I am new here but wanted to share my cautionary tale. During a recent remodel, I started to transition all of my light switches to smart dimmer switches. I thought I did my due diligence and decided to go with Inovelli Red switches… and bought about 15 of them. I had a professional electrician install the first handful, as there additional electrical work needed throughout the home.
Fast forward to the installation, we installed brand new recessed lighting and fixtures with LED throughout the home. One one switch that has 4 LED recessed lights, the lights turn off inconsistently starting at 25% dim… on another; on another switch with 2 fixtures, 1 light works properly and the other flashes light a disco any time the dim is below 50%.
When I asked my contractor about it, he immediately blamed the light switches… I disagreed. I reached out to Inovelli 3 months ago. First, it took me over a month to hear from them, but when I did, they suggested I just post it on their community board because “they were too busy.” I pushed back and asked for basic customer service. Another month passed… I finally heard back with a singular question… did they use a neutral wire in the installation. I answered in the affirmative and have never heard back from them… EVER!
When you take a chance to invest in a new up-and-coming company, the best you can hope for is their product to perform as promised… the least you can hope for is basic customer service… Inovelli has failed on all fronts… don’t believe me… try to find any phone number for the company… you can’t because they are hiding from their failure! At least invest in a BS number that connects me to India so that you have the perception of an attempt at customer service. Please learn from my mistake… for your home, invest in products where the company stands behind what they sell… I am switching to Lutron.
For what it’s worth, not all switches and dimmers will work with all LEDs.
I have had issues with the current generation of GE/Jasco Z-wave dimmers being unable to consistently dim the LED ceiling lights I have. Zooz dimmers worked for the same lights.
And had an issue with a Zooz ZEN26 switch trickling enough current when off that the LED bulbs it was controlling remained on but very dim when the switch was off.
Your electrician is probably correct. Try a different brand of dimmer.
I’ll let Eric comment on the customer service issues. Smart dimmers and LED fixtures always seem to be a practice in experimentation, but here’s some things i’ve found helpful with my Inovelli dimmer and LED fixtures. I’ve found they are a bit more picky compared to comparable models from Zooz, Jasco, etc., but I got them to work well doing the following:
For LED light bleed/flashing issues, I had to use Aeotec Bypass even though I have a neutral wire.
My LEDs also turned off at anything below ~25% dim level. There a setting for minimum dim level that i entered so that I can use the full 0-100% dim range.
Whats ironic is in my support ticket they specifically stated that they had almost 1000% ticket volume since the ST transition to the new app. Posting here is a bit ironic.
Have you posted in the community? There are a LOT of us over there daily helping people like you with issues.
There are solutions to try, but here isn’t the right place.
Right now they are saying 3-5 days on response times for tickets, but sounds like you have been well beyond that, definitely unfortunate.
I’m waiting to hear the response, since I was just about to buy 10 Red dimmers for my kitchen project (half there, half in the rest of the house to replace non-plus Jasco)
been there, done that… I chose Lutron Caseta and couldn’t be happier. 100% reliability and great performance. I also love the fact that it is a complete lighting system, versus just switches/dimmers. Not having to rely on ST, Hubitat, HomeAssistant, Node-RED, etc for integration with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Logitech Harmony, etc… is a huge bonus, IMHO. Also nice that I can integrate my Lutron devices with multiple home automation platforms at the same time… and never having to Exclude/Include to change a home automation platform is pretty sweet as well.
I have a pair of early Inovelli Z-Wave plus wall switches, both are in 3-way configuration and they generally work work fine (except for the occasional lockupthat requires a circuit breaker cycle to clear.) Of course these are relays not dimmers. I’ve also asked Inovelli support to send me the new firmware to fix this twice, but no joy. Hence I have purchased no more of these even though I would like to support a local company.
I have a larger number of Leviton switches (8) and dimmers (9) in both standard and 3 way configurations. I have these dimming a variety of LED bulbs and fixtures from various manufactures with no significant issues. The only caveat is that you must be on the latest Levition firmware (V1.20) You can read about the firmware saga in numerous posts including my own.
These devices represent a significant investment. The Lutron stuff looks pretty good, but my suggestion FWIW is to get a couple and try them out to see if they perform as expected before making a huge investment of time and money.
Challenge accepted and I of course want to say we’re terribly sorry for the lack of support and I’ve already addressed the team in regards to where the mistake has happened and how we can fix it.
As @MarkTr mentioned, I’ve commented in our community as well but for simplicity sake, I’ll copy/paste it here at the bottom.
Now it’s my turn if we’re playing truth or dare. I choose truth as this thread is a little exaggerated and while I’m not saying we dropped the ball (we did), what I am saying is that what you’ve put in the Cautionary Tale needs some fact checking.
This is false. You reached out to us in March and we responded to you within 3hrs (see first screenshot) . Then you reached out to us again on August 4th to which an auto-response came and then a real-time follow up came 6 days later (again, not great, but far from the 1mo claimed in the initial post) – please see second thread below.
Maybe I’m not seeing the email ticket where this took place, but in all tickets I pulled up from you, there wasn’t a spot where you asked for, “basic customer service”. Yes, we asked if you had a neutral wire – however, you did not affirm, you said you weren’t sure but probably (again, please see screenshot).
As for not hearing back – yes, you are correct here and again, I’m honestly very sorry this has happened. As you can see from the screenshot (circled in Red), this was sent as a Private Message when it should have been followed up on by the rep who did it to make sure this got to the right person.
Or it could be because we have limited staff and also can solve 99.9% of problems via email or from within the community. 9/10 if you say it’s an emergency and need us to call you, we will. But what that ends up turning into is people reaching out for customized setups calling at all hours of the night. So, we opted out of a phone system.
No thanks, we’d rather not outsource our customer service and I think you’d be more frustrated talking to someone who doesn’t understand your situation. If you look up anywhere on Reddit, Facebook, and all the various communities, our customer service has been rock solid. Sure, there are a few unsatisfied customers, but we go above and beyond to help them.
In your case, as I mentioned in the Inovelli forum, there was a mistake where the rep hit, “Private Message” and did not notify the correct contact internally. Therefore the person who was supposed to help you did not receive it.
Since then, I’ve told the team that whenever you’re sending a PM in the ticket system, reach out to that same person via Microsoft Teams Chat so we know there’s someone waiting.
I can tell you we stand behind our products, but I’m sure it will fall on deaf ears. I’m sorry you’re upset, and as I did in the Inovelli forum, I’m happy to help you – but to reach that conclusion about us not standing up to our products, that’s just not true.
Lutron is a great brand, I’m sure you will be happy with them. Remember to purchase the additional hub.
Original Response in the Inovelli Forum:
Good afternoon @Abusingsoup – first, just wanted to say thanks for posting. While it’s never a post I’d like to read, it’s one that I can certainly learn from and work with the team to figure out what happened.
In looking at your support ticket, it does appear that we dropped the ball, however, I’m not sure about the 3mo scenario (unless I’m missing a ticket under a different email).
The first ticket was sent on March 17th and was as follows (redacted the full names, but I’m happy to un-redact them):
The next ticket that I’m finding was sent on August 4th to which you received an automated email. Your response was on the 5th, saying to contact you when we have time to which we did on the 10th. This is where we directed you to the forum. You replied on the 13th and we responded again on the 14th.
Here’s where it fell apart on our end in that we had an internal PM to each other that looks like it never got picked up on and for that I sincerely apologize. This isn’t the norm.
NOTE: Right click and open in new tab to read – sorry it’s automatically shrunk in the thread.
I’m happy to help you solve this if you haven’t already returned them and again, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I will speak to the customer service team about sending a Microsoft Teams message instead of using the internal ticketing system to tag someone as those notifications do not always come through.
Happy to answer any other questions here.
@Kevin_Reene – thanks for bringing this up – yes, the past 2wks there’s been a significant delay in responses as SmartThings transitioned over the remaining Classic app and this has caused a ton of support tickets on our end as a lot of our Gen 1 products had issues with the migration.
Can you shoot me a PM? I’ll get you the firmware tonight.
Edit: I think I found your ticket and you were working with Eric M. I’ll send you a Z-Stick as it looks like you were using the HomeSeer stick and the HomeSeer firmware update tool which does not support .otz. The files we have are from our old manufacturer in which we unfortunately do not have a relationship with anymore, so they cannot convert these files. So, if you shoot me a PM with your address, I can either send out a Z-Stick of our own, or if you can use your HomeSeer stick with PC Controller, you can update the .otz file there? Either way, happy to help.
Not sure it’s needed, but for anyone who’s finding this thread I just wanted to say that all of my interaction with Inovelli, their customer service, and their products have been top notch. I own 8 dimmers, 10 switches, 4 bulbs, and 4 multi sensors and they’re all great in my setup. I’ve even had their customer service replace a couple switches. Great company.
100%. They have worked with me through some pairing issues, energy reporting issues, firmware testing, and one switch that stopped working RELIABLY they just swapped out no questions asked. They are active/involved in their community and back their product as a personal passion!
Bry… You got me there… “All tied up with his Lutrons…” Haha! (You can never let those clever comments go by without appreciating them!)
Actually, I am just sitting here, waiting… and waiting… and STILL WAITING for anyone from Inovelli to finally follow-up on Eric’s offer to offer any semblance of the majestic customer support that you AND Kevin AND Nick (yes… a total of 3 people of rave about their customer service.)
I don’t know about you, but if I worked for a company who heard about such a dissatisfied customer who was so frustrated that he resorted presenting his case in such an asininely public overture to just to get the company’s attention… I would reach out to that customer to try to make it right…
So in the meantime… just like Maytag Repairman… I will be just be here waiting… and waiting… and waiting.
It appears that you and @Eric_Inovelli are waiting on each other then.
In post #10 above, he says:
I’m happy to help you solve this if you haven’t already returned them and again, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I will speak to the customer service team about sending a Microsoft Teams message instead of using the internal ticketing system to tag someone as those notifications do not always come through.
.
Happy to answer any other questions here.
And he wishes you good luck with your Lutron devices. (By the way, I use Lutron in my own home and I’m very happy with them. excellent engineering.)
Have you tried responding to him directly with a PM here or openly in this thread?
Unfortunately, when I attempted to respond on the Inovelli forum, it seems that my post was blocked (not sure what occurred there.) As for the issue, I have shared my problem via email to their customer service (which Eric has also shared with all of us,) and expressed it my first post on this thread. Is there more needed to start the support?
To reiterate it again… Please see my highlighted quote… Is there more information I need to provide? If yes… please let me know. I can provide whatever will be helpful…
The brand/model numbers of the fixture
The types of light bulbs
Additional questions about the wiring
Is this a firmware issue
Is there a singular faulty dimmer
All valid questions that I would assume should be posed from their customer service… but why am I asking these questions instead of them? But again, I look forward to all the help Eric can provide, publicly, on this forum so we can all benefit from his team’s tremendous customer support that has been raved about on this thread.
The above image shows nothing under your name for anything (ie: Rejected, Approved, Pending, etc)
Yeah, we stopped replying via email because you dared us to respond to your threads which I did. I’m not sure what you want from us? I offered to help here per your request.
I will look into this shortly – give me 2hrs as I have an appointment I’m running to.
Because we asked you initial questions and you weren’t sure on the responses. And again, per the screenshots above, a mistake was made on our end in that we sent it off as a Private Message and the other customer service rep did not receive. Which again, I’m sorry for.
been there, done that… I chose Lutron Caseta and couldn’t be happier. 100% reliability and great performance. I also love the fact that it is a complete lighting system, versus just switches/dimmers. Not having to rely on ST, Hubitat, HomeAssistant, Node-RED, etc for integration with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Logitech Harmony, etc… is a huge bonus, IMHO. Also nice that I can integrate my Lutron devices with multiple home automation platforms at the same time… and never having to Exclude/Include to change a home automation platform is pretty sweet as well.
