I’ve been using Z-wave for almost 15 years, and like many my home is a mish-mash of different brands of switches and bulbs and over the years many have failed or just never worked right, and lots of un-smooth dimming and flickering issues along the way. We’ve decided to change the look of our home to black switches and along with that it seemed the perfect time to upgrade all my switches and bulbs to the best I can get at a reasonable price, and as well I upgraded my old hub to Home Assistant green. It’s a large home so something like Lutron RA would be outrageously expensive and I would need multiple Caseta hubs which sounds like a serious headache. Plus, I honestly find Z-Wave to always be RELIABLE, my issue is with switches and bulbs not dimming and reporting well.
Okay to my question - I had decided on Zooz after reading so many great reviews, and I’ll need a few dozen dimming switches, I have lots of 3 and even 4-way switch situations too. But I see they’ve changed them all to leading edge triac which is confusing and concerning to me.
Why did they do this? Merely production costs? Isn’t this far more problematic than trailing edge MOSFET?
How do I find bulbs that will be guaranteed to work great with current gen Zooz dimming switches (ZEN72/77) ?
What happens if I have a circuit that will be over the rated wattage limit for these switches? Is there a buffer I can push into? I have a 4-way circuit with 11 BR30 bulbs so being under 100 watts is basically impossible. If I’m at 120 watts on the ZEN77, is that seriously bad news?
Why did they do this? Merely production costs? Isn’t this far more problematic than trailing edge MOSFET?
>>> product cost. Triacs are cheaper than MOSFETs (MOSFETs also require a bit more circuit complexity, so add knock on cost) for similar voltage current specs. I wish they would have done MOSFET and then they could do leading and trailing edge control like Inovelli does
How do I find bulbs that will be guaranteed to work great with current gen Zooz dimming switches (ZEN72/77) ?
>>> Trial and error. In general bulb manufacturers are getting better at working with dimmers and vice versa. Zooz will claim its gotten to the point (good enough) that trailing edge dimming isn’t needed but that feels more self serving than factual. I found the biggest issue is bulb flicker at 100% brightness, Zooz has a nice feature where you can set a lower max brightness level. I set all my dimmers for 95% max brightness to avoid the flicker and the brightness difference is not noticeable.
What happens if I have a circuit that will be over the rated wattage limit for these switches? Is there a buffer I can push into? I have a 4-way circuit with 11 BR30 bulbs so being under 100 watts is basically impossible. If I’m at 120 watts on the ZEN77, is that seriously bad news?
>>> No, dimmers are significantly de-rated for LED loads. It due to the in-rush current of the light bulb electronics. It wasn’t long ago a simple dimmer served a 700W load (incandescent) and the house didn’t go up in flames. I suspect there is a good degree of caution in these LED ratings so it you went slightly over I wouldn’t expect a disaster. 4-way has no bearing on this only one dimmer will handle the entire load.
You might want to explore 4way virtual dimming however. Zooz has a clever feature where you can setup up direct association across a few ZEN77s such that they all control the same load from multiple location. Only one ZEN77 has the load connected to it, the others talk over ZWave so they all turn on/off and dim together. I have several 3-way and 4 way setup with ZEN77s. Works great, gives you that multi location dimming you get with high end dimmer products.
I find BulbRite bulbs are awesome and work flawlessly. It is all about having a good bulb. You have to get them from a lighting or electrical supply house but well worth it. The Amazon and big box store ones - even with a familiar name - are either terrible or hit/miss in my experience.
I found BulbRite by asking a group of electricians on Reddit what their go to bulb was and most said BulbRite.
Also, they had surprisingly good customer service. I emailed them via their website about a question regarding enclosed fixtures and they answered me right away. I was very impressed.
This was great information. I had recently started having issues with my bulb flicker on my GE bulbs on my Zen77s . Even tried the Zac95 bypass module, which made no difference for me. So I’ve ordered some BulbRites. Hopefully that cures my issues!
We made the change for multiple reasons but the primary one was that we found most new LED bulbs actually worked better with triacs because the LED manufacturers were trying to accommodate the most common dimmer type (triac). The LED industry is unfortunately not standardized in any way and often a race to the bottom with component changes in the bulbs from one production run to the other. That’s why we cannot guarantee compatibility for any given brand or model anymore. We wish there was a way to ensure a particular model/brand always works but this has not been our experience. We keep an internal spreadsheet for LED bulb testing so you can always get in touch with our support team to see if we have your bulbs in the database.
We also found that LED bulb manufacturers often under report the Watt rating so if the bulbs are rated for 120 Watts in total, it’s very likely actual draw is over the 150 Watts most of our switches are rated for. The ZEN77 dimmer is rated for 100 Watts, so it will get overloaded and may be damaged if used with 120 Watts of bulbs. We recommend disconnecting it and using the ZEN72 model here instead. Flickering is also a common sign of overload, especially if it happens at full brightness.