Why are there no Zwave circuit breakers?

Other Devices & Integrations Power Management
1

The only Zwave circuit breakers I can find are European. Why is no one in the US making/selling zwave circuit breakers? Maybe I just missed them in my seach…

I’m looking for breaker for water heat and AC/Heat so one breaker is 20amp single pole and one is 30a double pole.

If there are none, does anyone have a workaround?

2

The work-around would depend upon what you’re looking to get out of the Z-Wave part of a Z-Wave Circuit breaker?

ie. Determining if it needs to be reset or not (presumably an infrequent event) OR
ie. Power measurement

If you’re instead trying to switch a high-current device, then you’d want a Contactor unit instead

3

I am trying to switch on or off a 30amp feed to an AC unit or switch on or off a water heater.

Are there Zwave contactors? Or does a contactor work in conjunction with zwave device. If so, how would I set one up?

4

If you run a forum-wide search for “contactor”, you’ll see a load of previous discussions/options on this topic.

5

Found exactly what I needed - Thank you

6

If you are looking at the Intermatic one, be advised that it does not maintain state in a power outage, so you will probably want to make sure you have a scene that addresses this.

7

Good catch on power outage and Intermatic.

Using the contactor (thanks again guessed) was a work around to an LG PTHC LP150HED-Y8 that I’m having trouble connecting to a Dalton thermostat. I wired it using wire connectors (from Radio Shack) and the plastic widget that was supplied by LG but have had no luck. I even contacted and HVAC TECH on ASK. Sent him the LG manual and the Dalton Manual. He said connecting the LG to a thermostat was like connecting a thermostat to a toaster. He then tried to take my $30 for answering the question. I cried BS to ask and got my money back. Just ordered the LG harness (have to assm yourself but thinking that the wire connectors will make better contact with the board pins).

If the above fails, I am going to get the Intermatic. I’ll run the water heater and the PTHC through the contactor.

Thank you for the pointer.

8

Can you post the solution for power outage related Intermatic being turned off. Sounds like something I need but didn’t know it.

9

I’m running my water heater on it. I initially setup a start scene to turn it on a few hours before we normally wake up and a second scene to turn it off in the evening. We get periodic outages at this location and I found that if a spike occured during mid-day, the contactor would stay powered off.

My workaround was to add a virtual switch and set Home/Away on that, added that to the scene to turn on in the morning, and then added a trigger to run the scene if the power to the contactor was turned off.

This seems to work pretty reliably.

If you’re planning to run air conditioning on this, and you are in a hot area where it matters if it gets turned off and you aren’t there to notice, you’ll probably want to add some additional saftey checks to the automation.

10

tdinardo - I’m new to process. Scenes just hitting my radar… “then added a trigger to run the scene if the power to the contactor was turned off.” How do you add a trigger?

11

Create a virtual switch to track whether you are home or not.
Create a scene to turn the device you have connected to the contactor on.
Set the status for the virtual switch to Home
Select the circuits on the contactor to control
Add a trigger on the triggers tab called power failure, select the contactor control device and “a device is turned on or off” and set the mode to "Device is turned off
I have a schedule to turn the device on (I have mine set to turn on every day of the week at 6:00AM) in the scene. You may or may not want to do that depending on what you are running.

If you have a scene to turn it on on a schdule, you’ll probably want to turn it off on a schedule as well. To do that you need a second scene to do that. In that scene you just need to set the contactor controls in the off position, and a schdule. No triggers are needed on that scene.

Hope this helps.

Tom