LZW36 wiring options - bypass module for lights and enable local control

My current setup is that I have the LZW36 with local protection on the light, and then Illumin bulbs in the light fixture of the fan. Thanks to the help of @jtronicus, I was able to get z-wave association working on my LZW36.

While working on getting it working, I found myself wondering if it would make sense to re-enable local control, but bypass the module for the light power. The lights would then stay fully powered regardless of the state of the dimmer in the module.

The advantage is that I would regain the the dimming capability of the notification light. and association group 3 would actually work.

The down side would be I would need to keep the lights in sync with the switch state. On the surface this seems easy, but I could imagine it could get complicated real quick due to possible recursive behavior. I would also loose the power usage data for the light portion.

Anyone see any gotchas with this approach? Can the LZW36 module work with no load on the Light wire?

I would usually be hesitant to do something like this as it leaves the wires/lights hot when the switch is off, but the LZW is already wired so that is the case.

You could leave the Light wire in place and just always leave it in the “on” state and control the bulbs directly as you planned.

I plan on doing the same thing, I just havent gotten around to it yet.

The switch will rebroadcast commends in association group 3. That should make keeping things in sync easy. You just send your commands to the switch, and it will forward it to the associated lights for you. You may have to figure something out for changing the bulb color/temperature though.

Yes, it does work with no load on the light wire (tested by using the pull chain to turn off the lights)

If your fan has a pull chain for the lights, you can still manually cut power to the lights if needed.

The only drawbacks I am aware of are:

  • No power monitoring for the lights
  • Changing bulb color can be more complicated (if you want everything to cleanly show up as 1 device)

That is my current setup with a red series dimmer. The fan is on a dummy switch and the dimmer has no load and is associated with 3 bulbs. I use a Circadian smartapp for daily usage and programmed different settings via scenes through the dimmer. I just received my LZW36 yesterday (Canada), and am hoping to get at install this weekend.

My fan/light was on a three way until I redid it for the LZW36. Now I’m running one LZW36 and two Red Dimmers. My hub is a HomeSeer. There are issues, though:

  1. Homeseer only sees a single switch (documented as an issue elsewhere on the forums). I guess its a waiting game for HomeSeer to update their ZWave for this to work. If anyone from Inovelli could help with this, that’d be great!
  2. I tied the Red Dimmers to the LZW36 on Group 2, 3 and 4 thinking that would just control the light. It does not, rather, it controls BOTH the fan and light. I had hoped to tie the Red Dimmer buttons (Scene switch 3) to Group 5, but Homeseer does not support mapping to endpoints (which may be the issue) for that.

I’m curious to know if your group associations work correctly, thus making it an issue with HomeSeer rather than how Reds are communicating with the LZW36.