MVP-8400 poll (wireless TP)

ericmedley

In the world of politics and sales, perception is reality.

I tend not to deal with this very well myself.

So, I post this poll to try and get a sense of what's reality and what's perception.

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with MVP8400 problems. Those problems seem to stem from 1 of 2 classes. 1) WIFI communications issues or 2) Flakiness or flat out non-working panels.

We've discussed the first issue at lenght here. The 2nd not so much.

Some anecdotal observations from our shop...

1) Every single project to roll out of our shop for the past 2 years has had at least one TP sent back for warranty repair of one issue or another. The most common seem to be "Panel shuts down and will not reboot" or "Screen goes completely white" or "Wireless card is flaky"

2) WIFI communications are almost always unreliable and unpredictible. (this may or may not have anything to do with the MVP. There are way too many variables to nail it down conclusively) However, we do have one situation where we know for a fact that there is only one WAP with 2 panels and absolutely no other 2.4Ghz interference.

In our situation, our designers/sales people have really pushed the wireless panel as the main interface. We tend to not use the inwall wired as the main source of control. And we never put a wired panel in the middle of a room (wired - remote control)

I have shuddered everytime I see a system come through that calls for 5-10 wireless panels controlling everything in the home with maybe one in wall at some remote part of the house as a convenience.

Having said all this, I must admit that I don't have any hard numbers beyond what I've just said. We track all our returns and customer complaints and issues. But it's real hard to put a good number on the 'reliability' of the panel. Overal perception is that it's something like 50% of the time things work well. (like my old college car, it runs great when you can get it to run...)

The new MVP-5200i is now starting to slip into our projects as the main panel of choice. I'm finding myself even more frightened by them as initially they seem to be even more flaky and unreliable.

So, to the poll. I'd be curious, if you use the MVP-8400 as a main (or at least significant part of) controll interface, how would you rate it's overall reliability?