Double Tap Convience from a 3 way switch

I have noticed that the double tap does not work on a three way GE switch when double tapping from the remote switch. Is there a reason the double tap has to be done at the main switch and cannot not be performed at the remote switch as well?

It depends a little bit on which brand we’re talking about here… If you have a brand that licenses the (very stupid) Lutron patent (brands like Levitron and Cooper generally do), then I’m not 100% sure.

If you have a brand that doesn’t license the (very stupid) Lutron patent (GE/Jasco, Evolve generally don’t), then it’s because of how communication between the switch and the Hub happens. In short, these switches never directly tell the Hub when they are turned on/off. Instead they just send out a general “Ooh look… I’m a device on a z-wave network” type message. The Hub smartly polls switches when they do this to find out their current state and what’s going on. It’s okay (patent-wise) for the Hub to ask what’s happening, but the switch can’t initiate the conversation and tell the Hub what’s happening unless the Hub asks first.

Now here’s the important part: The switch does NOT send out the “Ooh look… I’m a device on a z-wave network” type message when the AUX switch is pressed. Therefore the Hub doesn’t know to ask what’s going on with the switch. During normal routine polling the status of the switch will be updated, but not nearly quick enough to notice two rapid taps on the Aux.

So I should use the pollster convience smartapp to poll that particular switch for the DT to work?

I don’t think that will help. First, you’d have to poll in like a half-second frequency, which I don’t think pollster can do. And even if it can it could cause some bandwidth issues.

Second, I believe the double-tap only initiates when a device it turned on. It it’s status is just “updated” to indicate that it’s now on, I don’t know that the double-tap app will run.

Hi all,

I was going to start a new topic but this is exactly what I want to talk about. It looks like my GE 3 way switch is very inconsistent when sending a double tap. The GE slave unit seems to work flawlessly. It’s my understanding that the slave unit sends a command to the GE 3 way switch and the switch communicates with the HUB. With that in mind, has anyone else experienced this? If so, would you say this is a fully device or is this just how the GE switches function?