About four years ago, I installed over 50 Inovelli dimmers and a couple of switches throughout my home. They’ve been in normal household use for about three years now. This is all new construction with neutral wires available at every switch.
A few months ago, I started having issues with one of the dimmers in the downstairs half-bath, which has no windows. This is probably the most-used switch in the house, especially in the evenings and on weekends since we’re usually at work during the day.
At first, when turning the light on, it would flicker rapidly like a strobe light at full brightness. Initially, turning the switch off and on once or twice would fix it. After a while, I had to pull the air gap for a few seconds to stop the flickering. That would fix it for a few days, but then the issue would return. Now, the flickering happens less often, but the switch will occasionally flash red, green, and blue without turning on the light. Pulling the air gap still temporarily resolves the problem, but only for a day or two.
Another dimmer in my son’s bedroom—who’s away at college most of the time—started acting up in a similar way. When powering it on, it just flashes red, green, and blue, and the light doesn’t turn on. At first, pulling the air gap would temporarily fix it, but since the room isn’t used daily, I’m not sure how long the fix lasted. Now, the dimmer doesn’t respond at all—no lights, no flashing, even after pulling the air gap. I replaced it with another Inovelli dimmer, and everything is working fine so far, so I don’t think the issue is related to wiring.
While I was replacing that switch, my wife mentioned that the dimmer in our bedroom gave her trouble turning on for the first time. She had to fiddle with it a bit—turning it on and off, dimming it up and down—before the light finally came on.
Given all this, I’m starting to get a bit concerned and have a few questions:
- Is there any debugging I can do?
- Should I check any configuration settings, parameters, or look into firmware updates? (I assume I won’t be able to do much with the dimmer that seems completely dead.)
- Any other suggestions I should try?
- Any other people seeing issues with red dimmers after few years of normal use?
Thank you.