Binding Switches together

I have two GE switches (non dimmer) that I'm trying to bind together. I also have a pair of GE dimmer switches that I'm trying to bind as well. I've tried Mirror Me as well as Switch Bindings to no avail. The bindings work fine when I control the switches via the Hubitat UI, but they do not work when I try to press the physical switches.

I set this up a couple of weeks ago and it was actually working fine for a bit. I had one setup with Mirror Me and another pair was using Rule Machine. So in summary, I've set this up across three different methods and none of them are working in response to physical button presses on two different pairs (4 switches total).

Has anyone seen this behavior?

Maybe this? His other apps are pretty good, but I have never used this particular one. But I do have a similar use case that I was thinking of, so glad you jogged my memory. :smile:

Are these z-wave plus, or just z-wave?

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Just tried that app, and it works good on both GE dimmer, and GE switches.

Is there a way to tell w/o removing them? I've been buying GE switches for years so it's possible some of my older ones might not be z-wave plus.

Look on the Z-Wave details page. If the first in-clusters entry is 0x5E, it’s Z-Wave Plus; if not, it’s non-Plus.

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Thanks. They both start with 0x25 so I assume they're not plus. I found another thread about physical events not logging consistently: Physical Events Not Logging Consistently

I'm guessing this is the issue.

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I would recommend Simple Automations

I wonder if you could possibly directly associate these two switches together via Z-Wave, thereby avoiding the no physical status update issue altogether?

I am not a Z-Wave expert whatsoever... But there are plenty around here that could probably guide you. Looks like the following post by @bertabcd1234 might be helpful...

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Thanks for the information. I believe I at least understand the issue and some possible workarounds.

For anyone who comes across this - if you have older GE/Jasco z-wave switches (non plus) they don't report their events quickly (at all?). If you are trying to bind switches together or do anything that responds to a physical button press it won't work without workarounds. Primarily - you can either use the built in Z-Wave Poller app to select all of your affected switches for periodic polling. This app will poll one switch a second. So, if you have more than 10 switches the polling might start to get noticeably slow. If you require fast polling you could instead use Rule Machine to setup faster polling directly on a switch.

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I would really try to avoid polling faster than 1 second. Z-wave devices usually operate at around 650 milliseconds and either 9.6kbps or 40kbps.

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sounds like it's time for an early christmas gift...z-wave+ switches :slight_smile: