Hey, hopefully a quick question for those in the know. I’m rewiring a 3-gang box. In it are 2 standard 120v circuits that are working with a Red Dimmer and a Red On/Off, but I have a third that is a switch for my fireplace gas. It’s using an 18-gauge wire and is low voltage, and I confirmed it’s getting power from elsewhere and simply bridging to trigger the gas flow. My hope was that the switch would power from the neutral wire from the other two circuits and be able to trigger the relay for the gas off that, but on further inspection it looks like it need a 120v line in + the neutral to power the switch as well? Would anyone be able to confirm this is the case?
I love the Inovelli switches and would hate to use anything else here, but if the Inovelli switch won’t work for this use case, does anyone have any ideas of a product that would look similar and work over Z-Wave/Zigbee/Wifi? I thought about using a Shelly because I just need to trigger a relay for the fireplace gas to kick on, but then I’d hate for it to be the only remaining decora rocker switch in the house (lol).
So you can’t switch the low voltage directly with the Inovelli. I would wire a hot and neutral to the line/neutral terminals so that the Inovelli is a scene controller. Then use a smart relay in the place of the old mechanical switch and control it via scenes sent from the Inovelli.
The toughest part will be trying to fit the relay in the switch box. You might need to do it at the fireplace. The relay needs 120VAC to drive it, but you should have that at the fireplace.
I used this to ignite my fireplace. I could program a double tab to activate the relay, but really I just used Alexa to turn it on. The switch still work to turn on or off.
You don’t necessarily need smart mode and a smart relay. You can use the switch to power a control relay and then use the contacts of the control relay to switch the fireplace on and off.
Like this relay, hook the load of Red to input and fireplace wires to SW1.
There are even cheaper relays too, the above was just one I found quickly searching.
The best solution all depends on what wiring is available or how much you can change it to suit what you need.
User preferences and many choices. I prefer the smart relay as I can add a button to control it plus gives up to 3 flame controls (depends on fireplace) in one device. Let us know what you end up doing @bobalachabbs
Hey everyone, I thought I’d post an update with what I ended up doing here.
After I presented my wife with a few different ideas to get her seal of approval, I ended up doing a combination of what @Bry and @harjms suggested plus a feature of the switches I stumbled across with my crazy kids when I first started installing them. If you push the config button 8 times on the Inovelli switch, it will disable the internal on/off relay from being toggled at the switch, you’d have to use an actual z-wave command to toggle the switch (I think this is for smart bulbs that always need the relay on to work). Since I just wanted to use the switch as a scene controller, I wired it all up with neutral and line (but no load), and disabled the relay from being triggered, since I didn’t need to actually use the relay for anything.
I had a Sonoff 4CHPRO R3 that I flashed with Tasmota a few months ago that I was going to use for another project but ended up doing something else for it (and since I had already flashed it I couldn’t return it). It’s totally overkill for this but it fits the bill since one circuit was low voltage from the thermocouple for the gas and the other is mains voltage from the switch box to run the blower. The Sonoff box keeps the two circuits isolated from each other. I put it in the base of the fireplace where the wiring and control switches were, and rewired everything there.
After that I brought everything into Home Assistant, set up some automations in Node-RED to pick up the 1x press scene activations from the Inovelli switch to toggle the Sonoff at the fireplace. Everything’s working great, thanks for the help and suggestions everyone!