In my kitchen, I have about 5 to 7 light switches that I would really like to act as a single switch. I installed 5 Z-Wave Plus GE Dimmer switches and everything is more or less working. When I hit the main switch, the rest of the lights turn on. However, there is a slight delay and the lights all come on at different times in a seemly random order.
I've come to see this is just a limitation of Z-Wave. Possibly all wireless protocols? I think in most situations this slight delay would be fine, but I was wondering are there any lighting systems (Zigbee/Lutron) better at this than others? I'd really like at least this one room to really feel like the lights are on one switch. If not, this is already a huge improvement over manually turning on all the switches.
If anyone has experience with more responsive switches let me know. I'm also not sure if some of the Z-Wave scenes can be used to decrease the delay? Any ideas are welcomed.
There are several. I have personal experience with Lutron, Hue Bridge and Insteon. All of these can control multiple lights simultaneously with no delay between bulbs. Of the three, only Insteon is not yet directly controllable by Hubitat, but Lutron and the Hue Bridge have direct integrations.
[Edit] You could maybe do what you want by changing the wiring and bulb type. Instead of directly controlling the lights with the Z-Wave switches, you could rewire the lights so they all have constant power, then change them to smart bulbs. Then instead of having the hub control the switches and the switches in turn controlling the lights directly, where one switch responds to the other, you would instead have the switches control the driver in hub and the hub would control lights based on the driver setting. You would use the group lighting app to specify which groups are controlled by which switches. Would this work with these GE Z-Wave Plus switches @mike.maxwell?
So you're pressing one of the switches, and you have it set up so that other switches follow the brightness/on/off of the main switch? If that's the case, then I'm not sure you're going to find a solution. There is going to be some processing delay on the hub to evaluate then send the commands to the other switches, meanwhile the first switch doesn't need to talk to the hub at all to change its brightness so it changes instantly. Even if we're talking about 200ms for the switch -> hub -> switch action to take place, it's going to be noticeable.
My kitchen is set up similarly, I have three z-wave switches controlling ~14 hi-hat lights. I use voice control (Alexa) to control them though, I never interact with the switches. Have you thought about maybe getting an echo or google home instead of using the switches? My lights all turn on at the very same time this way.
Sounds like Z-wave associations are designed to do what you want, and I believe that most GE/Jasco switches support them if configured to do so. These allow switches to be set in an association group, and command each other directly without talking to a hub (it doesn't mean that they are excluded from the hub; the hub can control each switch as it normally does). So the operation of turning on lights as a group should be faster than having an automation do it. Not sure how this would affect the hub's view of the state of the switches (they may need to be capable of relaying their status back to the hub so everything stays in sync).
The trick is figuring out how to set the association when there is no support in the driver to do it. The Aeon minimote is capable of doing this. But its no longer available to purchase new in retail. There may be other options... @JDRoberts may be able to make a recommendation.
Yes, my mind still conflates associations, scenes, and groups--but that is the next thing on my list to look at. This driver says it can do associations for the GE Switches -- but looked into how they work yet.
Likewise, I'm thinking of how to avoid the problem in other ways. For example turn on the lights when I get home before I enter the house. I do have a Google Home, but I don't think the lights are consistent still when using it.
Another idea was to possibly stagger the Z-Wave devices by a slight amount favoring certain more noticeable devices first. I'll have to write some scripts to see if that has any effect.
zigbee implements this via group commands, which we support but have not yet included in any drivers, zigbee group commands are multicast and include a group id, any bulb containing that group id will respond accordingly, this is how hue gets their bulb groups to all come on seemingly at the same time.
Zwave association commands will likely be a little slower in that the device that creates an association to another device needs to forward that command to it's list of devices, if the devices in this mix are secure enabled that process is even slower as they need to exchange security keys before hand.
