I’ve had a few inovelli white dimmer switches up for several months now—have made lots of use of the “smart” button, which is a great feature that none of the competitors seem to have.
Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to swap them out soon. The switches have failed the “wife approved” test.
We have other smart switches in the house that are Lutron Caseta that have physical dimmer sliders, and compared to that the day to day usage for dimming performance with push to hold on the inovelli switches is just not good.
It was improved somewhat by tweaking the dimming speeds via local params (the defaults were extra bad).
However, at the end of the day wife continues to complain about how annoying it is to use the inovelli dimmers and why I can’t just install lutron dimmers like we have elsewhere. So the benefit of the smart button got outweighed.
Would love to know if inovelli ever plans to release a dimmer with a direct physical dimming mechanism rather than “push and hold” (like a capacitive sensor over the LED, or a physical slider like the lutron diva switches), that we can look out for some time in the future!
So what happens when the hub changes the dim level and the physical slider is no longer matching the level. Say for example the slider is all the way up but the actual dim level is minimum how can the slider be moved up to increase the brightness?
The way lutron handles it is any motion on the physical slider immediately overrides whatever the hub had the level set to.
So if hub set the light to 25%, but physical slider is maxed, just lightly nudging it down sets the light to 99% or whatever and you can max it to 100 if you want.
This definitely comes down to personal preference and there’s no right answer, but we prefer the way the Inovelli switches are set up because, in a room full of lights, we aren’t constantly changing the dim levels on individual lights. Instead we set up scenes across all of the lights, and the Inovelli switches give us plenty of options for setting those scenes.
Why would the ability to set scenes be mutually exclusive from being able to set individual brightness quickly and precisely directly from the physical switch?
In fact, based on your response the ability to do so would be strictly better. Since you could rely on your scenes most of the time and quickly fine tune an individual light on an exceptions basis.
I never said the ability to set scenes and the physical slider are mutually exclusive.
As you said, the slider switches don’t have the config button, which I find ideal for setting scenes. I like how the Inovelli switches forgo the slider for the config button because we are more scene focused than wanting to adjust the individual dimness of lights. You or your wife might not value that. I was giving you my 2 cents. If you don’t agree, who cares? Move on.
I’m ok with the way it is. For me the issue would be the lack of sync, the disconnect between the position of the fader and the actual dim level. Since many of my lights are on schedules and/or scenes those switches’ faders would look wrong most of the time. I suppose motorized faders could be used but that would probably be cost prohibitive.
Sometimes the wife approved factor has to be ignored.
When I setup my Blue 2-1 switches to control Blue Fan Canopy, I asked my wife her preference between adjusting the fan speed with the config button in either multi-tap or cycle mode. She asked me what I meant, and I explained that cycle is equivalent to pulling the physical fan chain. She prefers cycle, so I set them up that way.
Then I added a second 2-1 to control the same fan from the other side of the room.
That’s when I discovered that the state of the cycle is stored in the dimmer, not the canopy or the group. So, cycling from the other switch or after the canopy was changed via the hub, the cycles were always out of sync. That’s not like pulling a physical chain at all!
So I put them in multi-tap (which is my preference anyway) and explained to my wife why.
She now agrees and has come to enjoy multi-tap.
What does this have to do with this thread?
I actually hate dimmers! I have no need for granularity 0-100 in the brightness of a light, and, therefore, no need for a physical slider. I want low, mid, hi, and maybe on (I really think 3 levels are all that’s humanly detectable anyway). So, I setup multi-tap automations for all my dimmers. Double-tap = low, triple-tap = mid, quad-tap = high or full on.
I hate holding the paddle for dimming. It either takes too long or overshoots what I’m looking for. ALWAYS!
So, I use my dimmers to basically replicate good old-fashioned 3-way lightbulbs.
@scott-gardner This is how lutron handles the discrepancy. Any motion of the physical slider immediately sets the LED to the position the slider is at.
Before this I had some Wemo WiFi switches had capacitive dimming level, so you would touch the dimming level and the LEDs would jump to that point. That was synced by default to the hub because the LED always displayed current brightness, regardless of how it was set.
It would be great if next gen inovelli switches had something like this AND the scene button.
As mentioned timed dimming will always either be too slow or overshoot.
Something like the Lutron Sunnata would be perfect. Paddle for on/off and capacitive touch for dimming. The indicator spans the entire switch and no programming button which gives it a balanced, clean look.
