# z wave smart dimmers and wafer led's



## macmikeman (Jan 23, 2007)

So.... my current customer goes on Ebay and picks up a whoop whoop load of z wave smart dimmers for the current job I'm on. Hands them to me. I tell him it's an additional 25 bucks each smarty pants device I have to install, no problem he says- he wants to play with his smarty pants phone and the switches. So today I was mr. Z wave installer. This is in a house I put somewhere around 65 lithonia wafer lites in. So- for the single pole switches, what you do is get a pigtail to the neutral at the switch and land it in the device's neutral terminal. then you wire the feed into another dedicated terminal for line, and the load line up to the light goes into another terminal marked load. Easy cheesy. The wafers strobed a few seconds at high frequency when turned on and the dimming was crappy. The Leviton dimmers I previously mentioned several times are so much better than these things. So I call the hotline. They say they got the solution. - Same dimmer catalog number, same box, except this solution box says z wave plus. I ran down to GE Supply and picked up a couple of the same switches only z plus- and they work fine. They work very well now actually. So Mr. customer has to send all the others back if he can and exchange them with z wave plus - this is like windows 3.0 verses windows 3.1 sort of.... 

The three ways are pretty different to do also. Use 1- same kind switch as their smart single pole, (Use a z wave plus though), and hook one of the travelers into the fourth terminal marked no 120 volts and on the other end you can use either a slave switch sold by the same company that uses that one traveler and a hookup to the neutral wire of the same circuit. If you don't have a neutral in the second box, you can use the second Unused traveller in the three wire cable you ran to bounce a neutral over to that box. You also can substitute a plain old single pole switch, hook neutral to one of the terminals and hook the "traveler" to the other terminal. But if you are using these to control Lithonia Wafer lights , be sure to buy z wave plus switches for one or two dollars more than the plain z wave switches. Makes a big difference . And 4 ways are pretty much the same as three ways , just put the neutral on the neutral terminal, and one of the traveller wires into the other terminal of the extender switch. 


If you never used z wave, this is your mac tip of the day!


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## splatz (May 23, 2015)

I did not know about this plus version. Were these the Z-wave brand, or GE brand Z-Wave protocol switches? I don't see how a better communication, zwave plus versus zwave, would make them dim better - must just be that the new improved communications are in the new improved version which also has new improved dimming. 



macmikeman said:


> I tell him it's an additional 25 bucks each smarty pants device I have to install,


That's good but what's going to be great is in a year when they start to flake out, you can charge $100 apiece to replace the smartypants chaos with 99¢ switches and serenity. 

That's your splatzbashem tip of the day!


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## macmikeman (Jan 23, 2007)

splatz said:


> I did not know about this plus version. Were these the Z-wave brand, or GE brand Z-Wave protocol switches? I don't see how a better communication, zwave plus versus zwave, would make them dim better - must just be that the new improved communications are in the new improved version which also has new improved dimming.
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> ...


They were GE brand z wave and GE brand z wave plus. I was very skeptical when I saw GE on the box, but like I said, the z wave plus works pretty darn nicely (so far....).


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## LGLS (Nov 10, 2007)

macmikeman said:


> They were GE brand z wave and GE brand z wave plus. I was very skeptical when I saw GE on the box, but like I said, the z wave plus works pretty darn nicely (so far....).



Until the Russians hack your router and then it's lights out.


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## MTW (Aug 28, 2013)

LawnGuyLandSparky said:


> Until the Russians hack your router and then it's lights out.



Ahh..mother Russia, the home of your communist overlords.


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## JoeSparky (Mar 25, 2010)

Only partially had to do with them being Z-wave plus. Non plus devices are quite a few years old before LED compatible dimmers were common. The newer ones most be led compatible. Z-wave plus has more to do with increased range, uniform firmware updates and better recovery if they disconnect from the hub.
I just bought a whole bunch of Zooz brand switches and dimmers for my house as well as a few GE (jasco) plug in switched outlets. The Zooz devices are on sale for 24 bucks on a regular basis
I'll have to report back when I get it all set up.


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