I have a few GE Z-Wave Smart Dimmer Switches on my first floor that control 3 different lights. What I’m trying to do is have an additional switch that just turns off all of them without any of the respective wires running to it. I can hook it to my house wiring or have it run on batteries (either one would work as long as it’s in the wall and fits in a standard cover plate) but just trying to get a z-wave switch that does nothing other than send a signal to the SmartThings hub and I’ll program when that is triggered, turn off those 3 designated switches. I tried looking and am confused what I should purchase that will accomplish this - is this an “Add-On Switch”? or will that do something different?. (Secondary question - and not sure if this one is possible and definitely a “want”, not a “need”, but would it be possible to program that same button to turn all the lights on but only if they’re all already off. As in if even one of them is on, then turn all off?)
Interesting… this is the third time this question or a variant of it has been asked in the last two weeks. I’m tired right now, so I’m just going to refer you to one of the other threads and then you could ask more questions if that doesn’t help.
But the short answer is you can either use a battery powered Device, and there are a couple of dozen that can work with SmartThings, or you can use a mains powered accessory switch, but it has to be a switch which actually has a radio that communicates directly to the SmartThings hub. Some do, but some add on switches, such as the GE brand, communicate with their own masters via physical traveler wire and those won’t work the way you want. But any of the battery powered devices would.
Anyway, take a look at these threads ( this is a clickable link)
This first one discusses a number of the battery operated options for this kind of use case:
And this one is talking about a mains powered device like the accessory switches
Either could work for your use case, so it just depends on what you prefer. In all cases, the switch will send a message to the hub and then the hub will send the messages to the other dimmer switches so they don’t all have to be on the same circuit.
Wired remote option was exactly what I was looking for. Ordered the gocontrol one on amazon as my local home depot doesn’t carry it. Will arrive in a few days and will come back if can’t get it to work, thanks so much!
My personal preference is to have a wall switch by the entrance of a room that toggles lamps in the room. I grew up in a home that had “half hot” outlets in every room tied to a switch. My sons room had 1 wall switch that operated the ceiling fan and I couldn’t run another wire because the trunk line of the HVAC was right above the bedroom door. ST helped me solve this problem.
I pulled out the single gang box and installed a double gang. Next to the fan switch, I installed a GE on/off switch leveraging the line and neutral from the fan switch, however I have no load. In other words the switch does nothing physically/mechanically. I switched a few of the receptacles with GE smart outlets and plugged the lamps into the switched outlet. Then in ST I use smart lighting, runs locally, to toggle the GE outlets when the wall switch is toggled.
Long story short, you can install a switch in your home with no load that smart lighting or Webcore subscribe to and turn off switches elsewhere. And one more idea, I have a minimote on my bedside table that I use daily to turn on and off my “house”. Certain switches are set to turn on and off by specific buttons.
After trying 5 buttons or so for a similar use-case, my favorite is the Sylvania/Osram Dimming switch. I use it as an “on” (top button) and “off” (bottom) switch to toggle all of our outdoor lights. Looks like you already found a solution, but figured I’d throw it out there in case you wanted to take a look: https://www.amazon.com/SYLVANIA-LIGHTIFY-Osram-Products-required/dp/B0196M620Y.
Thanks, but I’m actually very unreliable. It’s just that talking is easier than typing so my individual answers tend to look impressively long.
There are many community members who contribute lots of help and support in the forums. But since I tend to be interested in things that other people could care less about, specifically network protocols and the tiny distinctions between different device models, I stick out a little.
And as it happens, I am starting a new course of treatment in December, and don’t expect to be online much. I said that once before, but then I had a bad reaction to the new medication and we had to stop it altogether, so the downtime didn’t happen. But then neither did the hoped for improvements.
We’ll just have to see what happens this time, but if I’ve gone missing in December you’ll know why. Wish me luck!
So I got the gocontrol one and it kind of works, but not how I hoped. If all of the lights are off and I use the go control only, to turn all the lights on and off, it works. But if I use the actual load controllers to turn it on or off, the gocontrol becomes useless. I suspect this is because the gocontrol has an internal on and off state which doesn’t work for me. I tried to program
I want the on button to turn on all the downstairs lights, regardless of their current state and whether some of them are already on or not and same with the off, to turn them all off regardless of current state. (hopefully this makes sense)
I understand the appeal of a physical button to switch on and off the lights.
But, I actually like virtual buttons. I’m actually using an old iPhone and integrating it with ActionTiles and using that as my super switch.
ActionTiles is a pretty good UI wrapper around Smartthings. I would use place the turn on/off each light individually but also include one button to turn off all of them at once. The switches would visually show them as off.
I’ve including 2 screen shots of ActionTiles to give you an idea of how it would look like. You can tap to toggle on each of those lights and tap the “All Lights Out” button to turn off all of the lights. This set up gives you a visual of the lights going out.
This is one of those things where SmartThings keeps changing how it works. It used to be that if you requested the on message it would send the on even if the status was already on, but it sounds like they have changed it again (it changes from time to time) so now if the cloud thinks the device is on it won’t send the on message again.
There are a couple of ways to handle this. I think the most straightforward might be webcore, but I’m going to have to leave it up to others to discuss that possibility. @anon36505037 might have some ideas.
Need help - trying to do this with webCoRe and can’t figure out the exact way to structure it. I basically want that if you touch either the on or off on this go control that it follows this logic: (if any of these 3 lights are on, turn them all off. If none of them are on, turn them all on.)
I’ve created two that are currently like this (but I’ve tried a few variations and none work how I’d like):
