I ordered and received my first Innovelli Blue Dimmer Switch (VZM31-SN) to test out before jumping in and replacing all of my relevant switches. I chose to replace an old Single Pole Toggle switch in my Dining Room that powers 9 Hue Bulbs (all connected natively to HomeAssistant through Zigbee2MQTT - not the Hue Integration). The bulbs are all added and controlled to a single group in Z2M.
For reference, I had previously been using a Lutron Aurora on this toggle switch to control these lights without issue (other than the kludgy nature of the Aurora).
The installation seemed to go well, stripped the Line and the Load wires to the appropriate 5/8 and inserted them into the holes on the back of the switch and tightened the screws. I was able to add the switch to Z2A in HA and set it to ‘Smart Bulb Mode’ and ‘Single Pole’ and set the ‘GenOnOff’ and ‘GenLevelCtrl’ binding (Source endpoint 2) to the Z2M light group.
When it came time to test, when I hit the upper paddle and the bulbs pulse various level of brightness (over 3 seconds or so) and eventually settle around 25% brightness. In HA, the logs indicate that the bulbs are ramping up to 100% - when visually they are not. Even manually moving the bulbs to 100% in HA, they only (visually) get to around that ~25% actual brightness. It seems to me that there may not be enough power arriving to the fixture/bulbs.
If I bind that switch to ANOTHER light group (not the one that it is wired to) the behavior is as expected.
Does anyone have any additional troubleshooting I should look into?
Is it possible my switch is a lemon and not delivering enough power to the bulbs?
Will also chime in here that if there is a neutral available for that circuit in the box, you should hook that up to the dimmer as well, in case it is an issue with a no neutral setup and possibly needing a bypass installed.
If there is one available, this will remove the possible need for the bypass, as the bypass is only to allow the switch to get more power when there isn’t a sufficient load on the switch when connected without a neutral.
Ok, I’m not sure if that’s a valid test with a non-neutral for what I was thinking, but I was curious.
Confirming that you’re sure this is really a non-neutral switch leg? Also, confirming that you tested which of the two conductors was hot and landed that conductor in the Line hole? Out of curiosity, if you have Romex, which color conductor was hot?
For another test, take the switch out of the smart bulb mode temporarily, making it a dimmer. If you ramp the dimmer all the way up, do the bulbs go to full brightness?
I don’t think @robbygregory should do the last test Bry mentioned since the bulbs in question are Hue bulbs. Dimming Hue bulbs can kill them (they’re pretty resilient, but I killed a couple of mine after someone mistakenly took the switch out of Smart Bulb Mode by hitting the config button sequence unintentionally).
If you’re concerned about the dimming thing, put the switch in the On/Off mode. I believe that will work with a non-neutral. This will give you the equivalent of the SBM, but the paddle will still work to control the load. I’m trying to eliminate SBM from the equation.