmer) to see if that helps. If the problem comes back and the switch appears to be wired correctly (did the load wire come off, by chance?), I might contact support or see if they respond here for further assistance.
I’ve had the occasional problems with Alexa/hubitat working as you described. I created virtual dimmers that I expose to Alexa and then use Switch Bindings app to tie the two together and haven’t had this issue since (fingers crossed/knock on wood). I think the inovelli switch doesn’t update its status fast enough for the Alexa integration to see the successful result.
I have discovered that the switch works only when the dumb switch is in a particular position. I am wondering if I have one or both of two things going on.
Do I have the dumb switch wired properly? This happens to be the same switch I had tied to the Gen 1 Dimmer that didn’t work properly. I had rewired it as required for Gen 1 switches but I thought I had properly wired it back to its original configuration. Maybe not?
I am not convinced that the Gen 2 Dimmer is holding its configuration. Since I am new to these switches, I am not positive of what to expect. When I put it through the configuration settings, using the config switch 13x, etc., it gives me the impression that it is always set to zero. For example, I hold the config button until the LED is solid yellow. I press the config button 13x and the LED does the long flash followed by three short flashes. When I press on the up button, I always get a single purple flash. Should it be doing that if I had already configured it to one previously? Or does that mean it went back to zero? When I save the configuration, I get the cyan flash at the end so it appears to save. Is there any way to verify the config setting through Hubitat?
If you’re not sure about the dumb switch wiring, maybe post a pic here (Inovelli legally can’t help, but I’m sure some community members may offer). Otherwise, you’ll generally have two wires that can go on either two of the lighter screws on the “dumb” three-way switch and a third wire that needs to go on the darker screw. This third wire — the “common wire” — is often black (or marked with black) but wiring in general and three-ways in particular might not follow this convention. If you Google “how to identify common wire,” you’ll probably find some help (will require a multimeter or possibly a voltage detector, though the latter don’t always help me when there are a bunch of wires close to each other).
Since you have Hubitat, I second the recommendation above to set the parameter using Hubitat instead of on the switch. I know the manual encourages you to do it yourself for some parameters (possibly neutral vs. non-neutral, maybe this parameter too) before that, but I haven’t had any problems doing it this way yet. Hope that isn’t wrong.
(Reducing the “ramp rate” on the dimmer may help with that; I normally do because I find the defaults unbearably long for both physical and digital actions, but your preferences may vary. This is the only thing I can think of that might affect this on the Inovelli side.)