Is it possible that my Blue Series Dimmers got too cold?

[scott1]

Hi everyone,

It was minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit last night here in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.

I have three Blue Series dimmers inside the house but on an exterior wall. When I woke up this morning two of them were slow blinking red and light control was sporadic (they would turn the lights on…sometimes).

The two that were blinking red were both part of separate three-way switch setups and the other switch for both seemed to work fine. Both switches were controllable via Home Assistant.

The internal temperature of one switch is 59 degrees F and the other is 60.8 degrees F, but that doesn’t seem legit because I looked at the temperature history of both in Home Assistant and neither appears to have changed over the past month and there were only a couple of data points.

I took off the cover plate to pull the air gap switch and the switches were VERY cold and there was definitely a cold draft coming in (which I guess is another problem I need to solve ).

I pulled the air gap on them and both are now behaving normally.

I’ve never seen this behavior before.

So…is it possible that the switches got so cold that they stopped working?

Thanks.

[Bry]

They are rated for an ambient temperature of 32F, so I suppose that’s possible if you have an issue in your wall cavity.

BTW, you should not have to remove the wall plate to pull the air gap.

[scott1]

Thanks. I found the source of the draft so I’ll fix that when it warms up a bit.

And it was one of those screw less cover plates so it was easy to pop off.

[hydro311]

It certainly sounds like a case of the over-temp sensor shutting the switch down due to cold temps – that was the reason I had to stop using a Blue out in my detached garage.

However, that issue is fixed in firmware 3.04 – I put a Blue back out there on 3.04 and it has seen temps <-20F several times in the past several weeks – it’s been doing great.