Not entirely sure if you are still compiling data for this topic. But here you go.
I have 3 LZW36 and only one is an issue. I have one rule machine script that turns the fan on if outside temp is greater than 30c (92f). This is how i found out that one fan/light switch is experiencing disconnection issues: Here are my answers to the question:
Date switch was purchased
**"June 28, 2021", "Aartech Canada"**
Approximate distance from switch to fan canopy
**"10ft"**
Approximate internal temperature (in house) and external temperature (outside)
**"Inside the house is about 20-24c, Outside is ranging from 20-40c"**
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)?
"1,36 (beta)"
Have you made any parameter changes?
**"Yes, color of led (white)"**
Approximate wattage of your bulbs
**"25w"**
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)?
**"No"**
I came across this post because I am now experiencing this issue as well.
I have four of these all wired exactly the same and suddenly one is experiencing the issue.
I try and operate the fan and switch from my controller and the light and fan operate the switch and you can see it change the color brightness on the switch. If you manually operate the switch it does the same thing. In both cases neither the light or fan operate.
What I do is pull out the air gap and count to 10 then put back in and it fixes it.
I have had all four of these I believe since July 2020 and all have been working just fine all that time. One of the very recent changes I did was change the colors of this switch but I have now changed them back to default.
The amount of time it does this is so random it can work for a whole week just fine and then fail to work six times in one day. I am possibly noticing it more recently as I have needed to operated the fan more frequently.
I am having a sneaky feeling that a lot of peoples problems and possibly mine are due to other radio interference I have experienced this kind of issue in the past with Wi-Fi and Alarm System and Sonos. I once spent a long time trying to figure out why Sonos was so unreliable only to find out it was my ADT system at the time causing interference. Now other devices such as Govee, Zigbee and others in the mix could be causing an issue. Anyone’s thoughts?
I have two fan/light switches. Neither worked last time I tried them; one surprised me by not working, since it has worked well for a few months, and the other has consistently not worked for a month or so.
I have Sonos. I use SonosNET, but the use or non-use of Sonos devices (or even presence/non-presence) hasn’t made any noticeable impact to the reliability of the fan/light switches.
I have a single Govee device, but it’s been powered off for months. I have no Zigbee devices. I must have over two years of owning the fan/light switches now, and I can’t attribute anything as a contributor to whether they work or not: temperature, humidity, RF interference, etc… they work when they want to, and don’t when they don’t (the latter is usually when I really want them to work, e.g., shoulder seasons when I’m moving from active heating or cooling).
To quote a reedit article:
Sonosnet is a dedicated WiFi network only for your Sonos speakers. The first hard wired sonos speaker or boost to the router creates Sonosnet. Beware that adding the first speaker or boost to a wireless mesh node may cause problems and kill the performance of your WiFi mesh system. Ie Orbi, Eero, Google.
It is interesting that you have similar issue. I have zigbee but this is only very recent so possibly not the cause. Either way I am lucky in knowing that if it is interference then it is under my control as I am the only house for a long distance.
Either way it doesn’t seem that Inovelli have come up with a reason for the disconnect issues and I have seen some people being particularly nasty in response to Inovelli. In my opinion Inovelli is literally the only company out there that actually seems to give a s’'t about how their customers are using their products and do actually actively interact with their customers. Other companies just finger point and do nothing to be constructive. Also in my understanding this is pretty much the only product out there that does what this is doing. Hopefully they will come up with an updated version of this and I will happily grab at least one when and if it comes out.
I have a mesh network and the SonosNet hub is connected with a 3’ Ethernet cable to one of the nodes. I’ve never had any issues. In fact, SonosNET made everything work so much better when I started using it. Plus, I picked up the hub for cheap since no one seems to know what it’s for.
I agree that Inovelli has been concerned with this issue and at least participating in the discussion. They’ve tried to get to the bottom of it. And I can understand the other side, having paid for devices that not only disallow RF control of the fan and light, but also prevent even local control.
Having said that, my house is full of Inovelli switches and dimmers. They’re great. I’ll continue to support the company as long as their products align with my needs, and I hope a solution or improvement comes out for these switches. I am getting a bit tired of waiting, though, after two years of not being sure whether my fans will come on or not.
Do you happen to live in a urban environment? I live in the sticks and haven’t had any issues with the fan/light switch for the past year and half; however my wifi neighbors are minimal. My medium speed did stop working last month though, so there’s that.
Urban, no. “Sticks” is relative; many would say where I am is the sticks, but this town still has 25x the population of where I grew up. In any case, I’m not “in town,” and from where I’m sitting my phone isn’t seeing any Wifi networks that aren’t mine.
In my case 3 have never had a problem in 3 years and only one has started presenting this problem. In my case in the sticks nearest neighbor it 1/4 of a mile away which is why I was going down the path of some other device causing an issue. Only new things I have brought into my environment is Govee. Zigbee and Smarbot. I already had Unifi and Sonos so I would think those were not the issue.
See… I don’t have any of those things you’ve just added, and I’ve had issues even before adding SonosNET to the equation. They’re no more or less frequent or predictable now.
That being said it seems that Inovelli had major issues getting hold of z-wave chips. It was so bad that I never got my hands on a red series normal switch I tried so many times but no luck I still only have black.
It does appear that they will no longer be an issue going forward so hopefully they will release an updated version of this.
I know I am very eagerly awaiting the release of the RED SERIES • Z-WAVE 800 SERIES as I really don’t want to go further down the path of zigbee.
I installed 4 of these switches in 2020. They all worked fine for the first year then one of them developed the dreaded canopy controller disconnect issue working about 1 time out of 10. I tried resetting the switch, updating the firmware, re-pairing etc. Nothing made a difference. I then decided to disconnect the canopy controller from the fan and remove the PCB from the plastic case to inspect the solder joints. I was surprised to discover that the PCB was being held to the plastic cover not by a screw but by mechanical pressure applied to the sides of the PCB via a tab. It was a very tight connection. I was trained as an Electronics Technician back in the mid-70’s. In those days faulty circuit boards were repaired and not thrown away. Through experience and training I know that you should never cause a Printed Circuit Board to flex as doing so may cause solder joints to lift or traces to develop hairline cracks resulting in intermittent operation. I saw nothing obvious upon inspection of the fan controller PCB and proceeded to reassemble the Controller and install it back into the fan canopy. To my surprise and delight, the fan and light started working again and the operation has been solid for the last year. I suspect at least some of the problems with the LZW36 Fan/Light Switch are mechanical in nature.
It may not be a bad idea to try re-soldering every connection on a canopy controller board with problems. Having seen ROHS solder pads fail in things like automobile third brake lights that are exposed to heat/sun, it might also be worth sacrificing a few brain cells and hitting it with old-school Kester 44 solder while the iron is warm…
So I’ve had one of these installed for a year without issue. Then all of a sudden it stopped communicating with the canopy module. I reset the breaker and the light fixture started flashing indicating it was in pairing mode. I held down the fan up button and tapped the fan button 3 times. Lights start pulsing cyan, but after a minute flash red. I’ve tried this 5 times now without success. Ive found several threads related to those issue each with several hundred responses. I haven’t read through them all, but it didn’t sound like there is a good fix yet. has innovelli offered any remedies (ie replacem ent) outside of the warranty window? Or do we know if a fix is coming?
Inovelli has not provided a fix for this, that I know of.
Now… they’ve been active in troubleshooting and offering suggestions to what could be causing the problem, so I can’t fault them for that. But at the end of the day, I’ve got two fans and lights in the house that I haven’t been able to operate dependably for more than two years. I haven’t sought out a replacement because I really like the notification LEDs on the switches, and because the lights and fans aren’t really critical where they are. If they were… I’d have ditched the switches a long time ago.
I think the “right” thing to do would be for Inovelli to offer to replace these devices with something that works correctly and offers the same functionality as what was promised. But I don’t know what that would be or when it could be expected.
You shouldn’t feel lucky that your device worked for a year with no issues… but I would.
I’ve taken a bit of a different approach with these to get around the communication issue with the lights and it has been working flawlessly for me.
I swapped out my fan bulbs for smart bulbs. In my specific case I used the Globe WiFi bulbs from Costco flashed with ESPHome, but any smart bulb should work here. I went with these because they’re 4 bulbs for $19.99 CAD and could be flashed to ESPHome for local control. It was a proof of concept that I basically just kept.
Config for the switch I have the light itself turned ON, light brightness after power restored set to last state, and local protection set to light. This effectively locks the power to the bulbs always on and disables the button on the switch from being able to power them off. The light button on the switch still functions as a scene controller though which is important.
I then set an automation so that when a single click on the light button is detected, it toggles the smart bulbs. I’ve had this going for a few months now with 0 issues.
The 1 downside is you lose diming control from the switch itself. But you don’t want to dim power to smart bulbs anyways. The bulbs themselves can be dimmed through your hub. I handle dimming automatically with adaptive lighting so the lights get warmer and dimmer from sunset until their warmest/dimmest state at midnight.
That’s interesting. I have no smart bulbs and only use control at the switches, but I’ve been thinking about it lately.
However, for the locations in which I have Red Series fan/light switches, the light is of less concern than the fan. I suppose if you were going to do something similar for the fan, it would be a relay in replace of the canopy switch. But then you’d lose speed control over the fan. I’ve done something similar for some DC fans, and continued to use the factory remote for speed & direction control. It was a pretty janky way to do it, but the only thing I could think of until I replaced the fans.
It’s good that you’ve got a work-around for the light, but that’s not enough for me.
For me, I consider the light to be most critical since these are in the bedroom. WAF goes down significantly when it’s bedtime and the light control doesn’t work for an hour LOL
For the fan, I’ve got it heavily automated based on season, room temp, and home occupancy. In the winter while the fan is in reverse if the room temp is below a certain threshold it comes on at low speed. In the summer if it’s above various thresholds it comes on and speed is dependent on room temp. The automation runs every time there’s a change in temperature in the room so even if it’s disconnected when it runs the first time, it will only be a matter of minutes until it runs again. Adjusting it manually would be futile without disabling the automation so we don’t even bother.
So… The one that I had that was not working to connect the remote in the light is now so far since May reliably working again. I removed all the smart bulbs away from the room and close by. Since doing this I haven’t had any failed connections to it. I actually moved these bulbs two stories down directly in my garage and now the garage door remotes are not frequently working. So in my case I think the issue is actually interference from other devices. Nearly three months and still not one disconnect.