Looking for a full range LED dimmer

[randy]

We have recessed MR16 LEDs (12V on dimmable power supplies) and GU10 (120V) LED track lights in our media room. I had 4 Cooper dimmers that were OK, allowing the lights to dim almost as low as we would like them to when watching movies on the projector.

Since we have moistly HomeSeer dimmers and switches in the rest of the house, I was coerced into replacing the 4 Cooper Dimmers with HS-WD100+ dimmers.

Big mistake as the lights would no longer dim below about 20-25%. This was on firmware 5.17 and 5.19. On a suggestion I rolled all 4 back to 5.14, which was an improvement, but still left the lights much too bright even at minimum. While I have heard that improvements to the HS-WD100+ dimmer firmware are probable, this situation will not work for movie nights as it is and we have no idea if/when there might be changes.

Since these dimmers are not going to work and the Cooper dimmers are gone to a friend, I need to look for alternates.

Has anyone had any experience with dimmers that work well with LED lighting? I am looking for

• Full range dimming
• Paddle controls so that the function is similar to the HomeSeer dimmers
• Adjustable minimum brightness would be a plus
• Instant status and Z-Wave plus would also be a plus

[racerfern]

Wow! I had the exact problem. However, mine was resolved by going back to 5.14 and I'm still on 5.14.

Are you sure something didn't get scrambled? When I first moved back to 5.14, the switch worked upside down, both the paddles and the lights. I had to keep trying to do a hard reset, then it worked properly and has continued to do so.

Have you tried doing a hard reset and re-loading 5.14?

[randy]

Wow! I had the exact problem. However, mine was resolved by going back to 5.14 and I'm still on 5.14.

Are you sure something didn't get scrambled? When I first moved back to 5.14, the switch worked upside down, both the paddles and the lights. I had to keep trying to do a hard reset, then it worked properly and has continued to do so.

Have you tried doing a hard reset and re-loading 5.14?

Installing 5.14 did mess up all the parameters. I was able to set them correctly. 5.14 is a big improvement over 5.17 and 5.19, but they are still much brighter than the Cooper dimmers were. Subjectively the HS dimmers with 5.17 at 1% were about the same as the Coopers at 20%. Going back to 5.14 makes them about where the Coopers were at 10%. It is not a problem, except when we drop the screen to watch a movie, then the lights wash on the screen and it is distracting.

Before automation we controlled the same lights with Lutron dimmers and the range was from off to full. At minimum brightness the lights were off. The Coopers would not do that, but at minimum brightness they were very dim.

[Rvtravlr]

Randy,

We have builder grade high hats among other fixtures and have found that, using HS dimmers, we can dim to 1% with Philips warm glow LEDs.
Firmware is 5.19.

These LEDs are readily available at Home Depot.

But, perhaps you have already tried these.

(Pictures are upside down...)

[randy]

Randy,

We have builder grade high hats among other fixtures and have found that, using HS dimmers, we can dim to 1% with Philips warm glow LEDs.
Firmware is 5.19.

These LEDs are readily available at Home Depot.

But, perhaps you have already tried these.

(Pictures are upside down...)

Maybe I wasn't clear. The HS dimmers will go to 1% with these lights, but the actual light output is better than 10-20%. It dropped quite a bit when i installed 5.14, but is still too much light.
With the Cooper dimmers at 1% the lights barely had output, with the Lutrons, they were dark. Additionally since I have about 20 MR16s and 20 GU10s, it isn't possible to use the lights you refer to and it would be quite an expense.

[racerfern]

FWIW, I have the same BR40 LED bulbs in three rooms with three different styles of non-zwave dimmers. One of the three rooms (slide dimmer) will dim to 1% (bedroom) with ease. The other (slide dimmer) will only go to about 30% (kitchen) so not so critical anyways and the third will go down to about 20% (breakfast nook with X-10 dimmer without neutral). The moral of the story is, it's not always the bulb.

With that many bulbs, obviously the solution is in the dimmer. Do you have a micro dimmer you can try? Just asking?

[Grundcm]

I have the older Leviton dimmers (with the tiny horizontal dimmer bar) and they are configurable on the minimum dim level. I was able to adjust this and get the lights very dim (but your 20% may be different than my 20%)

The new ones appear to also have this feature and come default set at 10 as the minimum so you can lower the value down to 0. This can be configured with Z-Wave parameters. I don't know what a 1% step is on your bulb without actually buying the dimmer and testing on your light, but they do at least look slightly similar to the Homeseer ones.

I want all my switches to match and it appears only Leviton and GE offer the fan controllers (and Leviton only in the older models). I still have about 25% of the house to do and now the older Leviton Dimmers are getting hard to find. At close to $100 a dimmer it is not going to be cheap to buy them up before they are gone.

Homeseer needs to make the matching dimmer have the lighted Dim bar, make the minimum and max dim levels configurable, and come out with a fan controller and I will just convert the whole house to their stuff (the wife will love me swapping everything out a second time)

[farfromuman]

I have Evolve dimmers and decided to swap one out with Homeseer only to realize that they do not dim low enough. I have around 40 retrofit LED cans which work fine withe Evolves. I am hoping that they will add a minimum dim level setting otherwise these will be of limited use to me.

The Evolve dimmers do not have instant status but can dim very low in fact some LEDs will shut off around 3-5%

I decided to order the Leviton dimmer I can probably imitate the multitap with events and hopefully fine tune the LED dimming to a lower level.

[randy]

I have Evolve dimmers and decided to swap one out with Homeseer only to realize that they do not dim low enough. I have around 40 retrofit LED cans which work fine withe Evolves. I am hoping that they will add a minimum dim level setting otherwise these will be of limited use to me.

The Evolve dimmers do not have instant status but can dim very low in fact some LEDs will shut off around 3-5%

I decided to order the Leviton dimmer I can probably imitate the multitap with events and hopefully fine tune the LED dimming to a lower level.

Let us know how the Leviton works, because unless/until HS allows us to fine tune the minimum setting on the dimmers, they are almost useless in our media room. We now have to turn the lights off to watch a projected movie. We do not have a lightweight projector either, it is rated at 1900 lumens. They are better with 5.14 firmware, but the lights are still so bright they wash out the screen enough to be distracting. They were fine with Cooper dimmers dimming down to a glow.

[farfromuman]

Let us know how the Leviton works, because unless/until HS allows us to fine tune the minimum setting on the dimmers, they are almost useless in our media room. We now have to turn the lights off to watch a projected movie. We do not have a lightweight projector either, it is rated at 1900 lumens. They are better with 5.14 firmware, but the lights are still so bright they wash out the screen enough to be distracting. They were fine with Cooper dimmers dimming down to a glow.

I had time to test the Leviton DZ6HD-1BZ Decora Smart 600W Dimmer. I set it to the lowest Minimum DIM level setting of 1 (from default 10) and it did not perform any better than the Homeseer Dimmer with 5.14 firmware. The instant status reporting (via HAIL) seemed to be just a bit slower then Homeseer's method. The design is a little strange since the big paddle is used for ON/OFF and the rocker on the right side is used for dimming. The problem with the local dimming is that it changes in increments of 15% which is a huge amount for LEDs. The dimmer also feels flimsy when being operated.

[Tomgru]

Curious... i assume the same issue is there for the new 200 series dimmers with the multi-color LEDs? Does anyone know if they come with 5.14 firmware?

[randy]

Curious... i assume the same issue is there for the new 200 series dimmers with the multi-color LEDs? Does anyone know if they come with 5.14 firmware?

I have one. It is the same as an HS-WD100+ on 5.17 or 5.19. The HS-WD200+ shipped with 5.9 and I doubt there is any other firmware. The room I put the 200 in does not require very low dimming, otherwise I would have to stick with 5.14 on an HS-WD100+.

I wish these were able to dim down properly. I will keep my fingers crossed that this is taken care of with firmware down the road. As they are, the HS dimmers are useless in our home theater. Until it is fixed, we have to just turn all the lights off. The Cooper dimmers that were replaced by HS dimmers worked fine. Unfortunately they are in a 4 gang box, so swapping dimmers is not pleasant. Added to that the Cooper dimmers had leads and the HS dimmers use screw terminals.

[Tomgru]

I have one. It is the same as an HS-WD100+ on 5.17 or 5.19. The HS-WD200+ shipped with 5.9 and I doubt there is any other firmware. The room I put the 200 in does not require very low dimming, otherwise I would have to stick with 5.14 on an HS-WD100+.

I wish these were able to dim down properly. I will keep my fingers crossed that this is taken care of with firmware down the road. As they are, the HS dimmers are useless in our home theater. Until it is fixed, we have to just turn all the lights off. The Cooper dimmers that were replaced by HS dimmers worked fine. Unfortunately they are in a 4 gang box, so swapping dimmers is not pleasant. Added to that the Cooper dimmers had leads and the HS dimmers use screw terminals.

Shoot.

I purchased 4 to play with, and a couple will require the dimming i get from 5.14.

@rjh, any plans here? i hate to return this before i even get started.

[Timon]

Although dimmers are getting better the problem are still the LED bulbs. Getting them to dim way down to the level of incandescent is a very hard thing to do. When you do find one you still can't guarantee that all the different styles of bulbs that manufacture makes will dim as well.

There needs to be a solution to this.

1. A new versions of LED bulbs that can function with very small amounts of voltage. We getting close but it's still not as good as we would like and finding the ones that do is a task in its self.
   
2. I new generation of LED bulbs and Dimmers which work together. These would leave the power to the bulbs at full line voltage all the time.
   This sort of exists now with bulbs like the Hue but the issue is you still need a wall switch of some sort to manually control them even when the automations system is down. So we need a new Master/Slave switch. Basically a switch that has no internal dimmer but one that can send and receive commands to/from the HA system along with relaying them to the bulbs and when the HA is down allowing manual control the bulbs even that's only basic on/off/dimming.

Of these I think that #2 is something that can be done NOW. In fact HS is in a perfect position to do this with their new 200 series. Take the 200 series and give it a smart controller with the ability to control other lights as well as generate scenes as it does now. Set it up with a watch dog timer such that if it doesn't receive periodic triggers or see traffic being sent from the HA it goes into local control. This way you can program it to issue basic commands to the lights it's programmed to control. Now you can use Z-Wave bulbs in and have complete control even when the HA is down. The only issue that needs to be addresses is manually controlled dimming, i.i., holding the button down, working. That's something I never seen done.

The only issue I see is there are more Z-Wave bulbs needed. We have type A's but we also need Type BR and Pars, including short neck Par 30s, for can lighting. Getting a Z-Wave candelabra might be just a bit of a stretch but I've found fairly good dimming candelabra bulbs.

[Timon]

I have Evolve dimmers and decided to swap one out with Homeseer only to realize that they do not dim low enough. I have around 40 retrofit LED cans which work fine withe Evolves. I am hoping that they will add a minimum dim level setting otherwise these will be of limited use to me.

The Evolve dimmers do not have instant status but can dim very low in fact some LEDs will shut off around 3-5%

I decided to order the Leviton dimmer I can probably imitate the multitap with events and hopefully fine tune the LED dimming to a lower level.

I've noticed that sometimes my Evolve dimmers can go lower than the HS ones. I suspect HS can alter this but one needs to understand what the LED lights want to get to very low dimming.

Darn, I really need to buy a digital scope so I can see just what is being delivered to the lights from the dimmer. I've needed one for awhile now for other projects so maybe its time to let go of some cash