Zwave 3-way switch configuration

[peterathans]

I'm looking for help from the community after several months of troubleshooting and frustration, hoping someone else has some suggestions.

I've been trying to link two simple Zwave on/off switches together to use virtual 3-way switch behavior.  Theoretically this is possible, using Associations (making them work like Scenes in the Insteon world).

Unfortunately I've had limited success.  I've submitted several trouble tickets to get help (both with UD and Zooz) but this hasn't led to definitive solutions.

I'm guessing that the issue is possibly related to how I'm configuring the switches and Polisy, and am looking for a simple, straightforward procedure for linking two (or more) switches into a virtual group.  There's a handful of posts addressing this topic, but they are either for unique scenarios (i.e., one switch linked to a motion sensor) or have a series of addendums as people learned how things work (i.e., follow this procedure in post #4, but in post #9 someone says the earlier post isn't 100% correct and a few steps should be changed), making it difficult to know if I've got the right steps.

Does anyone have a clear, concise procedure I can follow?

[Techman]

@peterathans

Take a look at this Z-wave article from the UDI Wiki. 

ISY Users:V5:ZWave:Advanced User Guide:Scenes - Universal Devices, Inc. Wiki (universal-devices.com)

[FrayAdjacent]

Oh, this is relevant to my interests! New house has a couple 3-way lights and I definitely want to use a dimmer switch. I've already got a few ZWave switches on the way to test. 

[peterathans]

@Techman thanks for the link, but what I've found is that some of the information is out of date and sometimes vague.  For example, this wiki was last edited 9/2020 (almost 4 years ago). 

In the section Scene Link Types, it lists Native, Default, Command, and Ignore, but these appear out of date (instead of Native, I see Z-Wave Basic MC S2 Auth, which I assume is the replacement and works equivalently, as the other options are the same).  Also, the sub-sections after this talk about "Association between controller and responder", "Indirect control...", etc but doesn't describe how or when you'd want to use these different scenarios.

And it talks about "Adding a controller" and "Adding a responder", but what about cases where you want two (or more) switches to act as both controllers and responders?

If there are two (or more) switches in a Scene, do they all need to be configured the same way (i.e., Z-Wave Basic MC S2 Auth) for them to all work as a true n-way switch setup?

Edited July 9 by peterathans

[Techman]

Add the switches to the scene as controllers, which will also allow them to act as responders.

I'm not sure about adding them with S2. If they're not related to a security system/device You could probably add them as S0. I would assume that they would both need to have the same security configuration.