RA2 Select occupancy sensor has no fade — why, and the three ways round it

Where this came from: this question was asked on r/Lutron by u/Feisty_Balance3409 — not here. We answered it there, in public, and this is the fuller version of that answer. We publish these because the answers are ours and they are worth keeping somewhere they can be found.

The short version

You are not missing a setting. In RA2 Select, fade time belongs to Pico button programming, not to the dimmer. Anything that drives the load by another route — an occupancy sensor, the app, an integration command — bypasses that programming and uses the dimmer's own built-in ramp, which is roughly a second. That is why your Pico scenes fade beautifully over eight seconds and your new sensor snaps on like a toggle switch.

There is no checkbox for this, and we would not spend money trying to add one inside Select.

The question

A RA2 Select owner had custom eight-second fades set on their Pico scenes and loved them. They added an occupancy sensor, and it turns the lights on and off instantly with no fade. Their own theory — correct, as it turns out — was that the sensor sets brightness values directly on the dimmer rather than calling a scene, and so skips the fade entirely. They wanted a sense check before going further.

Our answer

Why it behaves this way

Think of the fade as living in the button, not in the light. When you press a Pico, the repeater sends "go to 60% over 8 seconds" because those eight seconds are stored in that button's programming. When an occupancy sensor fires, it sends "go to 60%" and nothing else. The dimmer receives a level with no time attached, so it applies its default ramp.

In our experience that default is on the order of a second and the Select app exposes no way to change it — but we have not found it documented, so treat the exact figure as our recollection rather than a published spec. What we are confident about is the shape of the problem: fade lives in scene programming, and the sensor is not calling a scene.

What actually fixes it

Full RadioRA 2 with Designer software lets you point a sensor at a scene instead of at a load, and a scene carries a fade. That is the real difference between the two product lines, and it is the honest fix.

It is also a new main repeater and re-adding every device in the house. For one sensor, that is not worth it, and we would tell you the same thing if you were paying us. We would also want to check what the equivalent path looks like on RA3 before recommending either — we have not verified the migration story there closely enough to promise it.

The route we would actually take

The Select main repeater has a telnet integration interface — port 23, enabled in the app's advanced settings — and it accepts an #OUTPUT command that carries a level and a fade time. If the repeater also reports occupancy state on that same connection, then something small you already run on the network (Home Assistant, a Pi, a spare mini PC) can watch for "occupied" and send the load to your level over eight seconds.

Two things we would confirm before promising that works, and we are flagging them because we have not tested them ourselves on a Select repeater:

• Whether a Select repeater publishes occupancy state over integration the way a full RA2 processor does. Select is the cut-down product and this is exactly the kind of thing that gets cut.
• Whether the sensor has to stay assigned to the dimmer in the app in order to report at all. If it does, you will get the snap-on first and then your fade fighting it — which is worse than what you have now.

The cheap half-measure

Set the sensor to vacancy mode so it only turns lights off. You press the Pico to come on with your eight seconds; the sensor just handles the leaving. The off is still abrupt, but it removes the jarring part most people actually notice — walking into a room and being hit with full brightness.

This is what we would do first, because it costs nothing and you can undo it in a minute.

What others said on the thread

Summarised in our words. These are other people's claims on a public forum, not ours, and we have not verified them.

• u/teamhippie42 made the same core point we did — fade time is set per button in the software, and there is no global per-zone setting. Their phrasing was that you can program the fade "when the dimmer is pressed," which lines up with fade living in button programming rather than on the load.

The original poster considered the question answered.

What we would need to answer this for your house

If you want us to dig into whether the telnet route actually reports occupancy on Select — we will, and there is no charge for finding out:

• Your main repeater model and its firmware version
• The occupancy sensor part number
• Whether the sensor is currently assigned to a load in the app

Disclosure: we are a Lutron dealer and have been since 1999, and we do remote Lutron and Control4 work for a living. Take the upgrade advice with that in mind — which is part of why our answer here is "for one sensor, don't."