hey guys welcome back to the channel so we got another deviation from our normal car
videos i've been moving and moving into the new house i decided to move all my old z-wave smart
switches so i had these ones for maybe like three or four years ago these were the z-wave
4005 model and then i got the zw 4008 model here and these are all made by ge or they're all
private labeled for ge but they're made by jasco anyway the reason why i have the one newer one is
these older ones have been dropping like a log i've lost literally like
probably seven or eight of them in the last year so luckily i was still in warranty and
jasco sent me a bunch of replacements so one thing i noticed first off with the newer version of this
they come with a qr code that helps you pair with smart things and any other hubs that you have
on the old version what you have to do is kind of flip it back and forth and hope that your z-wave
hub picks it up so you can actually pair it to your system one other thing i noticed when i was
installing it is that the newer version of it is a lot slimmer so it fits into these boxes a little
bit better the old version was probably another maybe half inch or quarter inch thicker that would
get in the way of a lot of the wiring inside the box area so that's a huge plus that they
reduce the size i think they knew that these were defective because a bunch of people i know have
the same one and they have the same failures and they get the same replacements another
good thing i noticed is they got rid of these stupid tabs right here so the old version had
these tabs on both sides and if you installed them into a single gang you didn't have to worry about
breaking them off but if you had to stall them side by side you would actually have to break
those things off you actually fit them in the gang box the new one eliminated that so it makes
it a lot easier you don't have to worry about that on the sides for any modern house since nec 2008
they've been required to have a neutral in all the switch boxes if you have an older house you're
probably out of luck because back before they changed the code they didn't have neutral so all
you had was a hot going into the box so with that you can't really run these smart switches because
you need a neutral so the only way to do that is you have an electrician running neutral
from your load down to your switch which is a big pain in the ass especially if you don't have
conduit or if your walls are insulated one of the main reasons why you really need the neutral on
here because there are electronics in here that run even though it switches on and off so on a
traditional switch all you do is intercept the hot leg on these two lugs right here basically open
the switch and close the switch and that's all you have to worry about plus the green ground on top
now with all the electronics and the computers and everything in here and it's actually communicating
all the time with your hub so you need that neutral and then you need to load to actually
power these devices also notice that these have the no 120 on the side for the three-way traveler
so if you have a smart switch you can't do your regular traditional three-way you can use the wire
that's already there you actually have to buy the mating switch for the three-way application
and wire it up the way that the manufacturer has you wire up so here's the add-on three-way switch
that i'm going to be adding on today because my kitchen lights here are three-way so i'm gonna do
the overhead kitchen lights the sink lights over here and then the under cabinet lights
which are all on the same bank except for the three-way add-on switch is pretty basic all
it needs is a neutral and then you connect your traveler right here the key to doing the three-way
on this is connecting the load through to the main switch so that way when you click this switch it
actually sends a signal to the main switch and turns it on from there so here's what we're gonna
be working with today we got this three gang right here that does the kitchen i'm gonna go ahead and
take care of that then i got another double gang on the other side that does the three-way
and also my breakfast nook i'm gonna go ahead and do that breakfast nook today also before we start
make sure you turn off the power at the breaker to your switches or whatever you're working with
so luckily i'm in the kitchen in the family room area and the kitchen is on a separate circuit so
i still have power and light behind me to do some work speak of the devil so as we were
actually talking about this and i went to hit the breaker to turn off the lights
i realized one of these switches that were already in the house which is also the same ge
z-wave switch started acting up so you can hear it clicking and beeping and that's the same symptoms
i get on mine when they died before so it looks like this one is on its way out i've had a few
that did this and eventually fixed themselves when it cycled on but it looks like this thing's been
just beeping for the last like couple minutes i'm gonna mess with that later probably just
replace it with one of mine luckily jasco sent me a bunch of warranty replacement ones to start
we're gonna take apart the switch plate cover so these got six of these flat heads right here
i find it easiest to switch the bit from a flathead to
a phillips to take apart these guys in here
so we want to pull all three of them out and kind of inspect the wiring make sure
we understand everything that's inside of here so taking a look at inside so here's what we got
so we got three switches in here these two are the regular switches so you can see them they're
basic they basically just have two lugs for the hot coming in and a ground right there like i
discussed earlier as a basic switch then over here what we got is the three-way and the switch
is a little bit different so you'll notice there's three lugs on here for the power what you usually
have is two golds and a black and that kind of indicates which one's load and which one's line
and which one's the pass through to the other side on three way you also have the green copper ground
right here inside the box so my house is a 2017 so it's pretty new and it's within the newer code
so you'll see in here you'll see a whole bunch of black wires which is this one right here and
that's the main line coming in from so back there you'll see like the bundle of white wires that's
the neutral all coming in here and joining right there then you also see all the grounds coming in
here as the bare copper so the main thing you want to look for is to make sure you have a neutral
in your box to make this work third off what we want to do is just start taking the
power part and the wires apart so usually i just take apart the ground so unscrew the green wire
usually i find that the ground is the hardest thing to put back into the new switch especially
when they do the ones where share a common ground across all of them luckily on this one
everybody's got their own single ground so this should be pretty easy just to pop out round out
the next thing you want to do is you want to take the leads out so the leads generally
on a new house or anything that's done by a professional they usually just splice and just use
the compression fit so you just twist it back and forth and it slides right out a lot of people that
do it themselves usually end up using the lugs and they screw it down i usually try just to push
it through the two holes and i only use these side ones if i have to add another circuit or
additional circuits to it so i've already broken off all the tabs on all these because i said
since i got to put three of these in one box i'm going to need as much room as i can so what the
first thing i'm going to do is i want to be able to connect the ground to the ground just make sure
that your green is loose up here get your bare copper wire kind of get that thing into there
screw that thing down so i want to get the two leads in here so on these switches you
actually have to put the leads in and then you tighten it down with the side screws
and you'll notice back here there's one that says line and one that says load so in a setup
like this the load will go into the wire and that's going up to the fixture the line
is that bundle that's coming from the fuse box or the building you want to tighten that down
you want to pull your neutral bundle out of here so you can actually get this guy in there
that's a huge bundle there's probably like
seven or eight wires in there you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna hook up one here and then
i'm gonna daisy chain the other three that's probably the easiest way to do the neutral
you wanna just tuck this first one back in the neutral back in the back of the box
into there so i'm going to get move on to the next one now
locate your line and your load after you do your ground
so i end up connecting that third neutral right here that's kind of daisy chain
over to the last switch to this guy so that thing's all set over here so now we gotta
determine which side of the three-way we're on so after studying the wire and i'll show you guys a
graphic on the screen right now what i determined is so this size the side that's getting power from
the circuit so this is where the main switch is going to be this main switch is going to actually
send power to the switch on the other side of the 3-way and that in turn is going to send power up
to the light fixture so what we're going to do is we're going to take the traveler which is the red
right here as the line and the traveler to the remote switch will determine the line and load
depending on which one is going into that bundle and which one's going up into the ceiling
and once we determine that we can wire up the switch over here and once i'm done there i'm gonna
go to the other end i'm gonna connect the traveler up to that remote add-on switch and that's gonna
control this guy over here so here's a more up close look at the wiring for the three-way which
is very important to see so you can see right here is the line line goes into that bundle
right here that goes to the breaker traveler and the load is the twisted red pair right here that
you'll see if you guys don't have a twisted red pair in yours just check to see if it's going up
together into the building right there you got your ground copper ground up there and you got
your neutral jumping to the next switch and then going back to the ultimate neutral inside there
so that is pretty much your three-way on this side so we're over here on the other side we're gonna
put the add-on three-way so you can see right here i've already installed the z-wave on the dual gang
this dual gang has so much more room than that triple gain just because there's so few wires
in here over here you can see those twisted pair red and black right here so those two are coming
from the other end so remember the switch is going to be sending power to this guy right here
on this side so what i have to do is take this guy and just jump it to this black right here
that's going up to the light fixture right now i'm going to take this red and put it
on the traveler of the add-on switch and then connect the neutral and we're done over here
since the ground popped off i kind of discovered that there's a hole right here that you can just
stick it in so i ended up bending that u out and just using that hole and then
i'm just going to tighten it there which makes life a lot easier
so now that we got everything plugged up and connected i went ahead and turned on the breaker
so i'm going to test to make sure everything works so the first thing i'm going to test
is my under cabinet lights turned on over there the next one is the the sink lights just turned
on so that works and then the last one we're going to test main kitchen lights the three-way
looks like it works so right there so over here we got the add-on switch so it's working that's
a success and then here's the breakfast next which i just added right here so that one works
so thanks for watching all the way the end of this video guys i hope you guys found this video useful
if you did please give it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to my channel go ahead and
subscribe to a channel i usually do car content but when i have projects around the house that
are actually useful for others i go ahead and do diys like this remember guys if i can do it
you can do it thanks for watching all the way to the end and i'll talk to you guys next time you