meross Smart Dimmer Switch (2-Pack)

Including: • turns your lights on and off. Check • dims your lights. Check • undims your lights. Check • works with Alexa. Check, although whether Alexa works is a different story. The only way I could get it to work in my daughter's room is if I changed her name to Brian. • works with Google. Check. Although running back and forth to Vital Statistics to change my daughter's name to Brian and back again depending on which smart device I want to use is going to be a real pain. • easy to install. Well, yeah, pretty much. The instructions (which, by the way, are printed on the box—don't waste your time hunting around the house to see if you dropped them, like I heard some people did) simply say to use the Meross app. Which is a lot more useful than you'd think. About eight screens' worth of clear diagrams. The most important ones have been reposted in these reviews. If you've spliced wires together before using wire nuts (included), installation is pretty easy, once you understand what all the pictures are of. (I thought the switch was an iPhone for a long while.) There is only one diagram you really need, the one that shows how to connect the four switch wires to the four colors of wires in your junction box. The only trouble I had with installation was this step…the diagram tells you to hook one of the switch wires to a wire that will be either black or red, another to a wire that will be either black or brown. Well, the wires in my house are bare copper, white, black and…black. So two black wires, both coming from the same direction in the junction box, no red, no brown. So I just shrugged and picked a black wire at random, pretty sure (OK, hoping) that it wouldn't matter too much if I got it wrong (by the way, I don't think this is a common practice with actual electricians). Of course with 50-50 odds I lost. The switch did nothing. But, no sparks came shooting out of the wall toward my eyes, so I was heartened enough to take the switch back out, switch the black wires, and try again. And then everything was fine. The switch gave me a quick little light show to let me know it was working and to show off a bit, frankly, and that was that. If not for the two-black-wires snag, the installation would've taken about ten minutes or so. That's not including adding the device in the app. Which was also pretty easy, but as I had bought a few Meross Wi-Fi outlet switches before, I already had the app, so it was just a matter of telling the app I was adding a new dimmer switch, and that was basically that. I didn't have to type in the Wi-Fi password again or anything. Basically my phone pointed double fingers at me and said, "Gotcha covered." (This actually happened.) Then I had to go to Google and Alexa and add the devices there. That was also really quick and painless. Until, as I mentioned, I tried to get Alexa to understand my kid's name, so if you're trying to decide between Google and Alexa, advantage: Google. Sorry, Amazon. :-S • You do need to have a neutral wire. Now me not being an electrician at all (maybe you could tell?), this was very confusing to me. In my wall I've got sheaths that each contain a wire, and another wire, and a naked metal wire. I assume one's hot, one's cold, one's ground. I think but I wouldn't swear that black's hot, white's not, and I'm almost positive that bare copper is ground. But I don't know if any of them are neutral or not. And I don't know how to tell; they all seem nice enough. And the fact that Meross thinks I should be finding red or brown wires in my walls makes me wonder if I should trust their judgment. But this is the Age of Readily Available but Highly Questionable Information on the Internet. From what I found out, if you have a house built after 1980 or so, you've most likely got neutral wires in your wiring. Which wire? The white one. What's the difference between it and a not-hot wire? I don't know. But basically, if you open up your junction box and it looks like the picture on the Meross app, you're good to go. And to be extra safe, I described my setup to Meross, and they wrote me back very quickly and assured me that I had what I needed to make the switch work. So I took a deep breath and went ahead and connected it (again, not how electricians do it), figuring if the switch didn't work out and my house burned down, well, that's a scathing one-star review for Meross. • it does remember the setting you last set it at, contrary to what another reviewer said. If you set it to half-bright on the wall, when you turn the light off and back on it comes up half-bright. What's more, if you open Google or Alexa, they both show the light as half-bright. If you tell the Google app to turn the brightness to 20% and open the Alexa app, you will see the brightness is at 20% there too. And vice versa. So I had no troubles with the switch losing its memory. • the switch fit my junction box, no troubles there. The switch plate is pretty flush to the wall…maybe I would've liked it a smidge closer, but I don't think anyone but me would ever notice. But it's not like it's uneven or anything. The plate snaps onto the switch rather than screwing on, which is a bit clunky. • I had no delay in turning on the light. Unless you count the light quickly ramping up from dim to full brightness; it starts out dim and very quickly brightens to full in less than a second. I thought that was kinda cool, a feature, not a bug. • the light on the switch is bright enough to see and help you find the switch in the dark (if you can't remember that it's where it always is, by the door), but it's not bright enough to keep you awake, in my opinion. When it's dark in the room, the bottom light glows a pale orangey-red. I have had devices with LEDs so bright I had to break out the electrical tape, but this is a subtle glow and wouldn't bother me. I do wish that the Meross app allowed you to do things like cut off the LEDs altogether, just because some people would prefer that, and why not allow you to? It couldn't be difficult to code that option in. Or change the maximum brightness level; you can change the maximum dimness, why not the maximum brightness too? Most people wouldn't care, but it's an easy feature to add for those that would. • I fail to see why using wire nuts in wiring a switch is a problem. That's how you do it, isn't it? (Again, not an electrician.) CONCLUSION: I would give it four and a half stars, but since I can't, and since the reasons for my half-star penalty would've been quibbly, five stars. Does what it says it does, works, not hard to install. I'll edit my review down if I have any trouble with it. Full disclosure: I received this switch for free in exchange for giving a review of it, but I didn’t go easy on them for that. They just asked for a review, period, not a favorable or five-star review. I just gave the switch that rating cz that's what I think it deserves.