I have 8 dead switches. Why are they dying and what should I do with them?

Switches General Discussion
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1

Over the past three years I’ve purchased 23 Red Dimmer Switches (LZW31-SN) and 25 Blue 2-1 Smart Switches (VZM31-SN). Since then, I’ve seen an absurdly high failure rate. I’ve had 4 of the Red Switches and 3 of the Blue Switches completely die and become non-responsive (no LEDs, no output voltage, no response to factory reset actions, no signs of life at all). I’ve also had one of the Red Switches continue to turn on by stop controlling the load (no voltage on load terminal).

All of these switches have been powering very vanilla incandescent and LED loads. No fans, inductive loads, or high wattage devices. I have many other devices (from manufacturers like Zooz, Aeotec, AEON Labs, Soff, and Third Reality) and none of them have died like this. The Inovelli failures have been pretty spread out, so it’s not like a single surge event took everything out. And the failures have been on many different circuits.

Unfortunately all of these failures have come after the 1 year mark, so I’ve just been putting the switches aside and replacing them as they’ve failed. However, now that I have some free time around the holidays I figured I’d pull them out of the pile and take a look at them more closely.

Any one have advice on what I should do with these switches to either root cause their failures or repair them?

2

I haven’t had one apart, but I’ve seen pictures and there is a little fuse on the circuit board inside. It’s possible that’s the only problem. You’d have to open them to find out, they might be obviously dead once you do.

1 Like
3

I opened a few of them up but no obvious blown components. I’m willing to solder and replace components, just need guidance on what to test and whether or not a replacement is likely to solve the issue.

4

Did you have them wired up to neutrals as well?

I had a few similar failures with their fan switches, but I hadn’t wired in the neutrals. Since I fixed that I havn’t had any failures yet, but its only been a couple months since the fix.

5

The fuse is a small rectangular boxed part. It’s marked with a current rating.