I’ve been having an annoying intermittent problem for a long time now, where my lights will flick off for a short fraction of a second, then instantly back to normal.
I’ve struggled to find any pattern to it. It happens all over the house, although usually only one room/switch at a time. It doesn’t correlate to any voltage spikes in my electrical supply (I have several devices measuring and logging this data). But one possibility that recently occurred to me: almost all the lights in my house are on LZW31-SN red series dimmers. Could that be the cause?
Most of the time my lights operate at full or nearly full brightness. Most of the time I have the maximum brightness parameter set to its highest value (I think 99?). I think I set it to a lower value for one of my lights that uses a dumb 3-way, as it was otherwise failing to detect reliably, but I don’t know if that switch has more or less frequent occurrences of this issue.
All the lights in my house are LEDs, of various types and manufacturers, and I’ve seen this happen on most of them. It happens a handful of times per week.
Has anyone else observed issues like this? I love my inovelli switches, and they’re the backbone of my z-wave mesh, but I’m struggling to think of another explanation for this issue.
I’ve got them all on the most recent firmware, and have for a long time. Only two of them use 3-ways. I can go through them all and lower the max output a bit and see if that helps. It’s an intermittent problem, so it will take a while to gather good data.
Really what I’m wondering is if anyone else has observed this problem (lights randomly cut out for a fraction of a second, then come right back).
I have a red series dimmer on the latest firmware and on a 3 way setup with four Cree led can lights connected to it that’s had an intermittent flickering issue for the year and a half that I’ve been in this house. The wiring is all new Romex right back to the breaker and I’ve had no luck figuring out what it is. I ended up putting a blue switch in its place once they arrived and it’s been fine. I hadnt even those that about it until I saw this post.
I replaced two of my red series dimmers where this was happening with blue series, and it’s still happening. In my case the wiring is not all new.
What do the red and blue series dimmers have in common, electrically? I know they’re made by different manufacturers, and I think they’re both MOSFETs. Did the new manufacturer start with their own design for a dimmer switch, and then modify it to meet Inovelli’s requirements? Or did they start with the same electrical design from the red switch?
Interestingly, I’ve found that disabling the power reports seems to resolve the issue (all 3 of them). I have many red series dimmers running firmware 1.57 and they all have this issue. It does seem to occur/be more noticeable at higher power levels.
Suspect there is something up with the intermittent power report that causes a slight interruption of power.