I have 9 White Series dimmer switches installed and since installation I have now had 3 occurrences where 1 of the switches became completely unresponsive. Spread out over ~6 months.
Each time it was a different switch, so this doesn’t appear to be a single faulty piece
Switches were unresponsive to any inputs (Physical buttons, control through Home Assistant or Google). This included the factory reset inputs having no impact.
Switch returned to normal operation by cutting power at the breaker
Switches in question are configured as dimmers
I have HA routines which update some LED bars infrequently, but the impacted switches don’t correlate entirely with those routines.
Impacted switches were handling various different loads of led bulbs (3-5), nothing outstanding wattage wise that feels relevant.
Given the infrequency this has occurred, and generally easy resolution of flipping the breaker, I am not overly concerned as I otherwise have been absolutely thrilled with the product and will be installing at least another half dozen more I already purchased.
However it seems like there may be a firmware issue at play here that I am hoping my experiences might be able to assist in resolving.
I have also been running into the issue lately with many switches around my house. I can also pull the air gap. Its seemingly random, but very frustrating. I have my switches set up in Apple Home and Alexa. I wonder if its an issue with being connected to multiple systems at once? For me its happening pretty frequently. Like once per switch every month? Definitely enough to be annoying.
This used to be unbearable for me. I disabled client steering on my Eero 6E Pro mesh, and the flickering, unresponsive, crashing reduced drastically. Now it still happens but only one or two (out of 50) every three days or so. It is very frustrating, but nothing like how bad it used to be. I would recommend looking at any WiFi settings that might mess with the 2.4Ghz bands that could cause the thread logic on the white series to go crazy. I also have Apple Home as the border gateway and all of the white series were added to Apple Home first. I have added 10 or so to Alexa and Google Home. That did not appear to have any impact on the frequency of flickering or crashing.
This happened to me so I sent back the device and got a replacement. Same as you, even physical paddle was unresponsive to touch. Now the replacement is doing the same thing. There are several threads on the forum going back over a year about this issue, but Inovelli has not acknowledged it at all. I’m super disappointed.
Yeah, I actually switched to these because what I was anticipating to be a much more solid experience with thread/matter than dealing with my Leviton switches falling off-line with Wi-Fi requiring pulling their air gap and sometimes having to go through the pairing process again for HomeKit. I bought 20 smart dimmers five band switches both of my fans which is fall off-line much more often than having problems with the dimmers, but I’ve had both the dimmers and the fence which is so non-responsive to physical button pushes and I’ve had to pull the air gap and often have to pull the air gap to bring them Back online after they fallen off-line even when they’re responsive physically.
I also have the problem with multiple different LED bulbs, randomly flickering, either dimmer or brighter depending on what brightness the lights at if it’s full bright they’ll flash dimmer if it’s lower the occasionally flash brighter.
Overall, with $1800 of existing switches and then a few of the switches with the humidity sensors on pre-order. I am a bit frustrated with this. I still only have five of the switches installed while trying to work through these problems and trying to jump back-and-forth through email with Support. It’s just very difficult.
I have so many different devices that keep failing and are overall unreliable. I could work a full-time job trying to support them. I tried to do the halo select by quickset and I had one fail. I got a replacement and that one’s also failed now and it was over $300 lock.
Since originally posting, this issue has continued infrequently with no discernable patterns.
Thanks to everyone else mentioning the air gap, much preferable over throwing the breaker.
Sadly this experience has led to me holding off on more purchases despite needing a bunch more products. Disappointed that there has been no acknowledgement of an issue.
I’ve had 37 VTM31s installed for over 6 months and have not experienced any of these issues. I have 15 VTM30s on order and anticipate they will perform just as well. I highly recommend these switches.
I’ve been experiencing this issue for months and it seems like the common theme is using a ZBT-1 with an Apple TV/Homepod. Apple’s thread integration has been somewhat of a disaster from the start, so I suspect they are the culprit here. My ATV frequently tends to go dormant in my thread network and I think it just becomes a black hole for a few of my switches that are unlucky enough to connect to it.
I did a factory reset on my ATV a few days ago and so far so good. Way too early to tell if it solved the issue.
Apple is upgrading ATVs to matter 1.4 next week, so perhaps y’all will see an improvement then. Otherwise, it might be worth trying to remove the Apple BR from your network. Assuming you don’t have 50+ switches, you probably don’t need multiple BRs anyways.
It’s not just apple. This happens occasionally for me with Google Home and Home Assistant. I just pull the air gap and it fixes itself. Hoping a future firmware update fixes this. I’d say across my 10+ switches, I do this roughly once a week.
Same issue for me for the past 1 year. But have gotten real bad recently where im pulling the air tab on multiple devices daily..the worst switch i’ve bought. For info, im using google nest pro wifi witb hubitat.
From personal experience, I can tell you that the Google Nest Wifi Pro 6e is a problematic boarder router. I used to have 6 of these in a larger home, with about 150 thread devices (about 75 Inovelli switches). So, more than enough to form a well-connected mesh. Devices going offline (from multiple brands) was common, and often a power reset on the WiFi Pros would bring devices back online. I’ve since switched to using Apple TVs only as the OTBRs (I sold all the Nest WiFi Pros and replaced with Ubiquity Wifi), and the system works better.
Also, based on experience writing the Hubitat driver, Hubitat’s Matter implementation needs work - I’d think of it as an early beta release. The two best Matter implementations seem to be (1) Home Assistant, and (2) Homey
This being said, the Inovelli switches also have issues. The 2-in1 switch was implemented using the Matter 1.1 development kit which is less mature than the current SDKs. - I can tell you that new firmware based on the Matter 1.4 / Thread 1.4 development SDK is in beta testing and improves the situation, so if you have patience, that an update to that firmware will help. Unfortunately, I don’t think Hubitat supports firmware updates, so you may need to pair your switches to Home Assistant or Apple Home (if you have Apple TVs) to get it to work.
I just tested multi admin on my switches and it indeed has caused them to freeze every few days. For me, it’s HomeAssistant/Alexa. Could using multi-admin with Alexa be a common factor?
Removing the switches from the extra service has stopped the freezing.
I am using Echo Gen 4s which have an old Thread version. I wonder if that could be related. What Echos do you use?
I’ve had basically no issues after I did one thing, which might not be possible for everyone. That one thing is, hard wire your Nest WiFi Pros, and Google TV streamers with Ethernet.
After putting all of my boarder routers on the same Ethernet instead of relying on Wi-Fi, everything has been great