I have smart bulbs throughout the house and I want to update all the rooms with zooz zen71 switches. In the main floor it’s mostly 3-way setups.
What I’m trying to understand is the function of the dumb-switches in a 3-way setup with the zen71 in smart bulb mode.
In this mode, I have to set HA to run an automation whenever the paddles are pressed. This works great in the one room (single switch) setup that I have now.
What I don’t know, and can’t seem to find online, is how this works with a dumb-switch in the mix. Will the dumb switch send a signal to the zooz switch that I can action in HA? Or will it be rendered useless?
Assuming you’re talking typical wiring using the lo voltage traveler on the switch…
With the zooz (and most Northamerica 110 smart switches) the dumb switch or aux switch is just seen as a momentary button that the main switch reacts to. The main switch is doing all the actual control. Ge/Jasco needs a special type of device but zooz and inovelli have decided to allow use of a standard dumb switch in this space.
Thanks, with Zooz it ended up being a toggle instead of momentary. Which has added a lot of complications. Unless there’s a way to configure it as momentary, but the documentation is lacking.
This is what I’m trying to do as well. But How did you get the status change info? I can’t see any changes when I toggle the 3-way connected dumb switch. But the Zooz switch works great.
So there are 3 ways to control the ZEN71. You can use a 3-Way switch, Z-Wave commands, or locally using the paddles. By default, regardless on the method you use to turn the ZEN71 on and off, the Binary Switch targetValue will be the parameter that gets updated. Here’s what it looks like in the Z-Wave JS UI control panel.
To tell if the ZEN71 was turned on manually or by using Z-Wave commands you need to set parameter 16 to Binary Switch for Z-Wave and Basic for manual. Once this is enabled the targetValue parameter will only update when the ZEN71 is turned on using Z-Wave commands. As you can see my ZEN71 is on as indicated by the currentValue parameter and the targetValue parameter is off because the last Z-Wave command that was sent was to turn off.
When I turn the ZEN71 on from the 3 way switch or the paddles the updates will get reported using the basic cc. It will show 99 for on and 0 for off.
The problem now is that you can’t tell whether the ZEN71 was turned on using the paddles or the 3-way switch because they both update the basic currentValue parameter. This is why you need to enable scenes on your 3 way switch.
Here is my completed automation to do this as one automation instead of several. What I discovered is that the Zen71 will manage state for itself, so the only thing need is to track the lights to the correct notification. To deal with state changes, combining the state and KeyUp/KeyDown seemed to solve the issue I was having with false starts. Hopefully this will help someone in the future.
