While true, if instructions say black is load/hot, red is traveler, white is neutral, and green ground I’d want to beat my electrician for putting in other colors 
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I completely agree and I think I’ve made that pretty clear already!
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OK so couple things:
- So we think my design is OK it sounds?
- If I can replace the wiring will probably do that as long as I can pull them thru without getting stuck. I just ordered a thinner pull line https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0026TA6RK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 so hopefully that will allow me to pull it thru and if I can then can replace the wires. If I can also see movement on one end by pulling the other can always pull new wiring thru using the existing wire.
Like I mentioned, the neutral by the line area in the kitchen may be an issue but will have to see if I have an outlet or something on the same circuit I can pull from. If not maybe can do something with the neutral in the middle wall.
if your wiring is as you show in the picture you posted it should work. the messy pictures and complicated descriptions don’t give me any comfort in how things actually are so i can’t tell you things won’t blow up when you first turn the breaker back on tho. 
Make absolutely sure you replace the wire with the same gauge as the wire that is already there. Wiring gauges have different load ratings depending on if they are running in a wall, in conduit or in free air and also based on the supply breaker ratings. (Hopefully…) the electrician sized the wires correctly based on your specific circumstances so I wouldn’t change that at all.
you also need to be careful and not potentially overload that neutral wire since it is also a current carrying conductor it still needs to be fully protected from overload by a properly sized breaker. the breaker itself only sees the power going to the hot wire. It doesn’t see the potential that a neutral might be carrying current from two different hot supplies so you could put yourself into a situation where your neutral might be carrying up to twice the current as it’s rated for and the two supply breakers will continue supplying that current until the wire burns up…
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There you go. So the circuit is 20 amp but besides the 9 cans in my family room it also powers my garage, basement, and hallway. When I look at the wiring, there is a combination of 12AWG and 14AWG. So technically it is not properly sized right now. Like the kitchen has 12AWG yellow wire but the brown wire connected to it is 14AWG. Well, I guess if they assume for a given room you aren’t going to exceed 15 amps then a 14AWG wire is OK but I would think either way using 12AWG wire on a 15 or 20 amp circuit would be OK where using 14AWG wire on a 20 amp circuit wouldn’t.
Right now those neutrals are completely unused so thinking that wouldn’t be an issue.
Also sorry if my description was confusing, tried to explain my setup but know that can be a challenge to describe thru a forum.
One thing I would like to get opinions on. The GE smart switches show no hot connection other than the switch tied to the line wire. They also say you can go without a neutral on the switch tied directly to the line closest to the circuit box. I’m guessing this is not the case with Leviton?
that’s pretty normal. Usually plugs on a 20 amp circuit are 12g and lighting is 14g. EDIT: and it’s not against code in my state.
Here’s what’s weird. I took a second look at the diagram from Leviton or maybe it’s new who knows now that I have the switches. Put one in a single pole and that worked out well. I am going to now move to a 3-way switch and then to my 4-way. What I find odd is the below:
So if you look at the part I highlighted, it shows the hot wire going into that terminal plus one of the travelers. But in the diagram under the “picture” of the switches, it just shows a wire going in from the hot connection and that’s it. If you go back to the picture of the switches they then show the traveler goes into the BK connector on the actual dimmer switch and the hot goes to RD on the dimmer. But the diagram doesn’t show that.
I’d go by that wiring diagram. It seems like it’s a different device and it requires different wiring setup from mine.
Yeah that’s my plan. Not to mention my dimmer is where the line comes in and the load goes out to. The “matching remote” as they call it has nothing coming in or out other than wires coming from the primary switch. That’s kind of why I’m going to assuming the wiring diagram is accurate and the device pictures aren’t as in the secondary box I only have two travelers from the main switch and power coming in from the main switch. Nothing else routing in or out. So was going to use one of the two travelers as a neutral from the other box. The way the switch picture shows you need both neutrals, and with the bottom diagram you only need the one from YL/RD to YL/RD.
there’s nothing odd about the pictures that I can see.
The first is a wiring diagram. It shows how the wiring should (could…) be physically laid out and connected.
The second is a schematic diagram. It shows you how the circuit is electrically connected.
the two red boxes below (your original and my addition) show the same thing conceptually. the big black dots in the second drawing denote an electrically equivalent potential/connection. It just so happens in the real world that connection point is on the BK terminal of the switch. You can translate anywhere there is a black dot as it being a wire nut or device terminal point.
Thanks for the info. Talked with Leviton and they felt my diagram was good. That said, I deviated slightly from what i put above now. Since I am currently short of wires in two areas:
- At the switch in the kitchen I am missing a neutral.
- At the switch by the TV I am missing HOT
But I have two travelers and from the 3-way I just completed elsewhere in the house, you only need one traveler though sounds like Leviton considers a “traveler” any hot or whatever that connects from switch to switch.
- I will take the kitchen traveler 1 wire and at the mid point connect that one to the neutral in that middle box
- I will take the other half of that traveler 1 wire from the TV area and at the mid point connect that to HOT.
So kind of like this:
At least that’s my theory. Originally I was thinking the hot and white wires all had to be on the same physical wire, but now thinking they just should be on the same circuit. So as long as “a” wire goes from one switch to another connection on the same circuit this should work. So in other words, Do not need Traveler 1 to be just a hot or just a neutral across the entire 4-way.
are the middle switch and the right switch powered from the same supply breaker in the box?
Also do yourself and the next person a favor and wrap some white electrical tape around both ends of that “traveler 1” wire going between the middle switch and the right switch to denote that’s a neutral wire. And also put some black electrical tape on both ends of “traveler 1” going between the middle switch and the left switch to denote it’s a hot wire.
Yes, when I turn off a single breaker all the switch boxes and everything in them (middle has two switches) show no power on any of the wires. Also thanks for the note on identification. I did that with the 3-way so will do the same here.
OK, then it looks like you should be OK doing what you have in the drawing.
OK so all done. The middle switch box was a pain. That thing is loaded with wires and actually has wires coming into it and back out (looping in from one conduit and out another) and could never figure out what it was. Turned off everything in the circuit box except some of my kitchen bigger appliances so who knows. Didn’t worry about it since it was just wire in and out, no connections. To make this work I had to add extra wires for the neutral pigtail as well as for power. Problem? Well there are already four neutral wires in this box and four power wires in this box and only have 5 and 3 port WAGO lever nuts. So had to put four wires of each in a 5 port Wego, then pigtail to a 3 port one and then two wires out from there to the two switches in that box. Did this twice for the hot and neutral wires. Then getting the switches back in was a bit of a challenge but did go in with very little resistance.
First time i tried turning it on it worked and then stopped. Took that box apart and one of the neutrals came loose. Adjusted it a bit and put them back Now it’s working again and with Alexa.
Only thing I still see is one time when I turned on the power from the circuit fresh only the main works and the two other switches show the led indicator like they are off and the bottom light on the brightness indicator are on. Turned the power off and on and it started again. Then one of my family was trying it and it stopped responding. You could turn it off and on visually on the switch but the lights didn’t respond. Powered it again and back to normal. Now seems to be working so not sure if/what to make of that.
I am also about a year in on the zwave2mqtt boat and this works pretty well. Sure there are dead nodes and nodes that stop identifying what they are but a power cycle of the node or reboot generally resolve issues.
I would be interested in a walk trough of making this work with openzwave 1.6. I tried a few months back but that was not a good idea at the time.
Yeah I followed what seemed like a decent guide and when I thought I was on 1.6 the good people here showed me it was not using it. I was going to post for your reference but apparently deleted it from my 70 page Word doc on what I’ve done so far when people showed it wasn’t working. Can find the article again if you like but apparently didn’t work.
@jriker1, @DamianFlynn
I did my setup using Ubuntu 16.04 (on an old 32bit machine) as well as 18.0.4 on a 64bit machine. So using Ubuntu via shell access, what I did in general was:
- Git download openzwave. I downloaded the latest one from the Master branch (which will be version 1.6+), but you can pick version 1.6 explicitly from the tag.
- Do a
makewhich will build openzwave shared libraries, and then do amake installwhich will place the shared libraries in a variety of places (namely/usr/local/xxxx) so that ZWave2MQTT can get to it. You also may have to create symbolic links to get 64bit library to point to the 32bit library. For Ubuntu, you also may have to usesudo ldconfigwhich helps applications like ZWave2MQTT find these libraries. Next you can runMinOZW(give it the location of the ZWave stick), to verify OpenZwave works properly. - Create a NodeJS environment. Ubuntu’s nodeJS is rather old, and has other issues, so I built a whole new NodeJS environment. ZWave2MQTT is NodeJS based, so you need this environment if you want to build ZWave2MQTT on your local system. I used Node Version Manager (NVM) which is a bash script to do all the heavy work. You can read about NVM here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm. I used the
curlcommand to download and install NVM. Log out and back in to pick up the bash changes and you should have nvm working. Next and easiest would be to runnvm --ltswhich will download several versions of NodeJS and build them, which may take a while. I found that running version 12 didn’t build ZWave2MQTT, but version 10 did. If you change the version you use, you have to tell nvm to use that version by default. - Git download zwave2mqtt. I didn’t download from the master branch, I picked the latest tagged version. Cd into the zwave2mqtt directory and run
npm installand thennpm run buildand it should build. You may run into the npm version problem I mentioned earlier so change the npm version (say to version 10.x.x) if needed. If successful, then simply donpm startand point your web browser to it to see if its working. You should see in the ZWave2MQTT log file which version of OpenZwave you’re using and it should show some variant of version 1.6.
There are probably a few details I missed out on, but thought I would start with this to see if it helps.
Wow. Thank you for the detail
On reading this it appears that you did not need to do any tweaking to get the node app working - but respect that your using the latest tagged release.
I’ll give this a spin during the week and loop back. I might try build it in a container
Damian