Like some out there, I am not an electrician, as a matter of fact, I didn’t bother to look at how a light switch works before I got my veralite four weeks ago. After my veralite arrived in the mail, I had to read online about 3-way light switch, 4 (and beyond)-way switch to learn more. I am a newbie to home automation, so I do feel the pain that many have encountered such as spending several hours in the span of several days to figure out, to read, and to learn how to put these babies together to make them actually work as intended.
Many posts in this forum as well as other websites helped me tremendously; to that, I thank those anonymous members and posters! I hope that sharing my experience would help others who might be in the same situation as I was just 2 or 3 days ago. This may save some newbies out there a few hours of pain and or headaches, that is the reason why I am writing this up.
Disclaimer: It is dangerous to work with electricity, accidents do happen even if you are the expert, be very careful, don’t be lazy and do not assume, test everything! I would rather take a few extra steps to verify that I have switched off the main circuit breaker in addition to using a voltmeter to test the actual wires in the light switch than to find out the hard way by having gazillions of electrons flowing through me :). Each house may be wired differently, so don’t assume anything base on the color of the wire, what I am posting here IN THIS POST applies to my house, yours may or may NOT be a little different, keep this in mind.
My house has a lot of light switches, imagine a 4-way switch with 3 switches located only 5 feet from each other? I was like, when the builder built my house, were the switches on sale at the 99 cents store with buy one get one free promotion or something hehehe? Seriously, 3 switches all within each other’s reach? There are a few other locations in my house where I think that some switches aren’t necessary. Needless to say, I disabled some and turned them into either a single pole, or a 3-way.
Single pole is somewhat easy, so not many would have problem, I will talk about my 3-way switch installation. Tools that you need are including but not limited to: electrical wire caps, multi-function voltmeter, flat head driver, screw driver, 14 AWG copper wire with white cover from any home improvement store, wire cutter, and finally a wife or girlfriend :), if you have one, to save you time to know which switch in the circuit breaker controls that light switch. I had to manually run back and forth to find out, talk about exercising.
There are 5 lines you have to know, those five ELECTRICAL wires are: line (this is where the electricity comes in), load (this goes to the light or other source of energy consumption), neutral, traveler, and ground. Don’t worry too much about color, but for my house, white is neutral, bare copper wire is ground, black is line (, load, or traveler), and red is traveler. You get to define what wire is load or traveler, just make sure you follow the code so you do not confuse yourself or others in the future!
I have a 3-way switch in my kitchen, the load wire is always in one switch box while the line wire is in another. From here on, the box with the line wire shall be denoted as box A, and the box with the load wire shall then be denoted as box B. After I turned off power from the circuit breaker, I opened up both switch boxes, labeled the wires with numbers and take a picture just in case I need to put them back in the original position, then I removed both switches. With all wires out and not touching one another, I turned the power back on for that switch from the circuit breaker, used a voltmeter to see which of the black wire is the line–this is where the main power comes in from. A word of caution, some of the wires may have paint on them so you might want to scrape them off–perhaps with a fingernail or sharp side of your knife–first so you can get an accurate reading if there is voltage or not. Just scrape them all, don’t be lazy now.
After I determined which is box A and which is B, I used a voltmeter and dialed to the continuity function to test box B, there are two black wires and a red wire in box B, one of the two black wires is the load. In box B, I have the neutral wires, which were twisted together, capped, and pushed all the way in the box. I cut 6 to 8 inches of 14 AWG wire, twisted open the cap and added this new wire to the neutral group.
The GE main switch requires the load and line to be on the same side. Since there are two traveler wires, one is black and the other is red, I capped the load wire from box B to a black traveler wire in there, now that black wire becomes a load wire on my box A since the (what was the) black traveler wire has been converted to the load wire in the box B. The red wire is used as a traveler A running to B. Now coming back to A, I connected, ground, neutral (which I just created just like how I did in box B above), line, traveler, and load wires to my GE main switch. Back to B, I connected ground, neutral, and traveler wires to my GE auxiliary switch. Made sure all connections are tight, for my model and version, there are two holes at each terminal, I can pick either hole, pushed the wire in and tighten the screws. I double checked to make sure all the connections are correct and tightly secured. I proceeded to turn on power from the circuit breaker. Went back in the kitchen to turn on for testing, and voila, the two switches blew up and started a fire, hehehe, just kidding, they worked just fine, I tested by turning on at A then off at B, on at B and off at B, etc. All combinations worked. Then I powered off from the circuit breaker, returned to the kitchen and pushed all the switches in and put all face plates on. I could have combined a few steps, but I don’t mind the extra steps as I learned how to do these things, systematically following steps so I would remember for a long time.
I did several 3-way switches in my house, also did a 4-way and 5-way, yes LOL, too many switches. The concept is similar, but if someone wants me to write up how I did my 4-way and 5-way (I reduced them to 3-way since many of my switches are too closely placed together to be of great use), I would be more than happy to do that in my reply.
My way is not the most efficient way, and surely it is not the only way, but as newbies, we have to start with the basics, then as time progresses and knowledge gained, we can optimize the schematics later if need be. One of many tricks is looking at the romex wire then you could tell which black wire is most likely the load so you could use a continuity tester to test that wire first, since load would travel hand in hand with the white and ground wires–no RED wire in there.
I said it before and I will say it again, the above is the schematics in my house, yours might be different, never assume, test every line. User voltmeters with one as a backup. Better being safe than sorry!
Here is something extra I wanna put in. Since some of my tenants never turn of the lights at night even after multiple times telling them, I just have a luup code to iterate and turn off all my GE zwave switch lights, pausing ten seconds and moving on to the next light. My lights have the ID number from 4 to 10; therefore, I used a for loop incrementing from 4 to 10.
for i = 4,10 do
local AmIOn= luup.variable_get(“urn:upnp-org:serviceId:SwitchPower1”, “Status”, i)
if (AmIOn== “1”) then
luup.call_action(“urn:upnp-org:serviceId:SwitchPower1”, “SetTarget”, {newTargetValue = “0”}, i)
luup.sleep (10000)
end
end
Some might say, why not just have a single line of code to turn off inside that for loop and get rid off the if statement. For me, I just want to make sure they are on before I send a signal to turn them off, you can just send an off signal to each of them if you want to, but I like to poll first. That is just me.
That is all I have to say, what a short review huh? LOL 
Good luck to everyone, if you are a newbie and have a question then ask me, who is better at feeling, seeing, or understanding your newbie pain than me…who happens to be another newbie?