LZW31 Dimming Issue

Oh… I don’t think it’s possible then as there’s a special handler/driver that exposes child devices and then from there, you’d be able to control those child devices (setup a specific time of day for them to turn on/off). We’ll be meeting with EZLO at CES where we can talk further with them to see if we can somehow get this to work. Plus Eric M will be coming on full time starting next year so he should have some more bandwidth to look into this.

Can you try bumping it up to 20 or 30%? Basically, what should happen is that as you are bumping up the minimum dim level, the bulb should also visibly show the same dim level (however, if the bulb does not turn on, it means the dim level should be increased until the bulb turns on).

Then, this minimum level becomes your new 1% in the app. This may be why you’re seeing it listed as 1% in the UI.

In other words, once you set the minimum level to let’s say 20%, 20% now will show as 1% in the UI indicating it cannot be dimmed lower.

Make sense?

I’m not the best at explaining things lol

Ah, that does make sense regarding the ‘new’ 1%.
And sucks about Vera… really getting tired of being disappointed with their platform limitations these days… but after >100 devices and all the plugins and pleg/reactor stuff I’m not wanting to start over either. Feel free to pass that along to Ezlo at CES. The only thing holding people back is the re-work to start over… :-/

Thanks Eric

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If you have the driver from old dimmers isn’t there a way to compare the old and the new drivers to see the differences?

I recently received both a lzw31-sn and lzw31. can confirm in two different LED lighting applications that the “dimming” is more of a stepped reduction or increase. not smooth at all. this flickering change is the same with brightness change no matter if using the paddle or zwave adjustment.also is noticeable on increased ramp or dimming time. in both applications leviton smart dimmers came out and were previously smooth dimming. Three way setup in both cases with neutral and dumb remote switch. seems that its ‘rigid’ in its dimming instead of a smooth transition

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I still think it’s the driver issue. The old Inovelli dimmers work perfectly. If they can compare the two drivers, specifically the dimming portion, they can solve this issue.

For me this issue with the dimming is similar as described but almost seems to be by design?? Manual: “How fast or slow the light turns on when you hold the switch (i.e.: dimming from 10-20%, 80-60%, etc)”

For every gap of dimming it appears as though the seconds value is applied. For example if I dim from 0-100% the dimming happens in 3 seconds and appears to be smooth. If I dim from 0-10% it has 2 distinct obvious steps and still ends up at 10% over 3 jarring seconds.

I would much rather have a constant ramp rate that can be configured vs. a time to complete the dimming. ie. 0-100% takes 3 seconds 0-33% takes 1 second etc…

Any thoughts on this? (same deal when using home assistant and the wall as expected)

Hey, Eric/Ruster34?
I’m with you, using Vera for years and years. It’s a pretty “ok” platform, once anything is working on it, it’s like 100% reliable. Integrating new-is stuff is tricky. Like Inovelli.
I tried OpenHAB (it’s super open architecture but it’ll be a forever science-project with tons of CLI-language) and HABitat (like OpenHab combined with Vera, but still clunky).
So, I’m back at VeraPlus. their new UserInterface is really good, overall IMHO they are right now the best “compromise” out there.
If VeraPlus JUST WOULD BE WORKING with Inovelli, I’d be a happy camper.
Anyone have suggestions how to tweak it manually?

I believe another thread indicated that Vera want Inovelli to pay them to carry the OpenZWave artifacts that enable compatibility. Feels like a bit of a bully move. I wonder what the going rate is on a merge-from-upstream these days.

Inovelli is Partying it Up at CES right now, so probably won’t answer many threads until Monday.

I didn’t see the lzw31 nor lzw31-sn configs in the InovelliUSA/open-zwave fork of OpenZWave/open-zwave and can’t understand why. I now see your non-forked InovelliUSA/OpenZWave, which has the updated configs, but I don’t understand why the PR into upstream OpenZWave/open-zwave hasn’t merged after a few months. something something openzwave-1.6 something ?

Is there anything someone can do from the outside to help that process?

Same. I thought there was a huge delay but it turns out that I just wasn’t getting any light while ramping up. Usable range for me is 27% - 55%. (Actually 53% but it won’t let me go below 55%). The old Lutron CL dimmer I was using before let me go much lower. Like barely a glow. At 27% these lights are pretty bright.

It’s a single pole, neutral light installation, with 4 13-watt 6" LED recessed lights on the load. Brand is Sunco lighting, and they work very nicely with Lutron CL Maestro dimmers.

I know this has been dead for some time now, but has anyone made any progress on this issue? I just installed three of these and have 6 more in the box, but I’m holding off installing the rest until I can get some sort of resolution. I really don’t want to send these back for another brand, but this is not how dimmers should work at all. Thanks in advance for your time and help!

Yea I’m in the same boat. The dimming action looks like a PowerPoint presentation with how aggressive/blocky the steps are. And it doesn’t dim very low. Pretty disappointed. Love my other inovelli switches but the dimmer is pretty disappointing. Even my wife made a comment saying “this is pretty bad”.

There is something wrong with these dimmers that has nothing to do with the controller platform (I’m using Homeseer 4 which needs no special drivers). I’ve got a string of four incandescent bulbs, not LED, and the lights don’t start to glow until about 20% dim level. None of the Z-wave dimmers from other manufacturers I’ve used have ever done this with conventional bulbs.

And yes, I’ve already checked the dim range parameters, etc.

Inovelli needs to fix the primary purpose of what these things are suppose to do: dim.

@Eric_Inovelli
I want to do a technology refresh in my house (and some of my clients) and replace dozens of older Z-wave dimmers that aren’t scene/event capable. The Red Dimmers were my leading candidates but the negative issues with them outweigh the positives at the moment.

I know you “checked the dim range parameters” but itI does not sound as if you have your range parameters set correctly.

Set the parameters to 1 and 99. Then work through the range to see at what level your light turns on and figure out what you want your max brightness to be. THEN reset the parameters to those figures.

If you do it this way, your bulbs will light a 1%, as the new range settings will map 1 - 99 to the level settings you determined in your testing.

I ended up getting a zooz 27 dimmer and all the issues complained about in this thread don’t affect this switch. The dimming goes way lower than the inovelli one did even when setting the minimum threshold to 1. The light would cutoff with the inovelli but with the zooz I can actually get it to be extremely dim.