I have been in the air for a while now flying from Tampa to Melbourne - I am at the CEDIA/INTEGRATE show in Australia this week. If anybody would like to hit me up for a beer or some other beverage, please stop by the Avation booth where we are demonstrating 4K UltraHD over IP and the 2G+4+ Tiling Transmitter.

I am more than willing to share with everybody that SAGE is the brand DC power supply that went totally bad as a third party supplier. We have lost over $50K dealing with the nightmare that this company dumped on our doorstep. I now have to consider that the cost of having done business with a supplier that out of the blue decided to cut a corner and use a 2 cents lower cost capacitor after a 4 year history of great performance. FWIW, the SAGE company would not begin to entertain the prospect of compensating Just Add Power or our DEALERS/DISTRIBUTORS for the costs we all incurred due to their bad 2 cents decision. In case I didn't make myself clear to some other MANUCFACTURERS - DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THE SAGE BRAND FOR POWER SUPPLIES. IF YOU ARE A DEALER AND YOU HAVE ANY SAGE POWER SUPPLIES IN THE FIELD, EVEN IF THEY ARE LONG PAST THE WARRANTY PERIOD, WE WILL STILL SEND YOU REPLACEMENTS FREE OF CHARGE ANYWAYS.

PHIHONG is the brand power supply we now ship exclusively (the same brand that Cisco ships with their IP phones). While most MANUFACTURERS would guard such information from their competitors, I'm willing to divulge this information because we are more interested in assuring our DEALERS that we have identified a reliable supplier of such devices (i.e. DC 5V power supplies) that we can not possibly build ourselves in the USA (building such power supplies is just not going to happen within the American borders due to a long list of environmental regulations).

As a matter of fact, I do know that in the urgent search for a good and reliable replacement supplier, there was a window of time where we were buying every DC 5V 2Amp or greater power supply, that did not say SAGE, we could find on the shelf of any wholesale supplier around. We literally emptied the shelves of several companies. You have to understand that when the DEALER had been hit by the SAGE disaster, and their customer was holding a gun to their head, we were willing to do whatever it took to get their customers systems back online ASAP. I guess it is possible that some of those other brand power supplies could be less reliable than PHIHONG (except CUI brand, which we know has also been shown to be a great product, but guaranteed large quantity supply volume was a problem at the time we were vetting potential suppliers). If anybody has received some other BRAND X power supplies for their Just Add Power devices that they are not confident in using, we will replace them with new PHIHONG supplies also. I'd even be willing to go one step further and accept a DEALERS own preferred brand choice of a similarly rated replacement power supply if they think that their crystal ball tells them that it is a better choice versus PHIHONG.

INDUSTRY OBSERVATION

It has been my experience that DISTRIBUTORS who sell anything to DEALERS guard their DEALER contact details and do not want to tell the MANUFACTURERS the name of their DEALERS out of fear that someday the MANUFACTURER will decide to go DEALER direct and bypass the DISTRIBUTORS - call it a trust thing. I've told the DISTRIBUTORS my mom taught me that you dance with the one who brought you to the prom, but too many previous manufactures have messed up the market and stabbed the DISTRIBUTORS and DEALERS in the back. Like it or not, there are a lot of DISTRIBUTORS who are not going to be able to play the trust game. As we have grown, Just Add Power did not make it a requirement for a DISTRIBUTOR to report such specific details. I guess we could start some sort of Warranty Registration program for new installations, but I'm willing to wager that there are plenty of paranoid DEALERS who would rather throw away the warranty registration card/URL advise versus sharing the names/details of their precious end users. They probably wouldn't be paranoid if everybody wasn't out to get them.

In the same vein, a lot of DEALERS don't want to tell the DISTRIBUTOR or the MANUFACTURER who their customer is out of fear that they'll be cut out of the deal also. Chalk this one up to even more trust issues caused by previous sleaze bag MANUFACTURERS and DISTRIBUTORS, despite the fact they are dealing with a company like Just Add Power that has a 20+ year history of not screwing the DEALER or the DISTRIBUTOR (see the prom reference above). We actually have some DEALERS who literally spray paint the Just Add Power cases to hide the product brand from their CUSTOMERS and other DEALERS. (FWIW, we don't void the warranty for such behavior, we just feel sorry for all the people who have so many trust issues. We also ship them back repaired/replaced pieces in the metal cases that they have decided to customize).

For those of you who think the MANUFACTURER should compensate a DEALER for a truck roll, I'm willing to sign up for this program, but only if you can get all the DEALERS to agree to pay for the cost we have incurred replacing and repairing devices due to their so called "innocent" mistakes (i.e. they used the wrong voltage power supply, or unplugged a device from the network in the middle of a firmware update and bricked the motherboard). For those of you interested in keeping score at home, Just Add Power would definitely come out on top of the deal compared to the status quo. For now, we will continue to consider such "innocent" mistakes just another cost of doing business.

So, if you are a DEALER who is unwilling or unable to forgive/understand how a MANUFCATURER could get innocently blind sided by a third party out of the blue, then I am willing to accept your decision to not do business with my company. It has been my experience that the vast majority of the DEALERS are a bit more reasonable. It is for those of you reasonable DEALERS that we will continue to lead and innovate the marketplace.

Damn, someone sh1t in your cheerios today ;-)

I just sent in my dealer agreement today and will be sending me CC form shortly (wasn't sent to me in the original email with the dealer agreement). I am very much looking forward to working with the product. The flexibility it affords already closed my first JAP deal with a second one already in the works. I did very few Matrices as it was a set number of inputs/outputs and thats what it was. I have no intentions of spray painting over any covers anytime soon :-)

Ed,
Kudos to you for naming the company, making it easier for us to decide what to do with what we have. Your rant is well deserved by every target you point at!

It bothers me a bit that you write as though it's in everyone's best interest to get that brand name out there, but you didn't reveal either the old or the new brand in your first explanation, doing so only after I called for you to reveal the name. Maybe you were going to do that anyway, I don't know.

At any rate, the rest of what you write is so so true. It takes a mighty QC department to correctly pass on any product, and China's means of manufacturing decision making seem especially bent toward the two cent saving without them considering the consequences. And you can't tell at the start whether a slightly different power supply will fail in time. QC departments can't wait months or years to approve parts. They can bake the hell out of power supplies, but would even that have revealed the problem? It's hard to tell.

Thanks for the info!

Ernie,

Are you a Justaddpower dealer?

Fantastic support, amazing product! Im using JAP on a 2x2 Video wall with seura outdoor TVs.

I cant get over how much I love JAP!!

Well you only LOVE or HATE products, there is no inbetween. So if it's even slightly good, you're bound to love it!!!

No.

Then why are you giving Ed such a hard time?

I said something bothered me A BIT. I was concerned that my comment would be taken negatively but I thought it needed to be said. I was not laying into him for being irresponsible or insensitive to our needs...okay, your needs. (I assume you're a JAP dealer.) Although, looking back at his post, when he said an entire supplier's stuff became bad and he didn't name them, he was in fact being insensitive to your needs. Now that I've answered you, isn't that even worse than what I said at first?

And why would a person have to be a dealer to come up with an idea that's a good thing for all manufacturers to do, such as identifying a third party brand, and then commenting that the brand name was withheld at first, then revealed?

Just imagine how limited the discussions here would be if, for instance, it was not somehow proper to talk bad about Harmony remotes without being a Harmony dealer. If you had been a little less sensitive about what I had said, we would not have a thread where JAP and Harmony are both mentioned, but the point had to be made. Was silence about how unreliable Jaguars used to be ever demanded of people who did not own Jaguars?

I think Ed did a great thing. I just don't believe that an accurate response like "Yes, right, it's a good idea to tell you the manufacturer's name" should be "I am more than willing to share with everybody that...etc."

So your admitting you created a problem out of nothing other then pointing out the obvious?

ED did very well, And good for him for pointing out the issue and calling out the manufacture that boned them. All that matters here is that they are taking care of their dealers, bottom line.

I think all you accomplished was getting Ed worked up to the point where he had to write a huge post defending his company.   Hopefully he didn't group his actual dealers into one group led by you.

|Hopefully he didn't group his actual dealers into one group led by you.

+1 especially considering he's not even a dealer, so what was the point ?!?

I don't know.  He likes to type apparently.

Nearly 25k posts didn't give that one away. And they aren't one word posts either.

As one of the just add power distributors I can say that the power supply issue was costly for everyone.

I remember when Control4 had the same issue with the HC200 power supplies.. They went through 3 vendors before they found a stable one

I have attached pictures of the current and proper power supply.