I recently swapped out two of my NZW31-S dimmers with LZW31-SN ones to gain the notification feature I plan to use to reflect the ST Smart Home Monitor State via WebCore.
Both these circuits are wired in a “one-way” configuration with neutral connected, and have multiple Ace Hardware Dimmable LED bulbs on the load terminal.
Previously what was a smooth transition to on or off with the same bulbs connected on the NZW31-S dimmers now gives a jerky, almost flashing result when turned on or off, or the level is changed either via the paddle or via a webcore script through ST on the LZW31-SN dimmer.
My guess is that it’s likely just characteristics of your bulbs. The dimmers are probably a bit different technology-wise and may cause different bulbs to respond differently. Some tested bulbs that work (and don’t) are in this thread: Dimmer Switches | LZW31 / LZW31-SN Compatible Bulbs Mega-Thread. You could consider adding your experience there, too.
One suggestion: could it just be that the bulbs don’t like super-low (or high) levels from the dimmer? You can experiment by using ST to dim them to various levels, and set the “minimum dimmer level” and “maximum dimmer level” preferences to what you find works best, if that happens to help with your problem. I only have one of these dimmers controlling actual bulbs (the rest are on smart bulbs with no direct local load control), but I did have to up my “minimum level” a bit to prevent the bulbs from just turning off. This isn’t exactly your problem, but maybe you can figure something out if you play around with these and other settings.
I’m sure I cant be the only one that wouldn’t expect to be doing crowd-sourced R&D for the supplier as to their compatibility with bulbs when replacing dimmers from the same brand.
I think it should go without saying though, that if you have already found compatible bulbs for your previous Inovelli product, the new switches should be backwardly compatible no?
@Jon-G, I would agree, but Inovelli used a new manufacturer this go around and essentially built the switches/dimmers from scratch. The design had to be different than the Jasco switches thus probably uses different electronics.
I’m not saying you should have to, but the new dimmers are made by an entirely different manufacturer and I’m just stating ways we can deal with the reality of the fact that Inovelli doesn’t have a manufacturer-provided compatibility list. (I would not expect it to be the exact same as the old dimmer just because both are “Inovelli.” A Zooz ZEN21 does not work the same as a ZEN27, for example.) Ones they’ve tested or otherwise know to work well are in that post (Zooz provides a similar list; Lutron is one of few manufacturers I can think of that provides a well-tested list, but their products aren’t exactly in the same price range).
You can add your feedback to the above if you want. If you stopped reading my post after that suggestion, I’d recommend trying the rest of what I said to see if you can find any parameter values that work better for you. Otherwise, the unfortunate reality is that you may need different bulbs (but if you don’t have any others on hand and do have an old incandescent, trying at least one of those instead of an LED would at least rule out a likely problem with the dimmer itself).
(I would not expect it to be the exact same as the old dimmer just because both are “Inovelli.” A Zooz ZEN21 does not work the same as a ZEN27, for example.) Ones they’ve tested or otherwise know to work well are in that post (Zooz provides a similar list; Lutron is one of few manufacturers I can think of that provides a well-tested list, but their products aren’t exactly in the same price range).