I bought three red dimmer switches (LZW31-SN) in August 2020 and two of those have failed in the past month or two. They are unresponsive to button presses and air gap does not fix the issue (although it does go through the boot up sequence). I have not tried turning the breaker on/off but the house lost power last night for a few minutes and that did not fix the issue.
So, they were working fine for 5 years and now they are not. Both of them have neutral connection and they are both in three-way configurations with a dumb aux switch. The wiring as per the instructions.
Has anyone else experienced this? Has anyone else tried to fix the units? I’m hoping I can fix these instead of chucking $180 CAD worth of switches….
I was hoping to contact the company to discuss this, or maybe a discount on some new switches in exchange for sending back the failed dimmer switches, but they don’t seem to have contact information readily available. Feels like I am on my own.
Have you tried factory resetting the switch(es). If they are unresponsive from the paddle, a zwave exclusion will also trigger a factory reset.
If you have had multiple power outages, the spike that sometimes results when power is restored can render smart switches inoperable. It can happen to any brand of smart switch. Whole house surge protectors guard against these surges.
Yes, I did try a factory reset, but they are unresponsive to button presses. I was able to remove them from ZWaveJS by airgrapping the switches and then “Remove Failed Nodes”. After powering the switches back on, they do the boot up sequence it does not seem to reset.
I have also tried changing the firmware for the switches from 1.61 to 1.57 and back again and that was successful but it did not fix the issue. It feels like the switches have two parts to them and one of the parts has failed.
I’ve had several of my Red Dimmers and Red On/Off switches fail over the years—no power passing through them anymore because the relay gave out. I’ve since switched to the Blue 2-1 series, and none of those use a relay. Even when I want simple on/off functionality, I use the instant on/instant off setting with dimming set to a minimum of 99 and a maximum of 100. There’s no more relay clicking, and these have been running since their release without a single issue.
I still have a few of the original Red Dimmers and On/Off models that continue to work fine, so I’ve always wondered if the failures came from a batch with weaker relays. I never tried repairing the bad ones—just replaced them with the Blue 2-1 versions.
