Zwave dimmer to dim OSRAM bulb

I know the first thought is why have a smart dimmer AND smart bulb, but this one is actually necessary. The previous owners of my house wired an outside light so that it is always on unless you trip a GFI outlet in the master bedroom (completely a WTF moment when we finally figured it out)

ANYWAY, I’ve had he OSRAM tunable white light out there which turns on and off and sunset/sunrise and it’s been great, but we wanted to add a switch to turn it on and off without getting our phones.

The switch is installed and it works fine turning on and off, but I bought a dimmer swtich and this doesn’t dim the smart bulb. The lighting automation app has a “turn on and set” option, but I have to predefine what it sets to, it still doesn’t control the dim. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

You shouldn’t use dimmers with devices that have that capability on Thierry own. Better off using just aneed on off switch and the devices dimming.

Sometimes it makes sense to put a smart binary switch (on/off) with a smart bulb, but you just can’t use a dimmer switch, networked or not, to control the current to a smart bulb and expect to Get dimming control that way.

Think about it. You know that when the current is all the way up, it’s still possible for the bulb to be “off”. That’s what works with the dumb switch, right?

A dimmer switch traditionally works by changing the amount of current let through to the bulb. When a dumb bulb gets more current, it shines brighter. But a smart bulb is going to ignore that and make its own decision.

If you want to dim a smart bulb with a smart switch, you actually don’t want the smart switch controlling the load to the bulb. That’s not going to do anything. What you want is for it to send a request to the hub, and then the hub to send the request to the smart bulb. Just slave the bulb to the switch, like we used to do with the smartapps “dim and dimmer” or “dim with me.”

I haven’t looked to see if the new solution at smart lights has this association ability as well. It might.

Thanks for the replies.

What JD mentions is what I thought would happen - the dimmer would tell the hub to dim the light, not actually control the current. It’s just that, upon setting it up, I realized I didn’t know how to configure that, and it doesn’t appear there’s an app out there for it. I was writing this to confirm that my suspicions that there’s not an app for that is true.

In the mean time, the dimmer I installed is working fine as an “on/off” solution, I would just like it if I could make it do what I want. If not, then I’ll probably order a switch to put there and move the dimmer elsewhere.

There are lots of smartapps to tell a smart bulb to dim based on the setting of a switch, the bulbs in fact often self identify as dimmer switches to begin with, because they have dimming capability. Or you can use one bulb as the master and have other bulbs follow it.

I’m not sure there’s an officially published app for that at this point, but any of the others should still work.

Have you tried “dim with me”?

@twack is there equivalent functionality to “dim with me” in the new smart lights solution app? Or do people still need to add A custom smartapp to have one dimmer follow another?

@slagle

Thanks! I’ll have to check this out (I’m out of town now, but will play with it when I get home.

I don’t really have experience installing non-official apps, but I’m sure there’s a post somewhere around here on how to go about doing it. (I’m just technical enough to get myself in trouble and follow how-to guides…not good enough to actualy get out of trouble. :smile:

Here you go:

Good news! Turns out custom code will not be required after all.

The option to use the lighting wizard to set up a quote “dim with me” scenario will appear if both the master and the slave are identified as dimmers in the device type.

During the migration, my own Zigbee plug in dimmers were misidentified by smartthings as smart outlets, which don’t have a dimmer capability. And I didn’t catch it until now.

As soon as I changed the device type, the dimmer options appeared in the lighting wizard.

Thanks to @bravenel for pointing this out to me.

I’ll have to check again, I didn’t see this as an option when I set mine up. I saw the “turn on and set level”, but you had to define the level at setup and it always set to that level, it didnt adjust when you pressed the switch to dim, it just turned on and off.

Turns out I was unfortunately right first time. This functionality is not currently available in the smart lights wizard. But I was also right that you can get it by using one of the other custom smartapps.

Thanks for clarifying. When I get back in town I’ll start playing with the custom code…we’ll see how this turns out!

I am using both the Turn On & Set Level and Turn On & Set Color (which also allows you to the set the level) features. It works great for my Osram Lightify and Philips Hue lights, but it does not set the level for my GE Smart Dimmers, just turns them on or off. I have submitted a ticket to Support about this issue.

Edit: Looking at the log, there is no setLevel command sent to the GE dimmers, so the app is just turning them on or off.