Do you mean repurposing the ground wire from Romex_1 to feed the load (black) wire from the bulb to the dimmer? The neutral from the bulb is already on the left and tied to neutral from the electrical panel. No worries on liability. I appreciate the help and am learning a ton through this process.
The schematics above (bottom one) match exactly your wire colors. Try exactly that and it āshouldā work. I would cover the ground/bare wire anywhere itās exposed (near Switch 1 and lamp junction box). Now, youāll be left with one extra wire (white) in Romex_2 that needs to be capped at both ends (light junction box and switch 2) as it is no longer used. The schematics/wiring is essentially the same as the one provided by Feit with the only exception is that the Neutral wire feeding the lamp is now the re-purposed bare/ground (Romex_1) in your circuit.
Great, Iāll give it a go tomorrow. I really appreciate your help.
That brought power to the light, but the power was constant and there was no dimming function. Iām unable to turn the light of at either end (Feit dimmer or 3 way switch). Thoughts? Could it be because weāre using the white build wire for load and black as neutral? (Reversed polarity)
The 3 way switch worked perfectly on both ends previously.
Sorry about that ā¦ Any chance you can build the circuit on your desk ā¦ and test if it works?
Polarity does not matter much with AC circuits. Typically all neutrals are white, and all hots are black but, according to an electrician I hired a while back, the building-code does not require any specific color usage. What is most important is that hot and neutral/ground should never come in contact, but you knew this already.
Also, do this first: Check again the connection on the 3 way-switch ā¦ which could be replaced by a simple 1-way.
Past experience: I would check everything on my desk, with a simple desk lamp, before moving everything back to the wall. The way I would do that is: take a cheap (2-wire) extension cord, cut it in 2, one end plugs into your outlet, the other feeds your desk lamp ā¦ then need to install both switches and few wires in between. Let me know if we need more details.
You were right, I had the connections wrong at the 3 way switch. After I got it right, now I can turn the Feit dimmer on and off at the 3 way or at the Feit dimmer itself, but the load is always hot, thus the light stays on and does not dim. I installed a simple 1 way with the same result.
Good progress.
What type of lights/lamps are you using? From my experience, incandescent lamps tend to dim down quite a bit, but the LEDs not so much, maybe at 40-50% max.
Some LEDs consume so little electricity that they are difficult to dim down. Now, I have a light outside on my patio, and canāt even turn it off. I suspect the dimmer could be defective and I plan on replacing it to see what happens.
Now, back to your situation: is it possible to replace the lamp and see what happens? Also, have you tried dimming up/down from the Feit App? ā¦ or are you using the two side buttons to dim the lights?
Bingo, thatās likely it. I have 5.7w led dimmable bulbs in the fixture. It took a little bit for them to come on, but once they were on, they stayed on. I tried dimming using the side up and down buttons on the switch, and turning the on and off and both switches, but didnāt try the app. Different bulbs is an easy fix
It may also be a defective switch. Either way, the amount of information I learned from you and the headache this process came with is all worth it.
I have a total of three Feit dimmers and a couple of locations in the house to install. Probably wonāt get back to it until next weekend sometime. I REALLY appreciate your help. Iāll report back with my results.
Glad you got it to work, and youāre very welcome. Youāre right about the defective switch possibility ā¦ I installed 16 of such switches in my house (many combinations of 1/3/4 ways) and found 2 were defective, or maybe do not work too well with some specific LEDs. To me this is not too bad given how affordable these switches are.
I learned a lot from this community as well and this field is very new and intimidating at times. If anything at all, the learning (as you said) is a very rewarding experience. All the best with bringing your home to the Smart āageā.
JB_63,
Would you mind to draw a schematic to connect one smart dimmer with switch in 5-way switch? TIA.
Hi @Bug_Eyes. Can you give a bit more details about your current installation? In all honesty Iām not sure what a 5-way switch is. I did a google search and there were few hits but not sure which is your specific situation. Is the pic below what you refer to as a 5-way switch i.e., 4 switches and one light ?
Do you mean the ability to turn light on/off from 4 locations? If so, then in a classical installation youād need 2Ć 3-way switches and 2Ć 4-way switches, as shown in the above figure. If that is the case, then the installation/wiring is very similar to that on post # 25 (and reproduced below). In principle you should be able to cascade as many smart dimmers as youād like. However, I tried that circuit with 3 dimmers only, not more, and it worked.
If you decide to do this, Iād recommend trying this on your desk first. Of course there is no guarantee as Iām not sure what the max limit of dimmers that can be cascaded is. Notice that all boxes need to have neutrals, and you need two travelers (AC-L and YL/RD) that all dimmers must share. Do not use HOTs from different phases (from your basement) as that will not work reliably.
The other thing about the above installation (multiple dimmers on the same circuit) is that, once you pair the dimmers to your mobile App (on you phone), all dimmers will show up as a āsingleā dimmer.
Hi DrJB,
Your first picture is corrected for my situation. We have a long hallway with a string of can light that were controlled with 4 switches span across hallway, 2x 3 way and 2x4 way switches. I like to see if I can use with just 1 smart dimmer for this scenario, thanks
Iām not aware of a solution that works for such situation. I need to try one based on post 28. Iām a bit hopeful but would need to try it first. Iāll keep you posted.
Thanks for trying this out, I donāt have enough knowledge and/or test bench to do this myself.
It looks like there was a web issue and some posts were lost. Here is my answer again to @Bug_Eyes.
I do not recall exactly what I wrote, but below is the main message. Yes, the idea is to somehow build upon @ChiFan 's post (25-29) and extend such circuit to handle one more switch location
Now, I have not tried such circuit in my home as it was not feasible for my specific situation (number of travelers), but in principle it should work. I say āin principleā as Iād like to check that on my desk first before attempting to be more brave. The circuit I think should look like below:
The difficulty with the above circuit (and that is the limitation I have in my home) is that one needs 3 travelers between the 3/4-way switches (yellow boxes). We need an extra traveler to ātransportā the Hot/Line from the left-most 3-way all the way to the dimmer. Most classical house wirings typically have only 2 travelers. Thus, we have two options:
- Route a 3rd wire/traveler as required
- Possibly use a HOT near the dimmer. Here, the challenge is that such Hot must be from the same leg as that feeding the left-most 3-way switch check your electrical panel in the basement). Otherwise, the phase difference between the two legs could āconfuseā the dimmer.
So, thatās where we stand today. A couple of questions:
- How many wires you have in each of the boxes?
- Is your house wiring made with conduits or Romex cables?
- How many single wires in the Romex, 2/3/4 ?
- Do you have neutral/Hot in the dimmer box? \
I purchased the dimmer combo from Costco because my non-smart dimmer switch on my 3 ways set up quit working properly. I have an old house that is wired in flexible conduit and the system uses the conduit and metal boxes for the ground. There is no neutral in the switch boxes so I cheated and used the metal box to obtain my neutral. I know this is not Kosher but it works.
I do have one location areal of my home that has a 4 way and two 3 way switches to allow my kitchen light to be controlled by 3 switches. I was thinking of replacing this with smart switches but I am not sure how to wire that up. I looked at the diagram above but the load from two of the switches does not show how that connects to the bulb in the circuit. I noticed in the diagram that the Feit system requires a hot and a neutral at each switch which is different from the normal 3 ways system.
On another note, I was looking for smart switches without the dimmer as I do not need a dimmer in my kitchen, stairway, hallways etc. I am surprised that Feit does not make a non dimmer 3 way smart switch.
Hi there, this has been very helpful with troubleshooting my set up. I purchased these as well from Costco recently to replace a dimmer switch that controls multiple lights. This is in a three way application to which I believe is similar to this image:
The dimmer is on the left side, which is a three gang with a couple of other switches all sharing a common hot/neutral. These then run off to power other areas. I then have a black/white/red/ground connection that would be the Load wires that I assume run to the lamps.
Following the instructions, I take a line into the T1, from the bundle of black wires, neutral from the bundle of white wires into AC-N.
I then connected the black wire to load, red wire to YL/RD and the white to AC-N. Ground is also connected.
On the other switch, Iāve tried various combinations, hoping to put one of the replies above to use. Whatās happening is that when the switch is in the ON position, the dimmer behaves like normal. I can dim, turn on and off from the dimmer.
When the dimmer is OFF, I can not control the lights from the switch. When the switch is OFF, I can no longer turn on the lights from the dimmer, though the LEDās light up. With the way itās wired, the switch MUST stay ON and then the dimmer behaves like normal.
Iām hoping I may have a wire mixed up but I canāt seem to pin point it. Iām really wanting to keep the dimmer on the left side as well. Is there a solution here? Do I have to run a dimmer on both left and right to have a dimmer on the left side?
I having some issues wiring two switches from the same power supply.
I have two plugs daisy chained, then took the power to a switch box, split it and wired two Feit Smart Dimmers going to two different lights.
Nothing
Unsplit it and wired directly to one dimmer.
Nothing
Then simply wired the power to a plug to test the wire and it worked fine.
Do these not work from a chain of outlets? Can one power source be split to two dimmers with different lights?
Can use some help please as I read all the comments but am not sure. I want to install the Feit switch on the load box and leave the existing 3 way switch in the line box. I removed all the wires to check which were hot. The lone box has the black and white hot and the red was not. The load box has a hot white and two reds which are not hot.
With the existing switched in place, the load switch has one R and the W live when the other switch is up and only the white hot when the line switch is down.
Where do I connect the W, R and R on the Feit switch and which wire on the lone side do I need to remove and cap? I do have the neutrals in the back of the box I can use.
Thanks!
This quantity 3 FEIT Smart Dimmer configuration (as proposed by JB_63 in the 4-Way diagram above) works perfectly in replacing a 4-way circuit. I successfully replaced a 3-way switch on the line side, a 4-way switch in the middle, and a dimmer switch on the load side with 3 FEIT Smart Dimmers. All work perfectly in synchronization to turn the lights on and off. I recommend installing all three switches before connecting any of them to wifi so that only 1 FEIT Smart Dimmer (for the group of 3) is automatically created by the FEIT Electric Appāno need to create a group in the FEIT app as they will show up as a single device. Thanks to all for this information as I never received any response to my inquiry from FEIT.