Re: Smarthome Insteon Defective Switchlinc Replacement Program (Re: I think they've done it again)

["BruceR" <br@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bobby, I do understand everything you're saying about Smarthome as it
relates to this issue and I too enjoy the discourse and have the utmost
respect for your positions and the way you present them.

In a perfect world SH would have done more extensive beta testing and
stopped sales instantly as you think they should have. I'm not defending
their actions but at the same time I'm not condemning them either.  On
the Appliance Modules with the safety issue they did stop, issued a
recall and notified all purchasers - voluntarily.  The flicker issue is
not a safety issue so it's a little different.  This is more like an
automotive service bulletin where IF a problem like a strange wind noise
or rattle shows up for a customer they tell him the answer and furnish
the improved part (and often charge for it!).  Maybe not the most
forthright manner to handle these things but, nonetheless, not uncommon
for most businesses. Products would cost a lot more if a percentage had
to be added for every contingency - just look at the light aircraft
industry.

Now, as far as Smarthome goes in comparison to it's competition, they
have had a far more open and direct way of dealing with users than X10,
Leviton, or any of the newer players.  The other technologies, which
seem to be a lot more closed mouth and don't have an open dialog with
the public, make it more difficult to know what ills they suffer from.
Let's not forget Leviton's Wall Controllers that were clearly defective
inthat almost every one failed from bad codewheels within a year. Their
solution? A new model. No warranty extensions. Even the control pads
couldn't be reused as they made a change so the new controllers needed a
different keypad. And the X10 Wall Outlet Modules? 20 years later and
they STILL haven't fixed the problem!  The UPB starter kit?  Stopped
working a week after it arrived.  None of these guys are angels!

As for my own switch changeouts I'm going to let the dust settle for 60
days or so before doing any swaps.

For the record, I haven't fully retired quite yet, I am still very much
in the telecom business but it requires less of my direct time now. I am
building a high-end spec house right now which is very time consuming
and very detail oriented so I do value my free time quite highly.  As to
the discount I got on my Insteon stuff, it was a very short window
promotion offered to a number of customers via email - no strings
attached as to NDA's, betas or any other limitations. Since ICONs
weren't discounted I basically bought more V2's than I had originally
planned instead of mostly ICON units.  You're right about the 3 houses
although one is a 60 year old rental unit on an adjacent property and
one is a townhouse in another city where I have an office. I replaced
all the switches and outlets in the 60 year old house and was surprised
to find the copper wiring in very good condition (some was upgraded 20
years ago). All the outlet boxes were filled with old geckko eggs and
dead baby geckko bodies. Yummy!







> Bruce, the real issue here is they didn't beta test the product
> thoroughly enough before releasing it.  Whatever word dancing they
> do, i.e.  "slight variations in the triac" - the triac/choke problem
> should have been discovered in beta.  Even worse, they kept selling
> the switches for months when they KNEW there was a problem.
>
> This becomes a serious issue because it exposes Smarthome's business
> ethic and concerns *anything* bought from Smarthome in the future.
> Even when they knew the product had problems, they just kept pushing
> them out the door, without constructive notice of the defect.
>
> My comments are not meant to be confined just to Smarthome.  They are
> meant to concern every poor schmoe here who has ended up being an
> unpaid beta tester.  Who here hasn't paid money for something that
> was so buggy that it was useless?
>
> The trend for the entire industry - indeed the entire tech sector -
> is to shift whatever costs they can to someone else.  One way to do
> that is to get the customer to eat beta test costs.  I don't think
> that's right.  Others may think differently.  That's Usenet.
>
> I sincerely appreciate your ability to discuss the issues on the
> merits like a gentlemen without resorting to personal invective.
> You're a very smart guy with wealth of HA and other technical
> experience and I value your opinion highly.  I've bought a number of
> HA items based solely on your recommedation and have been very happy
> with every purchase.  I can, believe it or not, see your point of
> view.  I hope that you can see mine.
>
> If a company rushes or perform an incomplete beta test, there are (and
> should be) consquences.  When they happen, most companies do their
> best to minimize the impact to the *company* and its bottom line,
> most often to the detriment of the customer who's purchased the
> defective equipment.
>
>> As to the cost of an electrician, I'm guessing few were installed by
>> any but if they were, and the customer brings it up, who's to say
>> that they won't make some kind of adjustment or compensation?
>
> Who's to say?  They're to say!  If they want to feel like real good
> guys, act like good guys.  "If you have an itemized bill from a
> licensed electrician for a swap of switches purchased during the
> "covered period" we'll pay it" would be a good start in that
> direction.  It's the kind of thing I imagine they'd be *forced* to do
> if a class-action attorney got interested in the case.
>
> Don't they know about Usenet and Google?  Why do Dave and *I* have to
> repost their reports here?  We both know the answer: Because
> Smarthome they really doesn't *want* people to know about the
> defective switches.   They really, really don't, Bruce.  That's
> obvious from their failure to give customers notice.  They found out
> about the problem very soon after the switches appeared.  Yet it took
> nearly four months for them to *stop* selling those switches.
>
> I contend that's because they are in a race for HA supremacy and a
> "stop sales" or a recall would have hurt them VERY badly.  So they
> *chose* to put that hurt on their customers, instead.  It was a
> voluntary action and it was not smart.  It would have saved them
> money (they're now paying shipping both ways to return items that
> should never have shipped) and reputation to have stopped selling
> switches until the problem was fixed.  I'm spending so much energy on
> this thread to hopefully convince them to behave differently in the
> future.  I like them, I've bought from them before and have been
> happy with the purchases.  But now I don't trust them.
>
> It's not just an issue of whether an electrician had to install or
> replace the switches.  I use that as a primary example because that's
> a cost everyone knows instantly in real-world dollars.  I had to
> suffer through grad school economics classes before I really
> understood that people tend to minimize non-dollar costs like lost
> opportunity costs.  But they are very real nonetheless.
>
> "Lost opportunities" are what economists and lawyers call the things
> you *could* have been doing if you weren't (in this case) jacking bad
> switches in and out.  They are things like earning extra money,
> recreating with the family or chilling out with a beer and the TV.
> Smarthome's actions have deprived people of those opportunities.
>
> Beta testers expect that they may be jacking switches in and out as
> designs are improved and refined.  But that's not an expectation a
> normal customer would have.  They expect the damn thing to work right
> the first time.  The highly competitive environment they're in
> probably contributed to an unwillingness to perform a thorough beta -
> one that was very likely to catch this problem.
>
> Who should pay for their decision not to do a complete enough beta
> test? The customers who didn't even know *they* were being
> conscripted as a unpaid beta test draftee?  I think not!
>
> By now it should be obvious to anyone reading that there are risks
> every time you torture old solid copper wires that one will break off
> at the wall. If that happens "it's a nightmare" - not my words, but
> the words of another respected poster here.  That could involve
> electricians, drywall workers and painters to repair.  It's not fair
> to increase people's exposure to those kinds of problems by selling
> them switches with defects they did not disclose.
>
> Not everyone has a weekend they want to spend with the power off,
> jackassing switches in and out.  Smarthome decided to ignore those
> consequential costs to the consumer and pushed those switches out the
> door for four months until the ETL report came back.  Then, suddenly,
> they decided to fix *all* of them.  Even the switches in inventory.
> We can only guess what ETL told them.
>
>> They can deal with those requests individually.
>
> You mean quietly, so as not to give other customers the same idea and
> to limit Smarthome's overall exposure?  Do you know of anyone they've
> actually done that for or is it just a suggestion of how they should
> act if they were willing to take responsibility for their actions?
>
> In any case, think of me as providing "squeaky wheel" documentation
> for those without years of expericence working for lawyers, providing
> litigation support. I'm merely reminding poor Smarthome customers,
> now and in the future that if they bought Switchlincs from between
> March and August 2006, they're in a different category than other
> Switchlinc buyers.  They should be able to hire an electrician to do
> the swap and send the bill to Smarthome, even if they didn't use an
> electrician in the first place.
>
> Those customers didn't get to decide whether to use switches with a
> known defect and thereby risk the hidden costs of jacking switches in
> and out again.  But Smarthome knew and continued to ship.  That's not
> fair.
>
> Why am I unwilling to let this just fade?  It's an action not likely
> to be restricted to this switch.  We have seen, in gory detail, just
> how Smarthome operates.  I'm sure you've heard the phrase "past
> behavior is the best predictor of future actions."  This is how they
> are likely to react to ANY defective product they market in the
> future.  Keep selling it until ETL or the Good Electrical Fairy or
> your corporate counsel tells them "you had better fix *all* of them
> *before* you sell anymore."
>
> When they heard their third or fourth report - each nearly identical
> to the other - they should have stopped sales.  When they were able
> to replicate it in their laboratory, they should have *surely*
> stopped selling.  They didn't.  They made a business decision that
> balanced market share and sales against reputation for quality.  Like
> the choice of chokes and triacs, they appear to have made a bad one
> regarding their reputation.
>
>> For most of us, the swap out will mean a  weekend of
>> inconvenience -
>
> You're retired, you like to do this stuff, you're qualified to do
> this stuff and apparently, you appear to live mostly in brand new
> homes with shiny, non-brittle copper wiring.  And frankly, Bruce, you
> probably place in the 99th percent of wealth if not in CHA, then the
> whole USA and maybe even the whole world.  I'm not sure, but I think
> you own three houses.  Even two would set you a little apart from the
> average CHA'er. :-)
>
> I don't mean these comments in a negative way, I just want to make
> sure that readers understand that our differences of opinion result
> from very different perspectives and life experiences.
>
> You're a former company owner who's manufactured electronic equipment
> and you've been faced with very similar product defect issues.
> That's bound to make you more sympathetic to their current
> circumstances than I am.
>
> You've told us that you've received a substantial discount from
> Smarthome for the switches you've installed, for all we know you
> might have been one of the early beta testers and your payment was a
> discount on the switches you tested.  I am not saying you are
> dishonorable, just that when someone receives something of value from
> something, even just a discount, it can color their viewpoint.
>
> It is likely if you were such a tester, an NDA prevents you from
> telling us and that's eminently fair.  There are good reasons to keep
> the identities of beta testers confidential.  All of the factors
> above can, and perhaps do, contribute towards you being more
> munificent toward them regarding the bad switches than I am willing
> to be.  That's just human nature.
>
>> just like the many weekends of inconvenience I've spent
>> debugging X10 stuff.  Like I said earlier, pioneers have
>> arrows in their backs.
>
> For some people (and at one point in my life that was me) spending a
> weekend working for Smarthome, gratis, would have meant I would have
> lost overtime pay or weekend consulting jobs.  It would have meant
> cheating my wife or kids out of a weekend outing.
>
> For those reasons, among others, I don't think it's quite fair to
> compare having to jack Smarthome's "known defective" switches in and
> out to X-10 debugging required years, in fact decades, after the
> original purchase.
>
> I ran X-10 for at least 10 years without any issues whatsoever. Only
> when the world changed and became filled with signal suckers did
> X-10's engineering finally need expensive help like a Monterey
> Poweline Analyzer. X-10 worked, as advertised, for long enough that
> no court in the world would find they didn't live up to their claims.
> That's not true of Smarthome and their Switchlincs.
>
> I don't *like* the time I spend debugging current X-10 problems, but
> I can't realistically compare it removing, returning and reinstalling
> Smarthome switches that THEY knew were bad but sold anyway.  That
> irks me (in case you hadn't noticed! <g>)
>
> In the case of X-10, I do the debugging and have spent $400 in
> analysis tools because I have a significant investment in both
> equipment and wife training that I want to protect.  That's very,
> very different than Smarthome discovering problems months after
> release that end up with their reworking every switch.
>
> Selling those switches from March to July 2006 that they knew had
> "slight variations in the triac" is just typical cover-up corporate
> behavior and I am more than a little sick of it.  It's only a notch
> or two up from oil companies insisting at Senate hearings they were
> not price gouging after Katrina but posting record profits of  62%
> for that and subsequent quarters after years of average gains.  WTF?
>
> I try to look at what companies DO, not what they say.  Smarthome
> sold duff switches that they didn't test well enough.  Worse, still,
> they've only told the world through second-hand means.  If they were
> "stand up guys" they might have behaved differently and posted here
> in CHA as soon as they knew there was a problem.
>
> But the less people know about the defect, the less it's going to cost
> Smarthome.  They know that.  You know that.  I know that.  We all
> know that. They also know Google Groups and Usenet exist and you'd
> better believe that although they won't post here, they sure do read
> here.  One might even wonder if these very discussions didn't
> inspire them to finally decide to fix all the switches in inventory
> and not just sell the bad ones out, as they obviously had been doing
> before these threads began.
>
> I don't like paying $+3 a gallon for gas, I don't like companies
> selling defective equipment they know is bad and I *really* don't
> like companies doing their beta testing on unwitting, paying
> customers.
>
> Two last questions.  In light of articles like this:
>
> http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/7/prweb410594.htm
>
> "At this point Insteon is competing for market share with legacy X10,
> Infrared, proprietary RF (Lutron, Zensys), ZigBee, and IEEE 802.15.4
> products," says Kirsten West, PhD, founder and Principal Analyst with
> the high-tech market research firm WTRS."
>
> Doesn't it at least *seem* credible with that kind of
> competition(some of them reaching market BEFORE Smarthome) that
> Smarthome might have rushed its product to market so as to gain
> market share?"
>
> Isn't there a distinction in your mind between the people buying the
> product when it first came out (true pioneers) and the people who
> bought the product well after Smarthome knew there was a defect?
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>> "Dave Houston" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>>> news:44d0f843.1326363906@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>>> The author of those posts received one of the new "fixed" dimmers
>>>> and he seems to confirm what I wrote here in his post dated
>>>> 08/01/2006 : 1:35:25 PM where he says the SmartHome "fix" is a much
>>>> larger choke that merely masks the underlying flaw.
>>>
>>> There's a new post at:
>>>
>>> http://www.techmall.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=405
>>>
>>> which seems to be Smarthome's official forum but it could also be
>>> someone calling themselves that.  Anyway, here's the latest, with
>>> ["Mike's comments"] so marked.
>>>
>>> ["As previously stated the load flicker is related to
>>> INSTEON-enabled products and not the underlying INSTEON
>>> technology."]
>>>
>>> What is THAT supposed to mean?  We designed it right but built it
>>> wrong? That's nice.  It smacks of the SODDI defense,
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SODDI_Defense
>>>
>>> except that there aren't any other "dudes" around!
>>>
>>> ["Our engineers have been able to replicate these symptoms in our
>>> lab and in the field. We have found that a small percentage of units
>>> flicker due to slight variations in the triac."]
>>>
>>> Sounds like you and the guy with the huge triacs were right.
>>> "Slight variations in the triac" means "some triacs are bad" in my
>>> downhome, low-tech comprehension of English.
>>>
>>> ["The component that was in question was the choke coil."]
>>>
>>> Could this also mean the cheapest way to fix the problem was not to
>>> replace the "slightly varying" triacs but to apply a cheaper patch
>>> downstream. Aren't triacs much more expensive (and harder to
>>> replace) than choke coils?
>>>
>>> ["Repeated INSTEON signals generated by the dimmer or controller
>>> were getting into the triac and causing the flicker."]
>>>
>>> And this wasn't noticed in the beta test?  It's certainly being
>>> noticed now. Bad beta test.
>>>
>>> [" We have increased the value of the choke coil to attenuate the
>>> INSTEON signals that go into the triac."]
>>>
>>> I wonder if that has any downside, like further attenuating X-10
>>> signals and creating problems for people with hybrid systems.  Any
>>> time you change even a single component, it can have unwanted side
>>> effects elsewhere.
>>>
>>> ["We are pleased to have received ETL approval sooner than expected
>>> and been able to roll this into production."]
>>>
>>> Read that to mean "all the chatter about bad Insteon switches
>>> spooked us so badly that we paid ETL a rush fee to get a fix out."
>>> They know they very much need to quiet what for them must be a most
>>> uncomfortable discussion in the midst of a home automation protocol
>>> war.
>>>
>>> http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/7/prweb410594.htm
>>>
>>> ["The following skus are the first that SmartLabs Design has been
>>> able to roll into production. We plan to roll these changes into all
>>> dimmable devices in the next few months. Please note the new rev
>>> codes on the front of the switches:"]
>>>
>>> Ah, so we know that if they plan to roll them into ALL dimmable
>>> devices, they are very likely ALL defective or will become so under
>>> the proper conditions.
>>>
>>> ["Products that shipped on or after Friday July 28, 2006 will have
>>> the new Rev codes."]
>>>
>>> Well, at least we know which ones to avoid! Anything BEFORE  #2476D
>>> SwitchLinc Rev. 2.5 and  #2476DH SwitchLinc 1000W Rev. 2.3
>>>
>>> ["If you have a unit or units that flicker prior to the rev codes
>>> above, please call tech support for an exchange (800-762-7846 Option
>>> 6). Exchanges will be handled as a standard product return with 2
>>> options to choose from, shipping will be free of charge for both
>>> options."]
>>>
>>> That's nice, Mr. Mike.  What Option do I press to get the free
>>> electrician's visit?  Oh, wait, there isn't any!  Oddly enough, when
>>> I went to look in Google for messages about how people with old and
>>> brittle wiring might find that settlement less than generous, I
>>> found this one:
>>>
>>>    > By the 1980's  both the copper and insulation had become
>>>    > brittle. It if came out of the conduit during remodeling when
>>>    > one pulled, it seemed like a good idea. If it broke, it was a
>>>    > nightmare. You could be trying to improve some minor thing
>>>    > and end up with no lights or worse and need to cut open the
>>>    > plaster lathe and start over all over.
>>>
>>> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.home.automation/msg/63d0551f2b029828
>>>
>>> "If something broke, it was a nightmare."  Well, that sums up why
>>> *I* think Smarthome is trampling their customers by making them
>>> absorb the foreseeable and consequential recall costs.  Or don't
>>> they know that over-twisting solid copper house wiring leads to
>>> metal fatigue?
>>>
>>> It's pretty general knowledge jacking switches in and out is neither
>>> free, easy nor without risk.  The "generous" terms Smarthome offers
>>> are what should have been offered during a beta test, not to
>>> purchasers who had no reason to suspect Smarthome continued to sell
>>> switches with either defective triacs or undersized chokes or both.
>>>
>>> Nothing I've seen so far expresses any remorse for selling switches
>>> to people who might NOT have bought them had they known they had
>>> "slight variations in the triac."  They did not have the benefit of
>>> making that choice - they had no say in the matter - Smarthome made
>>> the choice for them by deciding to keep selling the switches.
>>>
>>> Now, Smarthome should be placed in the equally bad position of not
>>> having in any say in paying for electrician's bills experienced by
>>> people who bought those switches between March 2006 and July 2006.
>>>
>>> I don't understand how people can support the actions of a company
>>> that would foist defective products on people and just "hope" for
>>> the best.

> "BruceR" <br@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:wrtAg.9089$Vq1.7076@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> I think this is getting a bit carried away. They found the problem,
>> they fixed the problem and they're replacing the products that have
>> problems.
>