This is a friendly PSA to all ZWave users out there: do your best to avoid Intermatic switches.

When I was first starting out, I wanted to pick up a bunch of switches cheaply. I ended up hearing about Intermatic CA600 dimmer switches, which could be found on eBay in bulk "buy it now" auctions for $99/6. That works out to $16.50/switch, which is clearly the best price you're going to find for a ZWave dimmer switch. Three years after buying two batches, it's still the best price I've seen by a huge margin.

While I don't regret the purchases, I do think I should have spent the money more wisely and built my system more slowly. These Intermatic switches have a pretty decent failure rate (I've had two overheat and die). They get unpaired from my controller in power outages. They act flaky in general, where their LED will turn back on even when it's still included (it's supposed to go off when the switch is included).

To make things worse, they seem to harm my network. I've had slowdowns and delay issues for a long time. It's been extremely frustrating. Well, after the last blackout kicked my Intermatics off my network again, I decided enough was enough. I'm going to slowly start replacing those switches (it'll take a while, I have a dozen to go). I did swap out two of the Intermatics for Linears and things improved immediately. I still have issues, but the performance has been noticeably better. I can't wait to switch out the rest of them!

So, if the Intermatic switches are still out there, don't bother with them. If you have some and your system isn't working well, dump them.