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

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"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.

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?

--
Bobby G.



>
>
>
> > "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.
>
>