Top positive review
3-way (remote switch) behavior was what I thought it was!
By Carl Picciotto on Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2023
I do love these switches. It's way cool that you can enter latitude and longitude, and it will track sunrise and sunset times all year long. I have several of these in my house, controlling various external lighting. For those of you wondering what it means to support a 3-way switch: I could NOT find it written anywhere in Honeywell's documentation. So I tried to get technical support, but Resideo Technologies (the spinoff company that makes the device for Honeywell) totally ignored me, so... I just closed my eyes and bought it on faith. When it's properly installed, the remote switch acts like it's pressing on the manual button (the big button on the front of the device that you can use to manually toggle your light), every time you flip the switch. In other words, if you flip it up, the light will change state. If you then flip it down, the light will change state again. Perfect! Note that the display will not light-up the way it does when you press on the button directly. Interestingly, I found there was about a 1/4 second delay for the light to change state, when using the remote switch. This gives a slightly weird experience, but it's tolerable. I am sure it's just an agressive defense against noise. How does it work: as you may know, in a 3-way switch installation, the remote switch will send two wires to the local switch (the one connected to the load). One of those wires will be hot (connected to line voltage), and the other will be connected to nothing. Which wire is hot will be dependent on the position of the remote switch. When you install this device, you add a jumper to the remote switch, so that one of the wires will ALWAY be hot, and the other will turn on and off with the switch, as before. The Honeywell timer will then be powered by the always-hot wire, and its microprocessor will monitor the other wire to detect switch actuation, on-off or off-on. That's it! It's really quite simple / clever. Note that I used the Honeywell device that requires a neutral wire. I have no idea how the switch that doesn't require a neutral wire works, or why it's a bit cheaper...? If you have a neutral wire available, I would absolutely buy the switch that requires it.
Top critical review
1 people found this helpful
Not Really a Three Way Switch has Four Wires
By Admiralbrown on Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2012
My house was built in 1948 and this switch cannot replace my existing 3-way switch. To use this switch you need this Honeywell switch and a two-way switch, not the traditional two three-way switches. My home wires are black, red and white and this switch has black, white, yellow and blue. The top of the instructions state "NOTE: This switch cannot be used if there is no neutral wire (white wires joint together) inside the electrical box.". Not my typo on the word joint, joined for those of use that have taken junior high English. It would have been nice if the product description on Amazon had mentioned this fact. The wiring diagram would be nice since this is not a plug and play replacement switch. This switch needs to have power applied to it to work, so I cannot reason out the function of each wire by throwing the switch and using an ohm meter. I bought this switch as a way to have a light come on for the dogs at sunset or as a timer when we are on vacation. The switch I wanted to replace is not visible from outside the house, the other switch on the circuit can be seen from the road and is not where I want to place a timer switch. Sorry if my thoughts seem disjointed right now, I am livid that I wasted my time with this switch and must make a return because the product description is lacking. Later in the day additional comments: I now see I will have to rewire my light if I want to use any Honeywell/Aube programmable switch. I did give it the old college try before shipping it back. I tried to wire it in to the junction box with the power coming in from the street and not the junction box powering the light as shown in the instructions. I wired black (switch line) to black (hot 120 volt), white (neutral) to white (neutral), blue (load) to black (going from switch to switch) and yellow (switch three way) to red (going from switch to switch). I then tried no jumper on the existing three way by the light and it was possible to completely disable the new programmable switch (light won't come on). Similarly I tried the jumper between the red wire and the black to the light with the same result. With the jumper between the two black wires of the existing three way switch both switches worked as they should work. I programmed the switches and noticed the problems. 1) The blue locator LED was on with the light being on and off with the light being off, the reverse of its intended function. 2) The back-light also functioned backwards and was on with the light off and dim with the light on. 3) About every 15 seconds the bulb would flash. The fixture has a compact fluorescent bulb and the light only flickered to partial brightness. Not acceptable hence the return. No one can say I didn't try. Someday I will rewire the junction box hidden from outside view to both take in 120V and power out to the light fixture and make the other junction box just a switch box. I am just not in the mood to string romex, I've wasted enough time on this project already.
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