Adding in my two cents (in a rather long post) on these as I’ve read the previous 98 very helpful posts , taken the plunge on ~10 of the rotary dimmers and now been using them for a few months. Thought id give back what I’ve learnt.
In summary, I’m really really happy with them - they have a few quirks (see below) like most smart home kit, but nobody makes a comparable product in my view. Maybe light wave are the closest, but they don’t look right in a Victorian property!
My key constraints are that i) I have no neutral wires at the switch so anything I use has to deal with that and ii) my SO’s one requirement is that the switches ‘look the same and work the same’. These fit that bill.
Reading back through these posts, I’ve seen a lot of comments on various topics, so trying to address them one by one:
General overview - Typically I tend to be able to buy these for ~£50, which is quite punchy, but as above, they have no competitors in my view. I’ve found these dimmers to be the same size (pretty much) as all other standard dimmer blocks, so fit in any backbox that had a dimmer and are easy to wire in / connect to my hub - occasionally you have to hold down the button for 6 seconds to put them into pairing mode again when connecting (led behind switch goes red), but it’s not been ‘hard’. Once they’re on, they’ve never dropped.
Drivers - Hubitat have now added an Aurora Aone Rotary Dimmer driver specifically for these which works pretty well and removed a whole bunch of the issues mentioned in earlier posts. It would be nice if it had a few more features (eg to always come on at 100%), but it controls switches in ‘master’ mode well (more about slave below)
Blue lights - the above mentioned new driver also allows you to choose when the little blue backlights come on (all the time, when the lights are on, when the lights are off, or never) - neat feature having a hallway switch glowing when it’s dark. Only comment would be that after a power outage, it reverts to ‘always on’ until you go and re-save preferences. Occasionally a bit annoying.
Compatible bulbs - Aurora only recommend to use these with their own bulbs. I’ve had mixed experience with other bulbs. The (rubbish) led bulbs the previous owner had in my house are a disaster (with all smart home tech tbh), as are mixed sets of bulbs, but the Aurora compatible bulbs are only about £3 for a GU10 which isn’t awful and I now have a nice box of the old leds for replacing outside lights etc where I don’t use dimmers :).
I’ve also found that you can use this with Amazon basic leds plus a fibaro bypass, but by that point it’s basically cheaper to buy the Aurora leds. This may be a useful approach for odd lights that don’t have an Aurora equivalent though.
Repeating - as far as I can tell, these seem to be good repeaters - nice high LQIs / low costs on my route table and I don’t have any issues with my zigbee mesh.
Firmware - lots of older posts above mentioning firmware issues / upgrades required and tbh this was my biggest concern when buying. I have no idea what firmware mine came on, but they’ve all be bought since Jan 2020 and all work fine, so never felt the need to fix.
Slave mode - There is a lot of talk above about slave mode and what it can / cannot do. Without using the Aurora platform or rule machine, slave mode will not create a two-way dimmer control. This isn’t really Aurora misadvertising IMO, but rather us deciding to use Hubitat rather that Aurora. Yes it’s a pain and yes it would be great if there was a ‘slave’ version of the driver that could sort this out, but there are work arounds.
Slave mode essentially changes the switch such that it’s ‘off’, except for the small amount of current required to power the zigbee. As per other posts, this means you can wire it in parallel to pretty much any circuit you want - it doesn’t have to be on the same circuit as the lights you are controlling. This can be very useful.
In Hubitat, clicking it sends a physical on/off command and rotating lowers or raises the current % dim from 50. This can easily be linked through to another switch with RM, to give dual control. It’s pretty quick, but not instant. The mirror application didn’t work for me (or others) - I think it’s too quick / gets confused and ends up in loops.
I’ve also found that while in slave mode, rotating the dim to zero or 100 causes it to ‘reset’ to 50 again (based on the Hubitat logs). There are ways to work around this - eg taking the action of dimming as the trigger for RM rather than the % dim value to drive the actions, but tbh that is a pain to sort.
However, I’ve found these slave switches especially useful in our bedroom to drive a pair of smart bulbs on the bedside lamps so these can be turned on from the wall, but then turned off from a smart button on the bedside table. Similarly in the kitchen, I changed a single dimmer plate for a double plate, added a slave and use it to control some led strips on the other side of the room.
Dimmer knobs - this is an odd one and I don’t understand why, but the plastic knob that comes with the dimmer is marginally different size and has a different ‘connector’ to the drive shaft of the dimmer to every other dimmer knob I’ve ever seen.
There are two fairly easy fixes for this:
- take your old dimmer knob (mine were chrome) and see if you can remove the plastic inner - needle pliers did the trick for me. You can then put the supplied plastic knob inside. It’s a slightly loose fit, so a bit of folded paper, blue tack or a dot of superglue if you’re really committing works well to hold it in
- take the rotary dimmer drive shaft in a pair of pliers and carefully file down a bit more of the ‘round’ bit to make a flat edge that is compatible with your old ‘normal’ dimmer knobs - this was actually surprisingly easily done
On at 100% - it’s a bit annoying, but depending how the brightness was changed (physical, digital), or if you dim as you turn on by accident, you can end up with the lights not at 100%. I’ve found a simple RM rule that ups them to 100% when switching on seems to do the trick.
Double click - there is a good post Here that explains how to fake a double tap on a switch or button that doesn’t natively have this functionality. Although it’s not super fast (think clicking twice slowly to edit text in an icon, rather than opening the file), it’s super useful - we have one by the stairs that turns off the entire ground floor, pauses the music etc on a double tap - great for bedtime!
I can’t think of anything else right now, but if anybody has any questions on these, I’d be happy to help!