Vantage vs. Lutron
From
The Electrician@21:1/5 to
All on Wed Feb 21 07:38:45 2018
I know this is an old thread but I stumbled on here because I have installed and/or serviced both companies' systems for over a decade and have been around long enough to work with the current Generations: For Vantage, it used to be the Qlink system and
later the Infusion system. For Lutron, they had the whole home Interactive which was followed by Illuminations, which was followed by Homeworks QS and of course they had Radio Ra as their DIY/lower end system which was replaced by the much more powerful
Radio Ra2 and now they have Caseta, RA2 select and a whole bunch of other mini-systems.
The only systems I haven't worked with are the original Vantage Vision and the original Homeworks because well, they're really really old and I couldn't even run the software or find parts so he best thing there is to get a new upgrade. Anyway, I hope if
another homeowner stumbles on this thread, I can uh, shed some light on the topic.
First a little history. It used to be that Lighting Automation was VERY expensive. Like unbelievably expensive and only those with 4 million dollar houses could afford them. They were also very clunky and essentially just let you put in some scenes,
all via wired control wires and local dimming. Soon, installers and decorators started hiding the dimmers to have a "clean" look so centralized panel based systems became the status symbol for the very rich.
There were only 3 companies that did this - Lutron in PA, Lite-Touch in UT, and Vantage that was also in UT. Lutron was the big name because well, they invented the dimmer and much like with IBM, nobody ever got fired by installing Lutron's products.
Lite-Touch to me seemed a little outdated and Vantage's products seemed like a much better version of Lite-Touch.
I'm not going to lie - I loved Vantage. They were small, very scrappy, enthusiastic, and it was easy to have a relationship with their support, engineers, and sales and customer support people. I also loved their panel systems over Lutron because it was
modular and the addressing was far easier than Lutron's then antiquated dip switch addressing. To this day you have to manually set the addresses on RPMs and such with Lutron.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Lutron too but they seemed more like the jocks because they had a much bigger budget, invite installers for free training, buy meals, give away screw drivers, and more importantly, their products were very good. Their
wireless systems in particular were always lightyears better than anybody else in my opinion, even Vantage.
So, my position to customers was that if it was a retrofit, Lutron was the way to go and if it was a centralized system, Vantage was not going to take a 2nd seat to no-one and even though they didn't have as many color options or the elegance of Lutron,
they would be a great choice and we'd highly recommend them.
Around this time, whole home automation also began to get popular and all these fancy houses had to have their Crestron, Control 4, Savant, ELAN, etc. etc. systems and Vantage who started in lighting started pivoting more towards that market by offering
AV products, touch screens and the above mentioned companies started pivoting towards lighting. Lutron on the other hand stuck with lighting which also included shades (sun is a light after all) and was happy to just be the lighting and have other
systems link into it.
Once the iPhone came out, it was a complete game changer. Everybody wanted apps and more and more demand for lighting automation was there so both companies updated their systems and Vantage brought out its beautiful Infusion system and soon Lutron came
out with their clear connect wireless systems and Homeworks QS and Radio Ra2 came out.
Both had apps but Lutron's was far more user friendly in my opinion because it would just take the existing house and put it on the app. No fuss. Vantage on the other hand was really into AV by now so the installer had to custom design it and it was not
very intuitive. Maybe for AV guys who work with Crestron type systems it made sense, but to me, it was not fun.
To make matters worse, once things moved towards cloud based, Lutron shined with their new DIY Caseta system and then seamlessly added cloud to their existing dealer systems (with just a connect bridge) and as far as I know, Vantage still doesn't have
that.
A couple other "game changing moments" also happened: LED lights became popular and the norm and SAVANT bought Lite-Touch and ended Lite-Touch systems. Also, the large French company Legrand bought Vantage. I'll come back to the latter in a bit.
LED light dimming turned out to be extremely difficult. The way a lot of smart dimmers and dimming modules worked, they put out some voltage to the load. There are engineering reasons for that which I am not fully aware of but I do know that there was a
minimum load requirement and with LED's that wasn't met so all kinds of things were going wrong with all 3 systems with LED lights initially.
Lights would flicker, lights would not go off, etc. Surprisingly, the vantage and Lutron power modules handled LEDs pretty well, but the in wall dimmers from Lutron didn't fare so well so both companies completely redid their dimmers - Vantage has a new
standing dimming module that is great and all of Lutron's dimmers now are CL rated or you can get ELV dimmers.
As such, to answer Mike's question from 5 years ago (which would mean he has the older dimming modules and this wouldn't apply lol), you really can't go wrong with either system if your concern is LED lighting. They've all figured it out and I've used
both systems just fine with LEDs.
The biggest issue I see now is that centralized systems are a ticking timebomb. Sooner or later, that processor or (master controller as Vantage calls it), will go out. IF you're lucky that the company is still around, AND if you're lucky that there is
a dealer in your area, AND you're lucky that they service or have the part available, it's only a few thousand dollars you'll spend. Typically you're fine for the first 5 years but I've seen systems fail even after 3 years.
After seeing how Savant treated Lite-Touch, and Legrand bought Vantage, I was worried about what was coming down the line. All of a sudden, the sales and tech support wasn't as friendly and down to earth as they used to be. All of a sudden, buildings
where we would send things to got changed...Then announcement after announcement about upcoming products to match other Legrand products and it seemed Vantage really wanted to go after the full home automation market than lighting.
For me, I don't do AV so I was in a tough spot because builders usually have their electrical guy and their AV guy. It used to be electrical guys also do lighting and only lighting and the AV guy does the rest and ties in.
I'm biased so i think lighting and electrical should be done by the electrical guy because we understand lighting loads, and it's better to have the same guy programming the house doing the high voltage stuff to catch issues and have one person to blame
when things go wrong. Not to mention most service calls in the future have an electrical source that neither an AV guy nor a typical electrician can touch. Now that it's all tied together, vantage really seemed to look at electricians as second class
dealers.
When you're buying a dealer installed system, having a good dealer is very important because dealers come and go all the time and some focus more on new systems while others on repairs and a homeowner can end up with a bad dealer who rather than wanting
to fix something, will sell them a new system.
One question I'm always asked in a sales meeting with a potential new customer is "if you're not around, will we find other dealers to work on this" and I would always tell the customer to check out their website and see how many authorized dealers are
in their area. With Lutron, it was super easy because they have many many dealers both AV or electrical variety. With Vantage, not so much. Mostly AV guys and kind of far away.
I won't get into too much details here because the wounds are fresh but the new sales regime at Vantage without warning terminated what they deemed as low performing dealers so there are even less dealers around. I think ultimately this will hurt their
customers because the new dealers who sell a lot of systems weren't around for the older systems and they are going to be like horse doctors that will just tell people to get a new system.
TLDR;
Because of this, I think the best choice right now is to go with Lutron and completely stay away from a centralized system. Lutron has many dealers, 24/7 tech support, the best apps both cloud based and local, and the best wireless and retrofit systems.
If you go with a non-centralized system, even if they do go out of business, you're still back to regular switches on your wall.
You can always go with wall mounted power modules hidden away a bit too and those will also work if the processor goes or you need to change to another system and there are far more choices in the non-central vs. central systems.
Only get a centralized system if you can afford to spend another $10-$50,000 in 10-20 years updating your system.
And honestly, I think for most people, a Radio Ra2 system is more than what they need.
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