Report on successful White Series Smart Dimmer installation

Switches General Discussion
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1

During December I successfully completed a project with 10 white series switches VTM31-SN. They are connected to Apple Home using a latest Apple TV as thread gateway.

1 single pole in box A
2 single pole in box B, 1 two way in box B
2 single pole in box C, 2 two way in box C
2 single pole in box D

In general, very high quality product, looks and works great after installation. The switches replaced mostly dumb switches but in a couple of cases did replace iDevices wifi smart switches that had intermittent connectivity issues. I have seen no such issues with the inovelli switches (and with any other matter over thread product in the network). I turned power off and on many times and reconnect very fast.

I also want to mention that there is an amazing community here that helped me with my questions faster than I would have ever expected.

Some notes:

  1. The switches came with firmware 1.0 and had to be updated to 1.0.5. This happened from the iPhone Apple Home App as one would expect.
  2. The toughest part with many of the switches was initial connection with the gateway. I have noticed this with other thread devices. My advice is keep retrying, full reset the switch (as described in other posts) and then try to pair immediately after. Eventually it works. Pairing takes about 1 minute when everything goes well, my experience is that if it does not connect within a minute pairing is doomed to fail. Also right at the beginning of the pairing process you should see the light on the switch blinking a bit blue. If it does not paring will fail.
  3. In a couple of occasions, even after upgrading to 1.0.5 the switch would be stuck in a state where it shows that is has 1.0.5 installed but still shows “Requesting” latest firmware. I unpaired and paired again the switches from the Apple Home app to eventually get rid of that status.
  4. Wiring challenge: The dumb switches I replaced where not using neutral and ground wires. In the box with the three and four switches too many wires caused space issues and putting everything in at the end was a challenge. Make sure you tighten all the side screws really well…
2

Well, I spoke a bit too soon. Today I attempted to connect one more switch. I had problems with that switch earlier but I had thought I just had not tried hard enough to reset it. Today I tried really hard!!

I believe I hit the issue described in this thread. No matter (no pun intended :upside_down_face:) what I did including all the methods described at this reply by @jvm33 , the switch would not pair. I plan to RMA it next. (I had one more VTM31-SN switch left, it paired immediately with no issues so the project was done.)

With method #3 I did find an Inovelli switch listed in the iOS keychain matter accessories that was not any of the successfully paired switches. I removed, it, I retried all the methods etc still no luck. So there is something there…

For the record: the gateway is an Apple TV (A2843) running tvOS 18.2 I assume that the VTM31-SN at the time of the attempt was running firmware 1.0.0 (like the rest of the switches in the batch).

3

hi Aetos, you are correct, if that one switch that you tried really hard to pair after performing the factory reset steps and still were unsuccessful, that is a known bug with FW version 1.0.0, I experienced the same with one of my four white series switches. After RMA request, Inovelli provided shipping label to send it back, then they FW updated it to the new FW version 1.0.5 and shipped it back to me, then I could successful pair it to my Apple Home.

Enjoy the switches!!