Best Z-Wave dimmer Wall Switch review

Just one review, but thorough…

(I really wish I had neutral wires :cry:).

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I’m lucky enough to have them in some of my boxes. I wish they all had it would make life easier.

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Very informative article… I have two installed so far and just love these switches. They work great for increasing the wife acceptance factor and the LED indicators are a big bonus. My wife loves having one switch in the TV Room that can control all the smart devices in the area by a simple double tap. Her favorite tap setup so far I called Movie Time, so double tapping turns on the Harmony activity that switches on the TV, turns on the audio amplifier and sets it to the right input and output for watching Netflix, turns off 5 lights in the area, enable the ceiling fan to run automatically based on room temp but turn off the ceiling fan light, set the dimmers to 20% for two floor torche lamps to give just enough light for movie watching. :wink:

For me, I just use my girlfriend Alexa to do it all :grinning:

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Trouble is, The Wirecutter says they’ll update their reviews… but they don’t. This is a great case-in-point. It was “updated” from this message, but not with the point that theirs is far from the only HS100+ to fail now. The switch is getting a reputation for it. Also interesting is that the manufacturer, Dragon Tech, has ceased to sell under their own name and at the same time HomeSeer can’t seem to restock the switches.

At my last house, I used a lot of Insteon switches in a mostly Z-Wave world, which is easy to do with HomeSeer, for the features and reliability. It’s looking like G.E./Jasco will continue to be my Z-Wave switch sweet spot.

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We all have our own lenses. :wink:

As an engineer, I found it to be a particularly superficial review. For one thing, it says all the dimmers can dim to 1%, which they definitely cannot–there is significant variation among the brands in this regard.

They didn’t mention which models required physical traveler wires and which didn’t, which can also be a significant issue.

They didn’t mention which models were zwave plus and which were not, something which can be particularly important with light switches as it allows you to pair them in place more than one hop from the hub.

They didn’t mention which, if any, of the parameters were configurable.

They didn’t mention which support direct association.

And they didn’t mention which have green LEDs and which have blue ones.

Not everyone cares about all of these issues, but quite a few people care about some, and to not even mention them makes device selection chancy.

And of course now there are new Z wave plus models out for both GE and Leviton, so the up-to-dateness does become an issue pretty quickly.

Different devices will work for different people precisely because they do have different feature sets. So it’s good to know what those are. And given that most of them are listed in the official conformance statement for each of the certified Z wave devices, there really isn’t any excuse for not looking them up before writing this kind of article.

http://products.z-wavealliance.org

I never have any problem with naïve questions. We’ve all been at that stage at some point, and people should be encouraged to ask so they can get the information that they need to make a decision.

I do have a problem with naïve answers presented as authoritative. Those are misleading and can lead other people astray.

One reason I like a wiki is so that other people can come in and fix any missing or inaccurate information.

Speaking of which: if anybody wants to copy the device class features topic to the SmartThings wiki, that would help keep that up-to-date. The wiki is great, but the editing features don’t work that well for voice. The light switch discussion starts around post 40 in this thread.

Anyway, I’m in a lot of pain this morning, so I’m sure I’m being unnecessarily grouchy. I think the blog article was a decent first effort in the “what I found out” category. It just shouldn’t be taken as authoritative.

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