I had a lot of issues with this specific style of dimmer from GE and I wanted to consolidate everything I learned into a single post in case someone else is struggling with the switch. This dimmer requires a little bit of manual setup to ensure proper performance. Inclusion is fine but once it is included, there are things that need to be addressed. Once the device is included, create an Item for it in your Model as you would any other device before addressing these issues.
Channels
By default, the Thing has 2 Channels after inclusion:
Double Tap
Dimmer
What I discovered was that if you tap the switch up to turn it on or down to turn it off, the Double Tap channel does not automatically update the Dimmer channel. This causes issues with running automation since the Double Tap may report Triggered while the Dimmer reports that it is at 0%. Likewise, if OpenHAB sends a command to the Dimmer channel, it doesn’t update the Double Tap channel.
To keep these in sync, once the Item has been created, go back to the Thing and go to the Channels tab. From there, go to the Dimmer channel and expand it. You will see that there is a linked Dimmer point Item and the option to add a link to another Item. Click on the “Add Link to Item…” butom.
This will take you to a new page. Select “Use an existing Item” and choose the Double Tap Item and click Link. It will look like this when you’re done:
Now, no matter if you use the switch on the wall or send a command to the dimmer channel, both channels will report the same status.
Parameters
I discovered an issue with Parameters 8, 10, and 12 that caused me a lot of headaches. These parameters all control the Dim Rate of the switch depending on how the switch was triggered. (Locally, remotely, or with ALL ON/OFF) These parameters can be set from 1 - 255 with 1 being the fastest and 255 being the slowest (I believe). The default is 3. I wanted the lights to turn on and off a bit more quickly so I set the Dim Rate to 1 on most (but not all) of these switches. I found that the switches did not always respond correctly to OpenHAB. About 10 - 20% of the time (which is a lot!) the light would not turn off when receiving an OFF or 0% command from the system. However, the night light on the switch would come on, indicating that the switch did believe it had turned off the load.
I would not set these parameters below 3. While it is legal to do so, it seems to cause inconsistent behavior with the switch. I have no way to know for sure what is happening, but my suspicion is that the Ramp Rate is so fast that sometimes the switch manages to report its status as off before actually turning off its own load.
Once I set the Dim Rate to 3, my system started responded as I expected.