Tags
dimmer, Electrical wiring, General Electric, Ground and neutral, Incandescent light bulb, Iris, iris system, LED, Light, Light switch, Lowe's iris, Lowes, Switch
To continue from my other post regarding “Replacing old light switch with GE light switch” There are some things you should know about the GE dimmer light switch and if it will work with your existing lights.
First off the positive aspect of this dimmer.
1) No neutral wire is needed for this light switch: This can be great if you only have a single pole switch that has two wires connected to them. This is so you don’t need to add an additional electrical wire for your switch where you may need to bring in an electrician to pull a new wire.
You can review the below youtube.com video which show’s how to wire a single pole switch, and the many different type of single pole switches there are.
**Please note if you have a third wire it my be the ground wire and is not the same as the neutral wire. If your unsure of this please contact a license electrician.**
2) It’s pretty simple to install by just turning off the power from breaker panel and moving the wire from the old switch to the new one. You do however need to know which wire is the “Line” wire and which is the “load” wire. My example was white was the “Load” and black was “Line”. Also there is a difference in installing the physical wire where you will notice that it’s a hook shape when you take it off and you need to straiten the electrical wire when installing it for the GE dimmer.
Here’s the video from Jasco which shows how to install the dimmer.
Here’s the video from Lowe’s regarding the GE setup instructions.
Now for the not so great part.
From my experiments this dimmer switch will only work with incandescent light bulbs.
I’ve tried using the dimmer with the circline light and it would sometimes be bright at 100% but most of the time the light would stay bright around 50% and often it would just shut itself off when you try to making it brighter.
I’ve also tried using two different fluorescent lights and got two different results. One of which will flicker when I have the light switched off, while the other would have trouble staying bright at 100% like the circline light above.
The last one was a dimmable LED light which I can’t seem to shut off. It stays at 10% brightness when the switch is set to off. Also when trying to make it brighter it seems to shut off sometimes too.
So to conclude, if you planning to use the GE dimmable light switch make sure you are using it only for incandescent light bulbs. If it’s anything else then your really taking a big change to get very weird results. The only option then is to install the neutral wire which at this time I can only recommend having electrician do this for you.
I’ll be looking into how to install my own neutral wire but I may need some time to figure this out.
I looked all through this blog, and I didn’t find any mention of the problem with GE (Jasco) light switches and dimmers not shutting off after the specified time. The smart plugs do not share this defect, they shut off after the time you set.
Iris tech support has been promising a fix to this for over a year!!! Is anybody else bothered by this?
I thought I would add a note. I was told by IRIS support that they are working with GE to fix the dimming issue with LED bulbs. I had tried what Lowe’s sells, Utilitech, and they dimmed fine, but would not completely shut off with 3 60 watt bulbs. I also tried FEIT (what Menard’s sells) and they also did not completely shut off. I then noticed that SAMS CLUB sells GE LED bulbs. I thought…perhaps GE bulbs, GE switch, and so I tried them. With 3 40 watt LED bulbs, the dimmer shuts off, but barely. Dimming is not as smooth as with the other two, and often I have to turn all the way up to dim back down, and / or use IRIS interface to set dimming level, but they do work, and they do shut off. Keeping the switches for now, but hoping that Lowes and GE get these fixed to work better with all dimming LED bulbs, I would just as soon use one with a neutral, but….alas, these are here and inexpensive, and I want to DIM and to control both….
I just ran another test, and the long-standing problem that GE switches, dimmers and outlets would not shut off after the time you set in the Magic Rules seems to finally have been fixed. I’m not sure when, because Iris never notified me, despite their promise to do so. All I can think is that this was an embarrassing problem for them so they didn’t want to call attention to it. Thank goodness they finally got it fixed!!!
Adding a neutral wire won’t help because it would have to be able to be loaded into the dimmer. I have a neutral, but because there is no way to put it in the dimmer, it still doesn’t work.
I picked $1,000 worth of Iris items. Decided to take the GE Wireless Dimmer switch out for the initial trial. Used Lowes iris model 45639 (lower right corner of package) The package says “Works with incandescent and dimmable LEDs” Installed it properly by experienced electrician. When I shut off switch, LEDs dimmed down to “almost off” but remained flickering and I could not resolve. The LED GU10 bulbs are dimmable models. So I called GE tech support. I told them what model switch I was using. They told me not to use the 45639’s they are no good for dimmable LED’s. I told him teh package says “Works with incandescent and dimmable LEDs” to which he had no replay. He tells me to go buy 45712’s instead. I ordered them from a home automation website. Going to return the 45639’s. I will report back upon my new results.