White Series 3 way - appear on, when not

Product Support Wiring Discussion
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1

I have about 20 white series dimmers setup throughout my home and all have been working well ever since they were installed. Just recently, a few of them are giving me headaches and I haven’t been able to figure out the root cause.

The ones acting strangely are in 3-way setups, using dumb switches downstream of the white series switch. I have them configured as multi-way+dumb both at the switch and in Home Assistant. The issue happens if I use another dumb switch to control my lights.

For example:

  1. Lights are on (Inovelli LED = on)
  2. Flip dumb switch → Lights go off, Inovelli LED flips off then back on, HA reports the the lights as off then back on immediately
  3. Flip smart switch → Lights go on, LED stays on, HA reports on

The only way to get them back to normal is to go back to the dumb switch and flip it again.

I’m confident the wiring is correct because they’ve been working for many months. I’m not sure what could have happened, so are there any tips? I haven’t tried resetting because this now happens for 3 different circuits (all are multi-way), but I do have other existing multi-ways that are still working fine. Is resetting the next troubleshooting path or is there anything else I should try?

2

Have you confirmed the switches are still in fact set to multi-way+dumb? If the switch firmware updated that may have been reset. I suspect what you’re seeing is consistent with the switch expecting an Inovelli aux switch instead of a dumb switch. It may be worth using the local button combo to make sure: White Series Dimmer Switch • Button Combinations, Quick Tap Sequences & Local Configuration Options | Inovelli Help Center

3

I just double-checked by changing that setting again and it still has the same broken behavior.

One thing I didn’t mention… when it’s in this weird state, tapping up doesn’t do anything but tapping down toggles the lights.

4

I know there was an issue with the Aux switches with the newer firmware (LINK), so maybe there is a similar issue with using dumb switches. I know on my Blue switches, there are now Aux Detection Level and Dumb Detection Level settings, so check if those options are available to you (as you are using White and not Blue) and if so, modify the Dumb Detection Level setting to see if your switches start behaving better.

5

Thanks for the tip. I’m running v1.1.5 of the white series firmware which appears to be the latest production release. There is an Aux Test setting and I tried all options with no luck.

6

This issue is fixed in V1.1.6r1 beta. You need to increase the “Dumb Test” parameter to accommodate longer line lengths to the dumb switch.

If you have HA then the software is available via the “Test-Net DCL”. If not you will need to PM @Kaleb_Inovelli to see if a beta version is available for your Hub.

7

That did it! Thank you!