Thinking of Bailing

Two hundred posts into thread suggests that perhaps this topic’s title, “Thinking of Bailing”, no longer represents your current state of mind?

:slight_smile: yeah, I may be down a path that I won’t be backing out of now thanks to all the help. But I have all these good people tied to this thread and some of my comments are tied to prior items above that I had previously talked about so didn’t want to upset anyone by starting a new thread and then be accused of double posting the same things.

Point taken. What’s great about all your input and my reading is I am starting to understand things better. I’m great with networking and network wiring, and plumbing but never got to into the electrical side of things. Now trying to reverse engineer my 47 year old house can be a challenge as I have some new stuff during a remodel and some old stuff.

If you think that’s bad then try that with a 100 year old house. :frowning:

When I first moved in to the house (which had been inspected and approved by a VA inspector :roll_eyes:) I started tripping one of the 15 amp breakers that was installed in a brand new 200 amp service main box. The ridiculous part is that when the breaker tripped it took out 75% of my house power and all of the garage power. They had all of that on one 15 amp breaker!! :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

After I started investigating more closely I then realized that almost all of the new wiring for the main service panel was all external to the walls in the basement and it was only running to a few lights & outlets. And that the rest of the wiring inside the walls was the old knob & tube single strand wiring (with no ground wires at all) all fed from that one 15 amp breaker.

Needless to say I had to figure out how to rewire my whole two story house while keeping most of the lights on so we could still live in it.

I’m happy to say that I’ve managed to get everything switched over to 20th century wiring aside from a few lights and a couple of outlets still on the old original wiring/breaker. And I’m not tripping breakers any more. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Update. I’ve now run three switches and this includes running neutral wires to the switches that do not have them. Including running wire thru conduit. This is actually kind of fun. I’m not sure why 99.97% of the messages on the internet around what to do if you do not have a neutral wire say to buy a switch that doesn’t require a neutral. The only issue I’ve had with this is my circuit breaker box isn’t fully labeled right so have to switch things off until I find the right one (and then label it), and having to rush to do it due to what I may be turning off effects someone in the house or have to deal with family stuff.

Welcome to your new hobby.

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Is this normal?

Basically Light Switch Basement Sink is 4 feet next to the switch and 8 feet directly in front of it is the Fibaro flood sensor. The light switch main basement is around a corner and up the stairs past the hub.

Then the Crawl space one is pointing right at the side of the Z-Stick and the other Washing Machine Power switch it’s connected to is up the stairs, around the corner and in the utility room.

Yup that’s normal

And now after a reboot which didn’t happen with a heal.

They’re gonna jump around that’s the beauty of mesh networking :wink:

FYI your fibaro flood sensor will never be a ‘bridge’ to other devices. It will only transmit to the mesh, not add to it. Most battery devices are like that because it drains less battery.

You are referring specifically to his Kitchen flood sensor :wink:
The basement flood sensor is reporting mains power :slight_smile:

Got one more questionable situation with my electrical. The rest of the house I think will be easier. Fingers crossed. This would be my family room.

It has three switches
One located in the kitchen area is a dimmer switch
Other two are on/off

We will call these switches based on location they are closest to:

  • Kitchen
  • Hallway
  • TV

Not sure if they are wired right. Here is what I see right now:

  • All switches physically down/off no lights are on.
  • If I turn on the Kitchen or Hallway nothing happens.
  • If i set kitchen and hallway back to off or on or one off and one on doesn’t matter, and then turn on the TV wall switch the lights go on.
  • Once the TV switch is on then I can toggle the lights on and off between hallway and kitchen.

Is this normal and will just replacing these with smart switches make things work any different or are there any suggestions how to replace these with smart switches?

I can take them out of the wall and show pictures of their wiring if that would help.

I’m not the expert that @finity is but that sounds like a lazy 3 way switch :stuck_out_tongue:
I have 2 lighting circuits that are 3 ways and any one of the switches will toggle the lighting on/off.

You should only need 1 “main” switch for a 2way/3way circuit with the other switches being what GE/Jassco call “Addon” switches basically push buttons to tell the main controller to toggle the load. The addon switches use a neutral, hot, and a traveler wire. For me that was (white, black, red) respectively.

Just a FYI - the Network “Graph” is pretty useless. It’s doesn’t report the full state of the mesh or networking and doesn’t reflect the “first priority” path a packet will take though the network (called Last Working Route).

I mostly ignore it. If you have a recent stick, you may see some “Extended TX Status” messages (if running Z2m with 1.6) that shows routing info for each transmitted messages with RSSI info and so forth)

So here’s more details on the family room switches that I want to replace.

OK so went thru my wiring and here’s what I came up with:

The switch by the kitchen:
This is the line that comes from the circuit box
Black connects to a blank wire that goes to the switch box on the right
Red connects to a “brown” wire that connects to a yellow wire within the right switch box
Red/White connects to another “brown wire that connects to another yellow wire within the right switch box
No white but can run one if needed.

In the box on the right of that box the wires run into the other box. So you can see on the left the black and brown wires coming in and pulled to the left side the brown wires connecting individually to yellow wire.
Also the black wire from the left comes into the right side and is connected to a brown wire

The brown wire and two yellow wires go down into the conduit opening on the bottom left

This is the switch on the far right side by the TV. This is the load side that connects to the light
Red wire goes to the lights
White bundle in the box
Two yellow travelers in the box to the switch as well

Other view of the conduit up to the lights

That’s all the wires in this box. No hot wire unless one of the yellows are used for it.

The box in the middle of the chain where the current 4-way I guess is. Has two separate switches
For some reason I didn’t get a picture of the actual switch but basically the switch on the right has four yellow wires so the two travelers from one side and the two from the other side. No other wires connected
There are neutrals in this box.
So looks like the bottom left the two yellow wires go out to the TV area switch and connected to the right switch

Then looks like on the bottom right the two from the kitchen area come in and connect to the switch as well

So according to the Leviton documentation, you need hot connected to each switch, and neutral connected to each switch, and the main unit at the load area which would be by the TV
So in theory then the DZ6HD-1BZ by the TV and the DD00R-DL by the kitchen and on the wall in the middle between the other one.
So some things.

  1. Do I really need a neutral in the kitchen since the hot runs into here initially?
  2. Do I need a hot connected to each one or as some people say I would connect the hot from the kitchen box to one of the two yellow wires and run it to the DZ6HD-1BZ by the TV directly and bypass the DD00R-DL units?
  3. Recommendations on design for the three switches with my setup.

Appreciate any suggestions on this.

How odd, last electrician I spoke to told me Yellow, Brown, Orange is for 480v 3 phase circuits (in the US).

Yeah I sometimes think in the US the standard is whatever color is most available on the truck use it.

It depends on the state. In my state all boxes where the ‘main’ switch is requires a neutral (all outlets require neutral on 20 amp line). Black = line, Neutral = White, ground = copper. All 3way and 4way auxiliary switches do not require grounds.

Looking at the Leviton smart switch wiring diagrams, do they actually use 2 travelers? From what I can see they use one but maybe I’m reading it wrong.