So today I'm hooking my first prodigy P-IDOCV up and it wont power on. I check the voltage and it's at 24volts. I call tech support cuz I'm steamed by now and ask the guy if they check this stuff before it goes out the door. Absolutely he says....He writes up an RMA for me after I laid into him about all of the recent DOA's and I stomp back to the rack. I then decided to have a closer look at the power supply. I put my meter back on the connector and lo and behold....they had the 24 volt wire reversed on the connector.... Switched them out and it powers up...I thought to myself....Sure you check this stuff before it goes out the door.


Then later in the day I'm attempting to aquire a P-DIM-EX and it won't aquire. I'm only 30 feet away from the PMC2+. I must have tried the sequence 20 times and still couldn't get the stupid thing to connect...WTF?

End Rant

I had a table lamp dimmer show up and not communicate. I had the other 14 acquired so i knew i was doing everything right on my end. Ended up that it was defective. They shipped another one next day.

Angry about lighting? LOL you should have tried Phast!

dude, i would be quiet if i were you. you are about to get slapped with a lawsuit!!!!

Its ok to complain about it as long as you don't praise something else in the same thread :D

I sent back in a product someone else installed. It's out of warranty but they repair it and don't charge for the repair! When I enquired I was told it was a known issue and they warrantied repair despite the product being out of warranty.

I'm coding a system with AAE and suddenly it sounds as if the amp is oscillating. Tech goes crazy, brings speaker down to the AAE. Same thing. Later on, I get around to checking cable presets and I am about to connect into the composite video jack and........The tech mistakenly connected the right channel into composite video. We were hearing sync, not an amp oscillating.

I'm using the Crestron AAE macro--always a mistake and I'm trying to figure out why my volume is not updating on off. When it hits me. Crestron loves to buffer these signals and if the unit wasn't on it will not pass signals. Guess what? I turn on the zone and the off volume updates. 90 minutes of troubleshooting code for naught. Moral of the story: Only use your own code or get familiar with the code someone else wrote.

Bitch if you want but they're a damned good company, even if they do get you on occasion.

Alan

Agreed, while I was fortuante enough not to suffer a lot of defects from RTI, I've still had my share of defective equipment from RTI, Denon, URC and when its within 30 days and you (on very rare occasion) still have the packaging, its pretty easy to swap out at disty, but for the most part, with any other company besides Crestron, Zektor & Pakedge (in my experience), I've had to wait 3-6 weeks for a new/repaired product. 

Crestron overnights me a new one every time (within warranty, and their warranty is damn good).

Yup they are a great company. I just like to bitch after a long frustrating day!! lol

 sounds like it is time to make the switch to Savant

surely you jest

I am sick of the failures of their wireless products.

Lutron and the iPad will solve most of those wireless problems :D

I am serious... and don't call me Shirley. 

Something doesn't make sense. You said you checked for 24 volts before calling tech support but after calling tech support is when you realize the power is wired backwards. Why didn't you catch that when you originally measured voltage?

Why do people feel the need to yell at tech support over manufacturing issues or QE issues? It's not like that person in tech designed the product or built the product or QE'd the product before packaging. You may feel better about life after 'ripping into him' but all you have really done is make that guy not want to help you past the end of the phone call. I worked TB tech support and guys like you were the ones nobody wanted to deal with because it was a constant bitch session and not really a 'let me help you solve the problem' session. I remember one guy that was extremely high strung. No one would deal with him, except me. He would piss and moan for 2+ hours every phone call...before we got to the problem. It was Crestron's fault his dog shit on the rug that morning is the way he came across. So he would try one or two things, get frustrated because he didn't fully understand what he was doing, call tech, yell for hours, finally get to the problem and *magic* we would solve the problem in a matter of minutes. He had a heart attack on a jobsite and died. He got bent about some video switcher is what I was told but I cannot verify that. He was a generally good person when he wasn't cussing me for existing. His biggest problem is that he didn't have all the knowledge he needed to do his job.

I get that it's frustrating when something is wrong. Yes, QE should have caught that the power supply was wired backwards. Human beings wire those power supplies and as such they will make a mistake from time to time. I'm 100% confident is saying that you have miswired something in your life and I don't know you nor have I ever met you. People will screw up from time to time. You were given an RMA with basically no questions asked. That's excellent customer service. As far as your DOA problem, all you say is 'all of the recent DOA' and that could be 2 devices or 2000 depending on your volume of business. I've been dealing with Crestron products for a very long time and when I have a run of DOA stuff, which is extremely rare, it is usually a batch of product where a chip fails or a resistor is the wrong value or something silly like that. Sure its a pain in the ass but at least I can get it replaced. Be thankful you have a resource like Crestron to work with because if this was a Microsoft or Apple (think bigger than Savant) based home auto product the odds are you would get 30 to 90 days warranty and no advanced replacement. Every control system has issues but it seems to me Crestron are the ones who get hammered the hardest when a problem arises. Oh well, life happens. I'm working on a project at the moment that is barely low to medium in size ($250k or so) and I have had my share of frustrations here but nothing that warrants me going off on a tech.

This is no excuse for QC but one of the reasons we (myself included) piss and moan about faulty product is that we often find ourselves taking it out of the box for the first time on site right when it needs to be installed. I am just as guilty as anyone else. Luckily crestrons support/next day air policy makes this less painful compared to some manufacturers. Zektor and Audio Authority have been pretty good about that stuff also.

If we made a point of getting hardware in, updating firmware, assigning ID's and testing it before the scheduled installation we would eliminate all of our frustration. I think we can all agree that it's much easier to handle initial configuration/setup and out of the box troubleshooting while sitting at our own desks where we have testing gear, internet access, phones and all of our tools... vs a clients house thats an hour away from the shop.

Good question...I put my meter on the connector screws to measure the voltage not even thinking to check which pin was hot and the other not. I got 24 volts on the first touch. One wire had writing on it and the other had white stripes so it wouldn't be hard to miss it if you weren't actually looking for it.


The problem with this point of view is that you are seeing it from a tech support position. They are the front line and I feel for them sometimes but they are the people that need to be sending back this information to "whomever" !!! My sales rep gets pissy emails from me too.

When you have DOA product, an unhappy customer and an electrician on the meter that has to come back and re-install all of your dimmers, I think you have every right to be pissed. It's my money going out the window affecting my bottom line. Today my tech spent another 5 hours between testing dimmers and TS phone calls to find out that none of the dimmers we bought would aquire. Tech support was unsure whether it was the processor or the dimmers that were the problem. So RMA's galore were written today. Fair enough but we still have an unhappy customer who was expecting us to finish today.



Not a good comparison. That's great that you have this type of job going on. There is obviously alot of room for you to absorb some of the losses. Smaller prodigy projects dont have that luxury.