Renovating my home with all Zooz switches and Hubitat hub. Going well. But, one thing I want is that when I turn on a light with a dimmer switch after 10PM, I want the single press on the paddle to turn the light on at 20%. And Double tap is set to Max brightness which is what I want. I can set a rule to set the level of the dimmers to 20% at 10PM, but it is turning all the lights on. And I assume if I create a rule that says when a light turns on, set to 20%, it will go to 100%, then dim to 20% after the hub event happens... Also, there is a Night Light setting in the Zooz properties, but I assume that is an always on light...
I want to set level at a specific time without that command turning the switch on or off. Leave the current state. Just change the level for the future. The Set Level command turns on the light...
Generally, not sure what the best way to do this is. Ideally, this would be a setting in the switch and it would be set through the hub, but no communication would be required for this to work at the time of button push....
One thing that comes to mind is to disable local control on the switches and use the switch press as the trigger to turn on the switch, set at the desired %.
That said, not sure if this will work on these particular switches. Ideally, local control would only be disabled after the required dimmer change and re-enabled when the switch is first turned on afterwards. (This could be done through Rule Machine). There could be some delays at times turning on the switch, and an app would need to be used for dimming when local control is disabled.
I don't trust the system enough to be dependent on the hub for every button push of a light. Reliability is probably 90% right now. Not really sure why, maybe interference in the 900 Mhz spectrum. But, I don't think I would ever rely on automation for any core functions.
Although, you gave me an idea. I just tried the inverse. I set the default level to 20% on the switch and created a rule for the daytime. So between 8AM and 10PM, if the light is turned on, it ramps the brightness to 100%. This actually worked because the switch gets the level change while it is ramping to 20% and if it doesn't at least the light turns on and I can always double tap to get it to 100%. The opposite way gave me a blast of 100% then lowered to 20%, so this is better. But, if a light is already on, it doesn't work without another rule. So I would need 2 rules per switch. That would be probably 7 or 8 lights times 2, so 16 rules, maybe more. What I might do is make my own custom App that does this. I am a software developer. I have no experience with this language, but I'm sure it's simple enough. But before I do this, I want to make sure that this does not already exist. Also, I would still prefer to set the level on the switch without changing the on/off state of the switch, but I don't know if Zooz supports that. @agnes.zooz
I use a variable to set the brightness to different levels at different times of day and illumination. The just turn the lights on to that variable level. One rule sets the variable which is used by multiple “turn on” rules.
This is what I did in my bathroom. Default is low and a rule sets it to 100% during the day. The feature you are looking for ideally is level presetting, which the Zooz switches do not support. As you found if you set the level the device turns on.
The nightlight setting if enabled when the light is off, if you hold down on the paddle it will come on at the nightlight brightness.
There might be an easier way to do what you want using either rules or one of the other built in apps, without multiple different rules for every device but I am only doing it with the one light at this time so I cannot be sure.
Unfortunately, the switch won't know which time it is to support an internal schedule like that. To my knowledge, there's no Z-Wave device that would support that outside of thermostats which only support an internal schedule if not connected to Z-Wave. Once added, you need to program the thermostat using Z-Wave to avoid logical conflicts.
We've had this discussion many times on this and other forums and we came up with the custom brightness setting for our dimmers that allows you to change the level-on value so you can write a script that will change the parameter based on a different time of day so when you turn the switch on, it will turn on to the pre-programmed brightness level. That's been supported for a while now but it does involve the hub to process the command, the same way it involves it when processing a central scene command which is what @tonybits wanted to eliminate as I understood, that's what my response was referring to. Hope that's clearer now!
Agnes is talking about the custom brightness when turned on setting. This is a different approach I did not think of. Its a round-about way to support the level presetting. It requires setting the parameter to different values back and forth every day so when the switch is turned on it comes on at the desired brightness. You would need two rules in RM. One to trigger at your "day" time and one to trigger at your "night" time. In each rule you could then have actions to set the parameter on each switch you want to be effected. Unfortunately you have to add each switch individually I think, because it would be a custom action and RM does not allow those to be set on multiple devices at once. If you have a lot of switches I would add some delays in there also so you don't blast the network with 20+ parameter commands all at once.
I think I still like setting the custom brightness to the lower setting then having a rule to ramp it up during the day better, instead of constantly changing the parameters. I believe you get nearly the same end result with both methods.
This however does not solve the problem if the light is already on as @tonybits mentioned above. You would need another set of rules that checks every light to see if it is already on, and if it is then adjust the brightness. If it is off then you would skip it.
For a lot of lights this would be a tedious process to setup the rules, but ultimately it should work as desired.
