I continue to have issues with my newly installed dimmers and switches and it’s pretty frustrating At this point my wife is pushing for have me switch out to “dumb switches”, but I’m not ready to do that yet.
Following up on this previous post, I now have 2 dimmers that have become completely unresponsive. Difference is this time they are not 3-way…just a single dimmer controlling a light.
For one dimmer, I can control it through the app, but not on the dimmer itself, the other one doesn’t work at all.
Another weird behaviour on this dimmer…sometimes it just turns on by itself (literally, we are all around it, no one is near the dimmer and it turns on…and then of course my wife gives me shit for it!)
I pulled the air gap, but that didn’t do anything
Both dimmers are LZW31-SN and the firmware listed is: “1.48”,“1.41”
I believe they all have neutral installed (new construction).
I updated Home Assistant and zwavejs2mqtt to the latest versions last night and it didn’t help.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I could remove/re-add them, but I’d love to understand what’s going on, as this seems to be a recurring issue.
When this happens, it’s usually because local control has been disabled. Press the config button 8x rapidly. It will flash one of two colors, red or green. If it flashes green, local control has been re-enabled, so that was the problem.
If it flashes red, local control was enabled, so that’s not the problem. Press 8x again to re-enable.
As far as switches randomly turning on and off, I’d test disconnecting from the hub and seeing if it still does it. Honestly when I’ve perceived this issue it was 100% the hub sending commands that I mistakenly had set up to the wrong dimmer or something.
A remove/reset and testing “offline” should let you know if the actual switch is defective or not. You would be 1/1000 if something were actually wrong with the switch. With multiple issues it’s almost impossible. We are here to help!
Absolutely. Logbook can be filtered to see what commands might have been sent. Even shutting down the hub for a bit and seeing if it does it would be a fine test, but then the entire mesh is down.
Following up on this…I think my system is going haywire
I’m home alone today, so no kids around who could be pressing a bunch of buttons.
I turned off all the bedroom lights…then a few hours later:
Two of the bedroom lights somehow turned on. When it comes to debugging this, any advice on where I should start?
One of the bedroom dimmers was again unresponsive. I hit the config button 8 times and the light flashed green…the dimmer became responsive again. It’s great that I know now how to quickly fix it, but I have no idea how it became unresponsive in the first place, especially since I was the last person to use the dimmer (I turned off the lights a few hours prior using the dimmer).
What load are you controlling? Are these smart bulbs by chance? I had a similar issue on one of the first iterations of firmware (since been fixed) where I would disable local control bc I had smart bulbs on the load and randomly the switch would reboot and then the lights would turn off on the reboot and since local control was enabled, I couldn’t do anything until I re-enabled local control, turned the lights on and then disabled local control again.
Since the light is flashing green, it does mean that local control was disabled, so we just need to get to the root cause as to why it’s being disabled. It could be a HA thing, but I’m not familiar with it
I can’t help w/HA either, but I recall @kreene1987 suggesting you check the logging.
It’s strange that the switches had DLC turned on, possibly by HA.
One thing you could try if you can’t resolve why HA (if that’s the case) is doing things on its own would be to factory reset the switch and re-add it (using a different name, just in case). If there are settings specific to the existing switch they should, in theory, no longer affect the new switch.
Do you by chance have a 700 series USB stick? I had issues with things turning themselves off and on with a Hubitat C-7 that had zero automation. A few Inovelli bulbs, but also a Homeseer fan switch, and some Jasco plugs.
I don’t know what was ultimately causing it, but my Hubitat was showing me a half dozen devices (LZW42 bulbs and Zooz ZEN15) that were spamming the z-wave mesh to the tune of ~10k commands per day. I removed the offending devices, and things started working as expected. While the insane traffic is of course the cause, I suspect the 700 series chip firmware (of the controller) has a bug when it comes to dealing with this sort of load, and it somehow sends bad/phantom commands. Are your switches possibly sending power usage updates super frequently?
At this point my wife is pushing for have me switch out to “dumb switches”, but I’m not ready to do that yet.
