Dimmer

Have had this for a few weeks and it works great. No complaints so far. Two things to keep in mind: 1) you must have a neutral wire and 2) you must have room in the electrical box to stuff this thing in there. The hardware that needs to go into the box is fairly big, even bigger than a normal dimmer switch, but not by much. My existing dimmer switch didn't have labels for the hot and neutral and they were the same color wire. I had to do trial and error to figure it out, but it wasn't bad.I have this tied into our Echo and it's pretty cool, but I honestly don't do it out of need, more novelty. That has more to do with my home layout, so YMMV. But the main reason I got this and it's killer feature is the easy scheduling from the app. You can set a schedule of when the switch turns on and off. It's great for every day use or for use as a security timer. It's a lot easier to schedule and set than the old school timers my dad used to use. It's also compatible with IFTTT, but I personally don't have a lot of use for this right now. Good to know it's there though.I prefer this dimmer to the traditional, mechanical ones. It's a nice big button area to turn the lights on and off. The dimmer is harder to use than my old one because it's a capacitive touch slider. You just touch and slide your finger. The old one had a nice big lever for doing that, but it annoyed me because I turn the light on and off much more frequently than adjust the dimmer. I appreciate the bigger on/off switch compared to the bigger slider. It's a good looking design, it's not obnoxiously techy or anything. It just has a subtle led that changes colors to alert you to something. For the most part, I don't notice the light there. I've been thinking of replacing all of my sliders with this more for the really nice appearance than function, but it's hard to justify at this price. Yes, the downside of this is that it is really expensive for a dimmer switch. But I definitely think it's worth it for one of my most used switches in the house. It's debatable how much it's worth it for the less used ones.

This dimmer installed without a lot of fuss. One may have trouble with swapping the live input (black) and output (red) wires, as a "normal" dimmer may work fine with either of those switched, as the dimmer just changes pulse width, which would work on either input or output. This is a relatively complex dimmer electrically, so the order matters. The instructions were good as far as troubleshooting; if they are reversed the dimmer just won't work.ADDED:Also got the 3-way switch:So, to start, this is one of the more complex installations, with FIVE wires. You do need the neutral wire, usually white, which is often not used on a regular switch. On a recently built home, this will be there, but on an older one it will not.The wires in your wall may be various colors, in my case 2 black, white, red, green. The switch has white, blue, red, black, and green. So, not a match, but the instructions were very helpful in identifying what was what. It went in easily and worked on the first try.The Alexa integration was basically automatic after using the Wemo app. I'm pretty happy with it. The 3-way switch seems to have improved readiness versus the dimmer, which sometimes has a "miss" with Alexa, working right afterward.You do only need 1 switch for a 3-way circuit.This connected to the app just fine, and you can choose whether you have incandescent, CFL, or LED bulbs, and the dimmer calibrated to my LEDs instantly. There are some limitations on current, so really you're not going to run 10 incandescent lights off this; 1-5 should be OK in just about all cases.I've also paired it with Alexa and Google Home without issue. It worked just as it should.One thing to keep in mind is that the dimmer does require a "neutral" wire; this is usually the white one behind your wall (and the black one is the "hot" line). Most light switches do not really need this, as they have the live input, output, and ground (green wire). My old dimmer did not use the neutral, and this line was sort of buried way back in the wall, with no lead. I had to tap into it to make one. Not a big deal really, but something to be aware of. It is noted on the package, so that's fair. It would probably be good to make this more prominent in the listing, though, as installing this dimmer to replace a switch or dimmer with no neutral line starts pushing this into a "medium" difficulty job rather than an "easy" one.In terms of behavior, it does brighten and dim when you turn these on/off. I'd say it's about 0.25 seconds to turn on full brightness, and 0.5 seconds to go from full brightness to off. I didn't expect this, but it's fine, and is NOT like the first-generation LED bulbs that had a noticeable delay in turning on.