LZW30 Black - 4 Way

I have a LZW30 Black Series switch wired in a 4way configuration with Line/Load in separate boxes. I use the LZW30 along with the existing 2 dumb switches. I used a wiring diagram that I obtained from the Inovelli site a while back and believe everything is wired correctly.

If you use the switches solely, everything does work as expected. All three switches toggle the single light fixture (fluorescent tubes) properly.

The trouble I run into is that I have a motion sensor in the room, which gets triggered frequently. The problem I find is that quite often, people in the house will, by habit turn on the switch, when at the same time, the sensor is being triggered. The result is that the light at some point will show as being on or off in Home Assistant, when its state is the opposite. In testing I found that if I did manually toggle the switch a number of times, and then do the same remotely, I could cause the switch to get out of sync as well. Usually about two or three presses of either the switch or the remote would put it back in sync. I running v1.2 of the firmware, which I believe to be the most recent.

I am currently running this with Home Assistant Z-Wave JS. I have tried both settings for parameters 13 and 51

I’m trying to better understand the issue.

It sounds like you’re saying that sometimes the motion sensor triggers, the light turns on, and then a split second later someone pushes the switch, which, because it’s a dumb 3-way, just toggles the light, and it then toggles off, but home assistant still thinks it’s on? That certainly would create a bad user experience, but I can’t really think of any way to fix it besides switching to aux switches that use a different input for on vs off.

What other issues does having the switch state be out of sync cause?

I have occasionally run into issues with a z-wave light having the wrong state shown, although it wasn’t with an inovelli device, and I suspect it was caused by dropped messages, improper use of supervised z-wave commands, and/or a weak z-wave mesh. In my case, I was able to create a “watchdog” automation which used a sensor to detect when the state was wrong and then corrected it.

When you say “remote” are you talking about the dumb 3-way/4-way switch? Or a control in home assistant?

My expectation would be that if you wait 3-4 seconds after confusing the switch with lots of fast changes, then push either the switch or the 3-way once, it should get home assistant back in sync. If this doesn’t work, then that may be evidence of a different problem. Can you try that?

Thank you for the reply.

When I refer to remote, I mean any non physical means, so in my current setup that is Home Assistant and I am referring specifically to the Inovelli switch. Given the location of the switches, the 2 dumb switches are rarely used.

The problem with the out of sync, condition, is that the switch doesn’t seem to respond properly after, with the most noticeable issue being the light doesn’t turn off after motion has been cleared.

It does typically take two additional remote commands to get the switch back in sync.

I hope to get more time this weekend on this, to try and find something consistent, that could help resolve this further or allow me a work around automation.

I do have a spare Inovelli but, its the dimmer version, LZW31, so it wouldn’t be a perfect swap to test with.

I can’t say why HA is not updating the switch’s status but there might be a hack that may or may not work for you. The switch exposes “refresh”. I don’t know how Z-wave JS handles this attribute specifically, but I have used it with other hubs to get the hub to poll the device to obtain the proper status. You might be able to run an automation triggered on the lights turning on or off, with a slight delay and then a refresh, with the intention of asking HA to go get the switch’s status each time the lights turn on or off. Maybe not a perfect solution, but . . .