Don,
Thank you for the reply and the pictures. At least it looks like the electrician who installed that did a halfway decent job of keeping things a little organized (I’ve seen worse rats nests when searching for GELV on the web).
My end game goal is to be able to get all of my house lighting incorporated into smartthings. Or at least the ones that make the most sense to be automated (for example my bedroom closet light is switched with GELV, but I don’t have an absolute need to control that with ST).
I currently have about 60 hard devices connected to smartthings, about half of those being lightbulbs or plug in/ in-wall switches/dimmers, and the other half being sensors (contact, motion, temp, humidity, etc).
Three of those switch devices are the curtain module relays – garage lights, hallway/steps lights, and whole house fan (my favorite application). They are set up as “Z-Wave Device Multichannel” in ST.
Each of the curtain modules are wired into the GELV system as follows…
12v wall wort adapter powers the curtain module. The curtain module has three different commands. The first is an “Open” command. The second, “Close”. The last is what I believe is to tell the curtain controller to “turn on” (I listed this last, however it fires every single time either the ‘open’ or ‘close’ command is triggered). Each of these inputs triggers a momentary but not instantaneous output.
Since the GELV relay needs a 24v momentary signal from each the “on” and “off” sides of its switch, I have a separate SSR relay for each (one for “on”, one for “off”), that is triggered by two of the curtain module commands as follows:
The “turn on” command set to turn the lights on.
The “Close” command is set to turn the lights off.
I did it this way since the module runs the ‘turn on’ command every single time (no matter whether “open” or “close” command was sent). If I turned the lights on with the “open” (or “Close”) command, there would be a minimal (yet very noticeable, especially by my wife) delay before the lights turned on.
The disadvantage of this is that even if the lights are already off, If ST sends an off signal (e.g. I have a routine that shuts all lights off at 1AM), they will actually flicker on for a split second before shutting back off Not a big deal in the garage or hallway, but wouldn’t work out in the kids bedrooms). Plus this adds extra wear on the GELV relays on top of the already long pulse that the commands send. I’m sure there is a work around flow for this with a simulated switch that can act as a ‘pilot light’, but I havent dug into it too much (plus I don’t think it would be applicable if the manual switches were used).
Note that for the whole house fan I didn’t wire them this way, and instead just tied to the open and close commands. I don’t care if that takes a split second to turn on.
I have all of the components for each switch crammed into a plastic project enclosure (actually an electrical box) with only the 12v power and the on/off/common lines coming out of it. It’s somewhat clean but I would love it to be more well integrated in a single location/large electrical box where I could share the same power supply (and maybe even 24v common wire) so that I would only need to tap into the GELV switch wires. I have probably 15 to 20 additional GELV lights that I would ultimately like to control.
The hallway/steps light is the one that has ended up with a bad RR7 relay (which I had previously replaced not too long ago). It was the one that was fired the most from ST (I had it set to turn on anytime someone came home, anytime motion was sensed in the hall, and anytime the top of steps door was opened, and off after 5 minutes). I have the other two still hooked up that way without noticing any issues yet.
Sorry if that was all too rudimentary of an explanation. Like I said, I am not an expert on this stuff, part of the reason I wrote it all out was so I could understand it as I was typing. Actually after re-reading it I wonder if I could modify the ST device type code to tell it to pulse quicker and also not to run that ‘turn on’ command every time…