Fan/Light Switch Disconnection Issue Thread

  • Date switch was purchased
    8/20/220

  • Approximate distance from switch to fan canopy
    10ft

  • Approximate internal temperature (in house) and external temperature (outside)
    78F internal max 75F to 85F external

  • What is your hub/gateway (ie: SmartThings, Hubitat, etc)?
    Smart things

  • What firmware version are you on (if you don’t know, leave blank, but it’s helpful)?
    000.039.00006

  • Have you made any parameter changes?
    yes

  • Approximate wattage of your bulbs
    60W

  • Does the disconnection happen when using the fan, the light or both?
    both

  • Do you notice any patterns (ie: time of day, time since last disconnection, etc)?
    usually after several hours of operation.

@MRobi I haven’t seen a delay that long but that doesn’t surprise me. I’m going to remove mine because it is generally always sluggish to respond to the button presses with some really delayed responses. But, usually when it drags out the response the LED on the button doesn’t light either. I’ve only used the fan portion, I was going to use the light portion as a controller for LED strips. But, I’ll probably just put in a switch for the fan.

  • Date switch was purchased
    June 24th, 2020
  • Approximate distance from switch to fan canopy
    8’
  • Approximate internal temperature (in house) and external temperature (outside)
    70°F inside & 80°F outside
  • What is your hub/gateway (ie: SmartThings, Hubitat, etc)?
    Vera Edge
  • What firmware version are you on (if you don’t know, leave blank, but it’s helpful)?
    Vera 1.7.5186 (7.31), Inovelli 798,3585,0
  • Have you made any parameter changes?
    Yes (1,5,17,18,20,22,23)
  • Approximate wattage of your bulbs
    2 x 5 watts each
  • Does the disconnection happen when using the fan, the light or both?
    Light only, fan still works correctly
  • Do you notice any patterns (ie: time of day, time since last disconnection, etc)?
    The light stopped working about 5 days ago and never started working since.

Hint, I think the solder joints on the castellated mounting Vias on the CMP9824A board in the fan module are poor. They have insufficient solder.

Hello, just wanted to say that the switch started having problems again. Perhaps a weird hypothesis… But could this issue be related to temperature? This thread started around June 15th and if I recall I started having problems 3-4 weeks prior which should be around spring time (nyc here). I rarely had any issues during the summer. Now that it’s getting cooler (55-70) it started happening again.

Only thing I can think of… Despite that, I will be reaching out for a return because it’s really difficult to deal with an unresponsive light / fan. We had to sleep with the lights on with the kids. I hope the manufacturer can get to the bottom of it, but until then I’ll have to look else where.

I just opened my second one. I cant say if it works or not, havent installed it yet. But I took a look inside. I agree, the solder looks not well done on that board. Specifically the GND via has minimal solder, and the MISO(?) via almost has none.

Definitely suspect. Would be interesting if someone else with the issue and some good soldering skills were to try and fix it…

Pics?

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  • Date switch was purchased : Feb 26th 2021

  • Approximate distance from switch to fan canopy: 15’

  • Approximate internal temperature (in house) and external temperature (outside): 77°/florida

  • What is your hub/gateway (ie: SmartThings, Hubitat, etc)? Hubitat

  • What firmware version are you on (if you don’t know, leave blank, but it’s helpful)? firmware : 1.34groups : 7

  • Have you made any parameter changes? (Yes?)

  • parameter2value : 0

  • parameter5value : 25

  • parameter21value : 5

  • actualAssociation4 : []

  • parameter27value : 3

  • actualAssociation3 : []

  • parameter10value : 0

  • actualAssociation5 : []

  • parameter8value : 99

  • oldLabel : LF combo LL

  • parameter19value : 5

  • parameter13value : 40

  • associationMC1 : true

  • parameter16value : 0

  • parameter30value : 10

  • parameter22value : 0

  • lastRan : 1633611791615

  • parameter3value : 0

  • parameter28value : 10

  • parameter6value : 99

  • parameter17value : 0

  • parameter14value : 0

  • parameter11value : 0

  • parameter29value : 3600

  • parameter7value : 1

  • parameter15value : 0

  • parameter4value : 0

  • parameter18value : 255

  • parameter23value : 0

  • parameter26value : 3

  • needfwUpdate : false

  • defaultG3 : []

  • actualAssociation2 : []

  • parameter1value : 0

  • parameter31value : 0

  • defaultG2 : []

  • actualAssociation1 : [01]

  • defaultG1 : []

  • parameter12value : 40

  • parameter20value : 170

  • Approximate wattage of your bulbs 8w ×2 led. Just put in 3 lzw42

  • Does the disconnection happen when using the fan, the light or both? Both

  • Do you notice any patterns (ie: time of day, time since last disconnection, etc)? Not really

Also after a power failure it goes into a flashing sequence for maybe a minute. I didn’t get to count how many times it flashed last time but the switch doesn’t change anything during its process when flashing

@g.marquez01 Or it didn’t happen :wink:

No way to get a phone cam to focus to the level needed to see the solder joints.

Ahh you got one of them 2003 Nokia phones.

Hmm interesting. Time to whip out the micro miniature soldering hardware.

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Well… for what it’s worth, the issues I’ve been having all summer with two of these fan/light switches seem to be less frequent now, and the weather is getting much cooler in my area. Good thought, but I’m having the opposite experience.

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The little board soldered on under the power devices and heatsink? Those looked bad to me too. Everything else looked good.

Yep that board. The one I took apart has a blue board on the green main board.

Yes , it is the board under the heatsink and the same board in the switch module. Depending on which board has solder joint issues, you could have different failure modes. In my case, the switch module works fine. It can be control via smart things but fan module doesn’t respond.

I started to have the problem after I have been using it for a month. Any final culprit or solution?

The issue went away for a little time. Now it came back and nothing I do has fixed it.

Video of Halloween light activity

Weather where I am ranges from 55-70F. Not hot.

I’m having a different disconnect issue where the switch seems to be disconnecting or rather timing out talking to my Aeotec zwave stick on OpenHAB. I am able to include it to the point where it gets a node number but anything else I just get “No Ack” after 4000+ ms and “Message timeout!” after that in the zwave debug logs. It seemed to be working fine for until maybe 3-4 months ago and I started noticing in the logs where it would show offline/online in the same minute sporadically. As part of troubleshooting after trying the standard reboot via air gap and exclude/include, I factory reset both the switch and my zwave stick and tried to do an include with just the fan switch and still get timeouts. In the PC Zwave software I can read the parameters and have upgraded it to the 1.36 firmware successfully but the topology map shows red for that node (no direct communication I think?) even though my stick is about 10 feet away. Also, doing the network health check in the PC Zwave software comes back as orange indicating potential latency issues.

Question Response
Date switch was purchased 02/18/2021
Approximate distance from switch to fan canopy 5’
Approximate internal temperature Inside mid 70’s, Outside 60 - 80
What is your hub/gateway? HUSBZB-1 and HomeAssistant
What firmware version are you on? 1.36 beta
Have you made any parameter changes? 17 - Fan Speed After Power Restored: 100 (Last State)
Approximate wattage of your bulbs 9w single LED
Does the disconnection happen when using the fan, the light or both? Both. Fan/light will be off and I can’t turn it on when I walk into the room
Do you notice any patterns?
  • I only use the fan at night.
  • It seems to act up more when it’s hotter and/or more humid outside.
  • I have four LZW36 in my house and one location constantly gives me this problem. Another location has the same fan but only gave me this problem once during the middle of the summer. When it disconnects, the switch offers no indication of a problem and acknowledges my changes locally or from zwave while the canopy doesn’t change. If I toy around with the local controls long enough it will eventually catch up and then I can use both local/zwave again.