Hello I am interested in your experience so far with the WIZ lights. I am about to make an investment in WIZ color downlights (so far I like the sample units). I have Smartthings and I can control there just fine. My concern (and why I am here) is I’d like to use a dimmer switch to control one or more WIZ color down lights. As I understand it, the Series Red Switch should be able to control power to the WIZ lights as well as dimmer functionality through SmartTHings? Does it really work? Is there much of a lag?
I’ll answer my own question 
Yes, both black and red series work well with WIZ lights. Both the b k ack and red series can disable local control to prevent cutting power, and also there’s a smart bulb mode.
I was obsessed with dimming but honestly I don’t dim as much as I thought I would. However with red series you can define different dim levels and assign to scenes and activate those levels with scenes association.
I think basic scene association is coming soon to black series. I tested the beta and it kinda works.
Bottom line these are good switches for wiz bulbs IMO.
1 Like
To expand on my quest to control my Philips wiz lights (for which I have a ton of them now). I now have dimming from a physical (as well as logical) black series dimmer (firmware 1.52 and DTH 09-09-21) working via a SmartThings WebCore piston. In SmartBulb mode and ramp rate for dimming set to 2 (this provides enough of a real-timeness to dimming changes) on the switch, my piston grabs the dimming level of the switch and then set the dim level of a group of 4 wiz lights to match. With basic scene control now in the black series, I coded up the 1x tap up to go to 100% and turn on the bulbs and 1x tap down to turn off the bulbs. So I can do (relatively, about a .25-.5s delay) instant on/off and dimming. Oh and dimming works from my GE aux switch as well as it’s all in a 3 way.
I love that my black series dimmer led bar moves with the dim level of my lights.
Pretty cool stuff. Interestingly it’s taken me almost year to get to this point (from my original post) and answer my own questions 
i know the whole smart bulb and smart switch what can/can’t you do comes up a lot and I know particuarly for the Wiz Bulbs (I’m a Philips Hue convert) comes up a lot on other forums. Hopefully this helps someone else. I plan to try this on my Red Series Dimmer and see what happens.
1 Like
Hi there, just came across your post and it’s relevant to an issue I’m having.
I’m moving from Smartthings (ST) to Home Assistant (HA) and in the process picked up a few WIZ lights and a Red dimmer. I have the lights and dimmer working in HA and can turn the lights on/off with an up/down paddle press. I cannot figure out how to get paddle hold dimming to work. I know I can set dimming percentages to multiple paddle presses but I’d prefer to get proper dimming to work. Any idea how to get your ST solution to work in HA?..thanks!
Step 1: Are you keeping the load at 100% at all times via smart bulb mode? If not, start there.
Because they are different protocols, you will need to go through the hub to match the dim level to the switch dim level. Each hub does this differently, there are other threads for HA to trigger on dimmer level change and then match dim level on lights.
There is ALSO scene control (single and multi-tap control) that you can look at for changing colors or color temp.
Lots of info available, hopefully this gets you on the right track!
Sorry I just saw your reply. I implemented dimming functionality in a Webcore piston in ST. As @kreene1987 stated, I’m triggering on a dimmer change, and grabbing the dimmer value then setting the wiz bulbs to that. I haven’t done anything with HA (yet) so not sure how custom automations work there. I will say this, my dimming is at best “good enough” for me. My issue is that ramp rate for the dimmer doesn’t seem fine-grain enough .Either it dims to slow and takes forever to scale up/down or it dims to fast and you blow by the level you’d like to set. I’ve got my ramp rate set at 2 and that works the best on things being equal.
When I have more time I’m thinking of a more elaborate piston that will track paddle up/down clicks and dim/up down in 10% increments.
Thanks for feedback, @kreene1987 & @miker2069. I’m very new to HA so for now I’ve set different dimming values and colors to different # of paddle presses. I think this will work for me since it’s not a switch I use often. I did contact Inovelli, they said dimming would work with direct association of Z-Wave bulbs but they could not offer a solution for WiFi bulbs.
As a suggestion, you might want to check out this you tube video by Joe Farro. He’s done quite a bit with Inovelli switches and Wiz Bulbs (I found him on my quest trying to find anything about using Wiz Bulbs as as smart bulb with Inovelli Switches). One thing I do know that HA has over ST is that the HA community has basically reverse engineered the Wiz light control protocol and HA has the ability to direct control the lights. Whereas in ST it still has to go out and back through the cloud. I’ve chatted within him in the youtube comments and he’s pretty nice and might be able to give you some pointers. I was impressed with the HA and Wiz local integration built by the HA community. I think what you are trying to do ultimately you’ll have a better dimming experience as you should be able to bypass the cloud and control the Wiz lights directly.
Yes, Joe’s vids are great, I’ve discussed this with him already, very nice guy. He doesn’t have a dimmer at this time but plans to get one and tinker with it. Been happy with HA thus far, still lot’s to learn but there is so much info out there. For whatever reason I’ve had a Hubitat hub for years and never bothered to make the switch from ST. Not sure why I gave it shot with HA, maybe it’s all the How To videos out there. Thanks, again for the advice.
Here are my experiences with 8 Wiz lights connected to a Red series dimmer and an add-on switch in a 3-way. Controlled through SmartThings…
It’s unreliable. At least some of the lights fail to receive a message most of the time. Thus I cannot trust Smart Bulb mode for on/off. In comparison, control via the Wiz app, or the Wizmote is rock solid. Because at least some of the lights get the message each time I would guess that the problem isn’t with the switch, but where?
To distinguish between when the lights are turned off by cutting the power or by turning off via Wiz app/Wizmote, I added a notification that turns the light bar yellow when the power is cut. I also added an automation (a bit unreliable) that turns on the lights on Button1 Push.
That still leaves me with an add-on switch location where I won’t know whether hitting the switch will turn on the lights or not! I think I will purchase a second Red dimmer so I can mirror the yellow light bar and Button1 Push function.
As mentioned above, Home Assistant has a local version of the Wiz protocol so I may look into that in future.
My wiz light configuration on ST is to leave power always connected and just control the virtual on/off state of the bulb. I have a total of 15 wiz bulbs across 4 different rooms/zones and it all works great (from ST or alexa). I rarely go to the wiz app or use the wiz remote for thus anymore.
Also two of my rooms/zones are in a 3 way configuration with a GE add on.
Why would you cut power in any scenario other than for a hard reset? Also what’s your wifi router/mesh system?
I have 3 Wiz lights, 1 Red dimmer and HA as my hub, in addition to various other zwave, zigbee and wifi devices.
HA controlling the Wiz lights with local integration works 100%. Red controlling the lights via HA is 95%, sometimes it takes an extra press to get the light to respond. In my case it could be a range issue since the dimmer is in the far corner of my home. Not sure if this is possible, but I would like to see the dimmer LED reflect the on/off state of the lights even when they are triggered by HA.
Every now and then when my lights are off and I want it on I have to press the off, then on (down and then up). I have a scene controller from another vendor and I realized that when I turn the wiz lights off from another device, the dimmer switch is still in the virtual on state. So when I try to turn it on from the dimmer, the event doesn’t fire because the dimmer thinks it’s already on.
Perhaps something like this might be attributing to the every now and again extra tap.
Should be easy to fix as I need to turn the dimmer virtually off and on from other devices in addition to manipulating the bulbs.
Yes, I think it may be the case of the dimmer becoming out of sync with the lights on/off state and therefore requiring an additional press. I need to test.
Because I can’t reliably turn the lights on/off without cutting the power!
Router is a TP-Link AX21 (wifi6). It and the ST hub are in the room directly over the lights.
Responding to my own post… static ip addresses seem to have drastically improved reliability. I think it’s jumped from 50% to closer to 90%. The other thing I noticed was that some of the lights had different values for fade-in/fade-out which added to the perception of unreliability. Happier now
2 Likes
that’s cool Mark! Glad there’s joy. The fade in/fade out is a nice feature, but I’ve set all of mine to 0 for the same reason.
One thing I notice with SmartThings and trying to figure out why that “5%” it doesn’t work, I’ve did a deep dive in the log and see that the switch is performing properly, the scene (in my case I use scenes to group the lights) starts to run, then at somepoint while being executed in the smart things platform I get a java network timeout error exception (not the exact error, I’m going from memory). I’m assuming because it goes from switch, to hub, to ST cloud, to wiz cloud, then to the light. A lot of places where this can get foo-barred. I think this could be washed away if there was some sort of retry on the back end for these network i/o operations. Anyway, I’m moving closer and closer to HA for the local control aspect,
I’m just going to again suggest you use SBM mode 2. Keep power to the bulb, control the bulb on/off via scenes and HA and your app and whatever, but smart bulbs should NEVER EVER have power cut.
1 Like
miker2069, if you are comfortable doing so, would you please share your webcore piston for dimming? I’m a tinkerer but would prefer to stand on the shoulders of giants!
kreene1987, with the higher reliability I’m seeing I’ll definitely check out SBM again
1 Like