State of GE Z-Wave dimmer model 12724 is not syncing

I have a GE 12724 Z-Wave dimmer which I can control just fine with openhab. My problem is that if I dim the light from the physical switch the dimming status does not appear to sync to openhab. My lights will be dimmed by openhab will not show the change in value. I don’t see anything in the debug log when I interact with the physical switch.

Am I doing something obviously wrong? I am new to openhab.

Here is my (very simple) item configuration and my sitemap

Dimmer	office_dimmer	"Office Dimmer [%d %%]"	<light>	{ zwave="6:command=SWITCH_MULTILEVEL" }

sitemap home label="Main Menu"
{
	Frame {
		Slider item=office_dimmer		
	}	
}

There is no configuration in the database for this product. This might be because whoever added it to the database didn’t have the information, or, it doesn’t have any configuration.

The reason I talk about configuration, is what you are looking for is associations - these allow the device to send status back to the controller. Typically the GE devices don’t have associations, and therefore there are difficulties in sending this status back to the controller…

I should add it’s not the only way that this can happen - the binding has other mechanisms to try and do this, but they are less reliable, and generally will only work if the device is close to the controller.

I guess the model number is confusing. It has two of them, 12724 and ZW3005. Habmin shows it as a ZW3003 which is a slightly older model. Looking at http://www.pepper1.net/zwavedb/ I see two entries for a ZW3003 dimmer v3.0b and v3.0c but no entry for my dimmer which is ZW3005 v3.0e.

I found more information on it here http://products.z-wavealliance.org/products/1197

What needs to be done to get this dimmer syncing its status to openhab?

Here is the information from habmin

This product doesn’t support associations, so it may not be possible. As I said earlier, if the device is close to the controller, then it might work, but if it’s routing through the mesh network, then I don’t think there’s any way to make this work.

Can you post the XML file that is generated for the node (/etc/zwave/node6.xml) - I’d just like to see what classes are reported.

I think I remember that the GE switches would send a hail command when the
devices starts to dim/brighten not when it stops. So when we get the
hail command and query the device for its status it reports the state that
you are starting from… if that makes any sense.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 1:51 PM Chris Jackson bot@community.openhab.org wrote:

chris https://community.openhab.org/users/chris Chris Jackson
https://community.openhab.org/users/chris maintainer
January 17

imagio:

What needs to be done to get this dimmer syncing its status to openhab?

This product doesn’t support associations, so it may not be possible. As I
said earlier, if the device is close to the controller, then it might work,
but if it’s routing through the mesh network, then I don’t think there’s
any way to make this work.

Can you post the XML file that is generated for the node
(/etc/zwave/node6.xml) - I’d just like to see what classes are reported.

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Hi Dan,
Yep - this was one of the mechanisms I was referring to, but I don’t believe that the HAIL command is routed (although I could be wrong as I’ve never seen any devices that use it). Maybe you can confirm?

Cheers
Chris

I have one GE dimmer in a spare room and gave it a go. I had the behavior
mixed up (it’s been a while since I debugged this device). When the
device is turned ON or OFF it reports an “Application Update Request”, but
because it fades the lights to on and off, when we query the device for its
status its in the starting position (near off when you turn it on, and near
the on level when you turn it off). So I found that it never reports the
right % level. This of course does not answer the original question :wink:

Strangely enough it reports absolutely nothing when you manually
dim/brighten the light, even from completely ON or OFF.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2016 at 2:28 PM Chris Jackson bot@community.openhab.org wrote:

chris https://community.openhab.org/users/chris Chris Jackson
https://community.openhab.org/users/chris maintainer
January 17

Hi Dan,
Yep - this was one of the mechanisms I was referring to, but I don’t
believe that the HAIL command is routed (although I could be wrong as I’ve
never seen any devices that use it). Maybe you can confirm?

Cheers

Chris

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Here is the XML

node6.xml (5.7 KB)

I also have a Samsung SmartThings hub and it can read the status of this dimmer even when it is manually dimmed. I don’t know how it is doing it but it demonstrates that it is at least possible.

Our models must behave differently, mine sends absolutely nothing when you
dim, not a single message. Mine switch shows up as model 45605, it looks
the same as yours but obviously is lacking some features.

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 6:48 AM Andrew Morsillo bot@community.openhab.org wrote:

imagio https://community.openhab.org/users/imagio Andrew Morsillo
https://community.openhab.org/users/imagio
January 18

I also have a Samsung SmartThings hub and it can read the status of this
dimmer even when it is manually dimmed. I don’t know how it is doing it but
it demonstrates that it is at least possible.

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Sorry for my ignorance about how z-wave works, I am very new to Openhab and home automation in general. Is there some way I could collect a dump or raw log of communications from the device to find out what information it might be sending?

Is it possible to send a command to get the device’s status? If I can retrieve the currently set brightness on demand then I think it would work fine for what I would like to do.

If the status can be retrieved then wouldn’t it be possible to poll the dimmer regularly to make sure the UI stays in sync with whatever someone has manually set on the dimmer? Perhaps that is how SmartThings does it.

Yes - you can poll the device - take a look at the wiki for the refresh_interval parameter.

Ah, I should have read the documentation more carefully, thanks! So much to learn.

Is there any downside to polling an always on device like a dimmer? For example if I install 10 dimmers in my house and poll them each at 5 seconds would that be likely to cause issues?

Yes - there is a downside… It will increase network traffic - it won’t normally matter if everything is working ok, but if there are any timeouts, it might be an issue as a timeout will lock things out for 5 seconds… Note though that the binding will reduce the polling speed - to reduce the impact on other services, it will only allow 2 outstanding polls into the queue at once - I think it does this every 5 seconds, so you 10 dimmers will take 25 seconds to poll… I think you can change this with a config option, but personally, I wouldn’t recommend it (if you network is stable and reliable though, it’s probably low risk).

I have a GE 12724 dimmer as well (verified with retail box labels) and openhab is reporting as ZW3003 which doesn’t contain any association group settings so I’ve had issues with web/mobile app status (sync of state, dim level) of the switch/dimmer after physical button presses.

I’ve added a “refresh_interval=45” to the dimmer item (not the switch item) and that seems to get things back in order eventually, hopefully without killing my network.

Any other ideas on a better way? Or thoughts on if this should be picked up as a GE 12724 (product explorer in openhab shows both ZW3003 and 12724 as different items for GE) or if that will even make any difference?

Thanks!

Throwing this out there in the case it is helpful. A link to the Jasco advanced parameters:

http://www.ezzwave.com/advanced-operation/

@chris is it possible to force a status update of the dimmer in a rule? I want to write a lighting rule which takes into account if somebody has changed the brightness using the wall switch to something other than a default value. If the device is not polled immediately when my rule runs it would be possible for the state of the dimmer item to differ from the actual state of the physical dimmer which would cause my rule to do the wrong thing.

@imagio i had the same idea for my GE dimmers.

@chris i’m pretty new to openhab, and to the rule language, but it feels kind of the like the rule language can interact with any public java classes that are available? i was poking around in the binding and it looks like we’d need some way to invoke ZwaveConverterHandler.executeRefresh(). i’m not sure how to access all the necessary state to construct one of these thought, and in the end that’d be a pretty ugly hack anyway.

it appears that the proper way to do this would be to expose it via an action. @chris, would that be a reasonable thing to do? if i get the time and energy i might try my hand at this…

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This (refresh) functionality is available in OH2, but is unlikely to be something that will be added to the OH1. I’m not sure if it fits with an action concept - probably not well, but it might work - the question is if it’s worth the effort…

Up to you :wink: