I've only ever had cheap zwave switches and couldn't afford Levitons with instant status, so I don't know how it works in practice. When I turn the switch on manually, does the light turn on slow enough for a preconfigured scene to control its eventual dim level? Or rather, am I able to send a scene command fast enough to control final dim level before the light turns on fully.
My use case is fairly typical. I want to be able to press a switch in my bathroom, and have different scenes turn on depending on the time of day. But I want to make sure that if it's 3 a.m., that light switch won't turn on to a 3 p.m. brightness level before it has a chance to set the nighttime scene. So how does this work?
Understanding instant status
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- Last Post 22 February 2016
Dignan17
posted this
22 February 2016
rscott
posted this
22 February 2016
I've only ever had cheap zwave switches and couldn't afford Levitons with instant status, so I don't know how it works in practice. When I turn the switch on manually, does the light turn on slow enough for a preconfigured scene to control its eventual dim level? Or rather, am I able to send a scene command fast enough to control final dim level before the light turns on fully.
My use case is fairly typical. I want to be able to press a switch in my bathroom, and have different scenes turn on depending on the time of day. But I want to make sure that if it's 3 a.m., that light switch won't turn on to a 3 p.m. brightness level before it has a chance to set the nighttime scene. So how does this work?
I doubt you'd be able to prevent the light from reaching 100% in those circumstances even if you had instant status updates. I believe the best you could achieve is turning it back down within a few seconds of reaching the max level.
By the way, despite the high cost of Leviton's switches, my experience with them is that they don't perform all that well. They tend to misbehave on a somewhat frequent basis and require that you cut power to them to 'reset' them before they start to function again.
I've heard that the patent preventing others from implementing instant status is expiring soon, so I'd hang tight for a few months to see what new devices enter the market.
Dignan17
posted this
22 February 2016
Thanks, Ryan.
I believe that patent actually expired this month, perhaps even days ago. Ideally the capabilities would have already been built into existing switches, just awaiting the expiration before sending out instructions for updating them...but I doubt it.
Elsewhere I got a tip that I could program the Leviton switch to always turn on to the lowest dim level no matter what, then the controller could get the sign that if it's during the day the light should turn on to brighter levels. Knowing my network, I'm sure I'd get delays and end up hating this setup.
For now I think I'm going to stick with Linear switches and just find other ways to initiate these scenes.
