Well, either I am unlucky and got some bad switches, or there is something in my home that is shortening the life of my GE/Jasco. I have had no problems with my Leviton plug-in switches that were purchased at same time. Go figure.
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What’s the date code on the front of the GE switches? I bought a ton of 17XX and they are dropping like flies in my house. Only speculating here but they must have had a manufacturing issue because they upped their warranty to 5 years. All the new ones have been fine and the older ones were fine too. When I purchased my first HE in early 2018 I started replacing all my 4 year old non plus devices so I bought many 2017 models.
It might be worth it to take one apart and see if the failed component is visible if not doing a warranty replacement for it. It's likely you got a bad batch built in the timeframe that they had some manufacturing defect.
Dirty power or grid equipment failure can also cause premature death. Sometimes see this in the summer months when the grid is under extreme load and a transformer pops. Weird things can happen when these go. Close/direct lightning strikes can also wreak havoc.
Also worth investigating the circuits and seeing how much noise is on your ground. A tiny amount of voltage isn't a problem but if your seeing like 30 or 40 volts then you should start trying to track it down. Noisy transformers usually the culprit in these cases.
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Thanks everyone for you insights. I think I’ll just change brands and see what happens. If my problem is due to manufacturing, shame on them for not testing thoroughly. I can’t afford buying new zwave switches every couple of years. All my other gear is connected to the same power source without issue.
They should still be under warranty if it's the batch from 2017 that had the issues.
Speaking from 20 years experience working at a consumer HW manufacturer, some issues just won't come up in pre-release testing (even w/accelerated wear-and-tear tests), due to long lead times required for the fault to appear.
With devices getting incremental changes in each new generation you have to rely on real-world experiences w/previous generations from warranty/customer call data to identify if real and potential long-term problems are likely. Any issues in the 2017 batch likely came from problems w/parts sourced from their suppliers (unless Jasco or their manufacturer made a significant design/fabrication change) which are also very hard to ID in advance. Suppliers (and out-sourced manufacturers) cost-reduce their parts/processes, making changes that they may not share.
Just saying that every reliability issue isn't the result of a lazy or irresponsible vendor...as one of our VPs was fond of muttering to himself when these types of issues would arise in the field, "sh_t just happens."
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