Lutron Wireless Switch and 3 way switch

[Little Bill]

For those that don't know, Lutron makes wireless switches that uses a master switch that you put in place of a regular SP or 3-way switch. Then they use a wireless remote switch called a Pico. Caseta is the most common model of this wireless set-up.
There is a way to use this in an existing 3-way circuit and keep one of the 3 way mechanical switches and use the Pico as an extra switch, effectively making this a 4-way circuit.

To use this setup, you replace one of the 3-ways (doesn't matter which one) with the master, or controller, switch. The master has 4 wires, black, red, blue, and white, also ground. You take the black from the master and tie it to the line/load wire. Then you take 1 of the travelers and tie it to the blue wire. It's important to note which traveler you used for the blue wire. Then tie the red wire to the remaining traveler. You either pass the neutral through with the white if needed, or cap it off.

At the other 3-way, you remove the common (line/load) and remember or tag it. Then the traveler that you tied to the blue wire remains on the switch. You remove the other traveler, tie it to the common, along with a jumper, and connect that back to the common terminal. This leaves one terminal empty. You then can add the Pico remote wherever its needed.

A customer has a 4-way circuit and would like to add another switch. I plan on using the method I described above and leave the 4-way switch, then add the Pico as the new switch. Does anyone see a problem with the 4-way being used along with this method?
I don't see a problem but wanted other "eyes" on it to check myself.

 

[brantmacga]

My brother has Caseta’s and picos in his house and asked me a couple of weeks ago about utilizing an existing 4-way, so I have looked at this recently .

The problem is that the line and load originate at the Caseta, so you don’t have a spare conductor to use for passing load through when a 4-way is in the circuit.

With just a 3-way at the other end, you can take one traveler away for line or load. But in a 4-way you need all three conductors.

I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work in his scenario.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[wwhitney]

Does anyone see a problem with the 4-way being used along with this method?

Yes. Your instructions for the case of (2) 3-way switches involved keeping track of which traveler was connected to the blue wire at the Lutron switch and which was connected to the red wire. And then at the remote 3-way switch, you treated those two travelers differently.

But the 4-way switch effectively just swaps travelers. So when you flip it, you'd end up with the wrong "traveler" at the remote 3-way's common.

Cheers, Wayne

 

[AC\DC]

Just did one today I came to conclusion wwhitney said.
Just installed pico over it.

 

[LarryFine]

Usually, the right way is to use several remotes with one master, just like the old X10 switches.

The master must be installed at one 3-way switch's box, and a remote at each other switch box.

One traveler becomes a circuit conductor full-time, and the other traveler a trigger wire full-time.

 

[wwhitney]

One traveler becomes a circuit conductor full-time, and the other traveler a trigger wire full-time.

So, per Lutron's instructions for the case of just (2) 3-way switches, the remote 3-way switch ends up getting used as a simple two-way switch and either shorts the blue (trigger) to red (load) or not. And apparently the Lutron switch detects that change of state (regardless of whether the load is on or off), and responds to it by toggling the load state.

If the Lutron switch would respond similarly to a momentary shorting of blue to red, i.e. just change state once rather than twice, then there would be more possibilities for using the existing wiring to more than one remote switch. But I have no idea if that is true.

Of course, even if that's not true, with the correct piece of extra hardware in the box with the Lutron switch, a series of momentary signals could be integrated to an on/off for the Lutron blue/red triggering.

Cheers, Wayne

 

[Little Bill]

To me, the 4-way is just a pass through for each wire, depending on which way the switch is flipped. I'm going to try it just to satisfy myself if nothing else. Worse case scenario I take out the 4-way, splice the wires/travelers together, and put a Pico in it's place.

ETA: After drawing it out and thinking about it and what was said, it looks like both travelers need to be continuous at all times. If one is broken, it would kill the path of either a signal or actual load going through.

 

[synchro]

My brother has Caseta’s and picos in his house and asked me a couple of weeks ago about utilizing an existing 4-way, so I have looked at this recently .

The problem is that the line and load originate at the Caseta, so you don’t have a spare conductor to use for passing load through when a 4-way is in the circuit.

With just a 3-way at the other end, you can take one traveler away for line or load. But in a 4-way you need all three conductors.

I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work in his scenario.

The mechanical switch in the diagram below of course could use two terminals of a 3-way switch instead of the 2-way that is shown. The switch is used to change the on/off state of the Casetta each time the blue wire is switched to either a "hot" or an open circuit.
Therefore if you have a dead-end chain of 3-ways/4-ways acting as a switch loop I suggest the following: Connect the "common"terminal of the first 3-way in the chain to "hot" at the box with the Caseta as in a normal circuit using mechanical switches. But at the Caseta, connect the switched hot coming back from the dead-ended 3-way to the blue wire of the Caseta. That way anytime a mechanical 3-way or 4-way is flipped, the blue wire will turn on or off and therefore the Caseta will toggle from its previous state.