I felt compelled to share the following exchange I had with "SmartHome John" a few months ago based on this thread... It may be helpful to some of you. As I noted I was impressed with the initial response but ultimatley I was surprised by the level of problems he disclosed, often when SmartHome admits nothing, but I was more surprised that despite all the claims relating to his and his bosses concern with customer satisfaction no offer was made to try to improve my situation......none... It seems there is an illusion of customer satisfaction, his comments on standing behind products are very revealing.... Here's a quote from the note below "Smarthome fixing just one your concerns would still leave many un-resolved and your reluctance to continue using Smarthome would continue.
" Translation: we are not going to do anything...
Hi BK,
Saw your message on Cocoontech.com about moving towards UPB switches due to your problems with Smarthome INSTEON products.
First of all, I have no problem with your move and you probably live with others in your home that have pressured you to do a move.
I do work for Smarthome. I have had been at there for 12 years and only three others who have been there longer. My job function is a project manager with the product design group. I mostly coordinate our new powerline products getting them from a sketch to shipping. While we have a full-time QC/QA manager (hired last year), I am in the faces of our contract manufacturer when they make crap.
Anyhow, I am truly interested in hearing your comments about our products and how you came to the decision to look into UPB.
No question we have had some quality problem. Crappy paddles or products that just go dead. There are others too. Most of 2007, we spent more time looking into those problems and correcting them than developing new products. Still, that does not help a guy like you who get heat from family members complaining to you that something is not working.
If you care to, turn the flame thrower on and tell me what you think and your decision making process on moving to UPB and trying a different provider.
My CEO and I see our customers as the people who pay our bills. He commented a few months ago that we should replace every SwitchLinc ever sold. That would be about 1 million hit to our bottom line. He later settled down and extended the warranty to 7 years. But, again, that does not help you since failing switches need to be replaced by you.
I can't tell you much, but we are in the process of re-engineering all of our products to be more robust. The first four just passed ETL safety this week and will roll out the first part of next year.
I will also share with you that during my last trip to China, I found UPB products from PCS and Simply Automated in the engineering department at my contract manufacturer. I don't know if any agreements have been made to make those products. Given that Intermatic is closing down their z-wave ops at that same CM, they may pick up the UPB business.
Please tell me about your experiences if you care to and when you have time.
Regards, John
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Hi John,
I’m very impressed that you would write and be concerned. I think there is a major disconnect between your and your CEO’s attitude as you’ve described vs. some of the customer support people at Smarthome and their willingness to make things right. I was a Smarthomepro dealer at one point although it was really just for me and friends. I was a twenty five year technical / managerial employee with HP (retired) and have been involved with HA for a longtime. I can trouble shoot HA or X10 with the best of them.
On Cocoonnet I’m starting to see more and more noise issues in the UPB arena that concern me. For a protocol and specification that was supposed to solve all the X10 issues and in most cases not even need a coupler it seems to me that UPB has fallen far short of that goal. Perhaps there really is no effective way to stop the line noise and no foolproof way of getting a signal from point A->B over potentially expansive, noisy household wiring.
I think the RF idea behind Insteon, Z-Wave and others is great but speedy, reliable RF is not foolproof either.
I bought the original Switchlinc two way product a number of years ago, over time it was clear that these had a lot of functional logic issues and where eventually replaced with one way units of improved electrical design by your company with a later model (which now doesn’t exist anymore).
Electrically these units have been pretty darn reliable but mechanically (starting middle of 06) they’ve been a disaster. I have switches all over the house where the paddles don’t work at all, have fallen off or only work for On or Off but not both. I had called customer service (may even have some emails) but no one wanted to help me or offer to replace them with something because this model isn’t made anymore. In my book wall switches should fail electrically long before they ever fail mechanically. The profit margin on these switches is huge, the company should be willing to replace a product that are clearly defective by design.
I couldn’t justify investing anymore money in Smarthome switches since it appeared they wouldn’t stand behind what I had previously been given even though this was an obvious design or manufacturing issue. I lost faith that your company was actually able to design and get manufactured something of high quality that had been extensively tested. A company like Leviton is very good and testing products and really getting a handle on failure rates. It didn’t feel like Smarthome was doing any of that kind of reliability testing. To add insult to injury your company won’t let be buy at dealer prices anymore because I didn’t buy enough products! I’m an industry insider; I can’t go back to paying full retail.
It’s a lot of work to install these switches especially in multi-gang boxes, the thought of doing this again is not pleasant and it really should have been unnecessary. If I ever build a next house (doubtful) I’d probably use the switches that you run a cat5 to just so there would be no noise issues!
So I’m back to not really knowing what to do at this point and what technology to try but I need something that is mechanically and electrically reliable…. At the moment I have a house full of switches that don’t work properly
Regards,
Brian
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Hi Brian,
Thanks for taking time to share your thoughts.
We agree that each of the major retro-fit home automation technologies all have some issues that can degrade performance. Like you mentioned, in the power line world, it is typically electrical noise on the AC line while in RF, it is interference from other devices or just poor range. Like you concluded, the hardwired systems overcome these problems but at a higher cost of installation.
We did a lot of testing prior to rolling out Insteon. I think the total time between project "Go" and the first customer ship products was about three years. For me, seeing the test results between a home with only two Insteon devices (operating poorly like X10 products) and the same home with 12 Insteon devices sold me on the new system. With two devices, the communication failures were very high. But, when other Insteon devices were added to help repeat the signals, the success rate was 99% or better.
I was a SmarthomePro dealer at one point although it was really just for me and friends. I was a twenty five year technical / managerial employee with HP (retired) and have been involved with HA for a longtime.....To add insult to injury your company now won’t let be buy at dealer prices anymore because I didn’t buy enough products! I’m an industry insider; I can’t go back to paying full retail.
I understand this is a tough situation to deal with.
I know there was a filtering of the dealer system to remove people like you who were not really in the business and making a living from installing Smarthome products. A few years ago, we had some internal sales people who converted regular customers to dealer customers to inflate their sales and commissions. When the scandal was discovered, those people were let go and some hard decisions had to be made on how to repair the damage. I believe they looked back at the goal of the Smarthome Pro side of the business and why dealers were able to buy at discounted prices.
It would be nice if there was a frequent flyer-like program here that rewarded high volume customers with discounts or rebates.
Right now, we only have the "Gold Line" program where our top customers (by sales volume) are given direct access to our best tech support people for support issues. But, it sounds like you have good troubleshooting skills.
I bought the original SwitchLinc two way product a number of years ago, over time it was clear that these had a lot of functional logic issues and where eventually replaced with one way units of improved electrical design by your company (with a later model 2386W & 2382W which was phased out).
Electrically these units have been pretty darn reliable but mechanically (starting middle of 06) they’ve been a disaster. I have switches all over the house where the paddles don’t work at all, have fallen off or only work for On or Off but not both. I had called customer service (may even have some emails) but no one wanted to help me or offer to replace them with something because this model isn’t made anymore. In my book wall switches should fail electrically long before they ever fail mechanically. The profit margin on these switches is huge, the company should be willing to replace a product that are clearly defective by design.
The last incarnation of the X10 SwitchLinc products were in production from 2001 to 2005. As soon as the Insteon versions came out, the X10 models were phased out. From a quality standpoint, we did not have issues with the mechanical switches on those models. In fact, when we recently discovered the paddle switch problem in our current Insteon SwitchLinc switches, we looked back at the X10 models to figure out how we lost that design.
I can understand how you came to the conclusion that there must of been a design error in the products since so many were beginning to go bad. But, statically looking at the causes of returns, bad paddles on that series never rose to a level of concern like it did more recently on the Insteon SwitchLinc models.
The school of thought that a company should stand behind its products is often debated. When I first took a user car I bought to the dealer for routine service, the service manager said, we'll it is a '95 and those typically have motor mount and defective AC/heater LCD screens. Should I be going back to the car manufacturer to fix these problems years after the basic warranty expired because the problem is so common? I am sure that, like your situation, if all my neighbors had the same year and make car and we all had defective motor mounts we too would be asking for in-warranty repairs.
I know that we did keep some reserve stock of X10 SwitchLinc products for warranty replacement, so if your call for help came in during or slightly beyond the warranty period, you should have been helped. I don't think you would be able to get product installed in '03 or '04 replaced today.
A company like Leviton is very good and testing products and really getting a handle on failure rates. In contrast it didn’t feel like Smarthome was doing any of that kind of reliability testing.
I would guess that if you compare the test plans of Leviton and Smarthome, Leviton would come out on top. They have been making electrical devices for nearly 100 years so they have a formula. You probably saw the same thing at HP where they have been doing the same thing for a long time and there was a plan for every product roll out. We do have a 100+ step plan for introducing new products including testing in homes and in the lab. We have not invested in "test-to-failure" services from external companies due to the high costs. I can tell you we track failures of every returned Insteon product. Here is an example over a six month time span:
R1 open 27.84%
D3 shorted 23.71%
Triac burnt or shorted 20.27%
MOV burst 6.01%
Air gap failure 5.50%
Bad soldering 4.47%
Paddle issue 2.41%
Load Flutter 2.06%
Bad component 1.89%
C1 exploded 1.37%
Not available 1.37%
Bad LED 1.03%
P/S 0.86%
5V to ground 0.34%
Bad switch 0.52%
Wrong ID 0.34%
For this product, we focused on the top three issues. We made electrical change to strengthen R1 and D3. For the triac, we asked ourselves how we can fix mis-wiring by customers. So we are testing a short-circuit detection that would cause the switch to shut-down and sound a continuous beep if it detects a mis-wiring by the customer when power is first applied. This circuit will increase the price of the switch by ~8%, but we feel it is a good investment.
So, I hope you can see that we are recognizing problems and working to improve the products
It’s a lot of work to install these switches especially in multi-gang boxes, the thought of doing this again is not pleasant and it really should have been unnecessary.
Been there, done that. Like you, I have installed many switches over the years in the same wall boxes. I think my laundry room holds the record at 10 or more over the 20+ years I've been there starting with Radio Shack X10 wall switches.
I understand you frustrations. Seems like multiple issues have prompted you to look into other technologies and providers. Smarthome fixing just one your concerns would still leave many un-resolved and your reluctance to continue using Smarthome would continue.
I’ll mention your experiences next time we talk about customer loyalty or product quality.
Thanks again for sharing your experiences!
John
