On my White Series dimmers, when I use local configuration to change parameter #8 “LED Indicator Color (When Off)” to orange, it shows up as red. If I increase the brightness one jump above the minimum it does show orange but then it is too bright.
I tested actually setting the color to red and it looks identical to the orange. To see if a dim orange was even possible, I manually turned on the LED and was able to make it a very dim orange comparable to the dim red, so I don’t think there is a hardware limitation. See my attached image where the first switch is red, second is orange, and third is manually set to dim orange.
Is anyone else having this issue and is there a workaround?
I’m going to make a WAG based upon a discussion we had about four years ago with the Gen 2 switches.
Colors that aren’t a primary RGB color are produced by a combination of two or three of the RBG colors (red, green, blue).
Orange is R:255 G:165 , B:0 (Yours may be slightly different depending upon how your driver dictates it.) So Orange is really a combination of Red and Green.
The theory is that as you turn the brightness down, the green LED turns off, arguably prematurely, leaving you with red. If that’s true, as you increase the brightness, the green LED turns back on, producing the orange.
This is just a theory. But if it’s correct, I don’t think there is much you can do about it other than accept the minimum brightness where it displays orange.
I suspected something like that, which is why I tried to see if I could manually get a dim orange color, and it turned out that yes there is a dimmer version of orange than the current minimum. In fact, there is a tone of orange that I can set to 1% brightness and still looks orange, here is a better photo:
You might be right that specifically the 255/165 orange has this problem, but then choosing a different orange with a little more green would make sense as a default.
You can also get more flexibility for the “color when off” by using automations. The way to do this is to set up an automation to trigger on a change of the load control to the “off” state, then turn on the “Alert LED Bar” endpoint to the color and brightness you want. You also need to detect a change of the load control back to the “On” state, at which time you turn off the Alert LED Bar so that the LED strip resumes operating in a “normal” dimmer load LED indicator mode.
