Thanks, we sincerely appreciate any and all prayers!
It’s truly insane out there and yeah, trying to manage overhead costs when there are some months when there is limited stock and then knowing you may not have any stock at all is actually super frightening.
Luckily, we have an awesome team who has been thru a lot and they’ve taken to heart the start-up culture (even though I wouldn’t really consider us a start up lol) of wearing many hats, sacrificing vacation hours and working overtime.
I have been periodically checking on the on/off switches for months now before finally reading through this thread. I was starting to worry that you were discontinuing the on/off to focus on the dimmers instead or something! Zwave chips having lead times as long as two years is nuts and definitely explains the delay
Probably because everyone buys one and never again lol. I had so much trouble with sensor and dimmer.
I assume there are no updates on the fan switches? I have a Leviton which died after 5 months …… I really need that fan back to live and don’t want to buy another brand (since I already use one Inovelli fan switch and being super happy with it).
Go for the dimmer (they are in stock), just set parameter 1 to 0 (immediately) and parameter 2-4 to 101 (which is copying the immediate setting of parameter 1) and you have a on/off switch with dimming functionality for later if you change light setup. And additional bonus is, they look much cooler
I already have the dimmers where I want the on/off switches. I would rather have the smaller LED bar in that location. Plus i want to move my dimmers some where else.
I need some for fans in bathrooms, unfortunately my understanding is that for cases like that using a dimmer even with immediate on could damage the dimmer from the fan load so I’ll hold out for on/off
No new stock coming anytime soon. Every once in awhile we have refurbs come up but none at the moment! Will let you know if I find any additional in the office.
Lol, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, things are very hard right now from a supply chain perspective and it’s definitely worrisome from a business perspective.
Here’s what we’re up against:
Silicon Labs have told us to basically forget about 700 Series products until 2023 and that 500 Series will be tough to get until end of Q2 2022.
If we do want 500 Series for our current switches, we can buy on the, “spot market” but that adds an extra $6 per unit (our cost… does not include tariffs on that new cost)
One of the parts in our Dimmer switch has also been discontinued and we need to look for a replacement – I think it’s the MOSFET, which really sucks
So, it’s not looking good at all for Z-Wave in 2022. This is why there’s simply, “unknown” for many (if not all) of the statuses above.
However, all is not doom and gloom, I promise and we’ve been accounting for this for some time. In fact, we got kind of a head-start in overcoming it with ZigBee.
It was a hard realization for us given that we love Z-Wave and have always been huge fans of the protocol (still are) but with the many supply chain issues, companies never really adopting the standard, etc, we made the decision to start the process of creating our ZigBee line.
We do not have the same issues here with supply chain. In fact, the manufacturer can allocate more ZigBee products than we have demand for (right now) so we should be good.
Of course, the problem in the interim is that we are out of stock on just about everything and ZigBee is still a couple months away from production so it kind of stinks from a cashflow perspective, but we’ll be fine.
My hope is the Blue Series will take off and be more successful than the Red Series so that we don’t have that much of a ramp up in demand, but time will tell.
Anyway, hope that helps. Long story short is that times are tough right now for sure, but we’ve been in similar situations in the past (switching from our original manufacturer there was a 9mo period where there was no inventory) and have come out much stronger. I’m confident this will be the case here.
The transparency on how the supply chain is affecting business, worries, alternative ideas, and positivity is really nice to hear. Can’t help but to wish for the best.
All the best luck!
Z-wave + zigbee stick so i am eady for the zigbee blue when released. Already have 2 spots picked out.
Is there any ETA for new-stock LZW36’s, or are Refurb units going to be the only solution in the near future? I’ve been holding off on a project since last fall and haven’t seen any of the stock emails
Unfortunately no ETA whatsoever. Refurbs are the only answer at the moment but pretty hard to come by as we haven’t really had anyone return a fan switch in 6+ months since we haven’t sold them in so long.
How many do you need?
