Problem controlling Ceiling Fan Light with Red Dimmer via Hubitat Rule Machine

Have you now been able to get it to work to do an association between a 2nd Gen Red Dimmer and the light of a Fan+Light?

Is that anywhere on your “to do” list?

Unfortunately this won’t be possible with association. There is not enough storage space on the Z-Wave chip to add multi-channel association.

If you have a local processing hub, you could use scene control and have a pretty good experience. On a cloud platform it probably wouldn’t work very well.

I am using a Hubitat C7 that is in the same room as the Fan+Light switch and the other switch is literally on the other side of the wall as Fan+Light switch in the hallway. The one in the hallway is connected to just the line, neutral and ground.

While it usually works via a Hubitat rule, for some reason from time-to-time I get huge delays from a few seconds to 30-40 seconds or sometimes forever, before the light turns on or off. That happens periodically with every switch that isn’t physically connected to a load, and even for the ones that are I get that same non-responsive behavior for all of my Config/Favorite buttons as they have to go through the hub. It seems to be worse late at night, but it can, and does, happen anytime of the day or night.

Often after the Favorite/Config button doesn’t work I find just turning it on and off from the main paddle (when connected directly to the load) gets the Favorite/Config button to work. I have no idea why this is, other than a guess that somehow it was “sleeping”. But this doesn’t seem to make sense as I have a neutral wire connected to every switch and therefore they should be always on. My other guess is that perhaps the hub was working on the routing, but I have no idea how to tell if that was the case or anyway to schedule when that happens. Still 30-40 second delay, or even, at times, no response, seems way more than should be accountable for that.

I’ve posted several threads here and on the Hubitat site asking why this happens and how to prevent it, but I literally get no response from anyone. I don’t know if it is an issue with your switches, the Hubitat hub or, if this is home automation’s dirty secret, that it just isn’t that reliable.

Yeah the delay sounds like something is up. Thinking back, the only time I have seen delays of that length have been when a device is associated to another and the second device is having issues or has been removed from the network. So the device will try to send a command and will eventually time out. This can cause a long delay. I’m not sure if that is what is going on or not. Also, if the hub is getting a lot of load at the time, that could be it. You might want to check the logs during the delay and see what is happening.