This Leviton LED/CFL “universal” dimmer switch is significantly defective, overwhelmingly not universal - and they evidently put it over on the market anyway by a multi-layer scam. It’s actually fascinatingly complicated and nasty, although not so wonderful for those of us who are its victims. The one bit of good news here is that Amazon very kindly completely fixed the problem for me - but that probably won’t help you if you too make the mistake of ordering this defective dimmer. In my experience, the main defect with this dimmer switch - as tried with three different kinds of bulbs, namely two kinds of LEDs and one of halogens - is that, almost always when the switch is turned on, it first flashes the lights on, at probably full-on brightness, for a fraction of a second, then dims back down to appropriate brightness as set by the dimmer control slider. This startling flash is like having a camera flash go off in your face, unexpectedly. This intense flash is particularly annoying behavior coming from a device whose entire purpose is to allow the user to set and control the light level and the mood at a desired level. Although, to be fair, in my experience, after this turn-on transient assault on the eyes, this dimmer actually works fairly well, does not (for example) flicker much thereafter. If Leviton just admitted this one bad defect, said yeah, we’ve got this terrible turn-on glitch in this dimmer, too bad, sorry, well then I’d probably just be moderately peeved, rate it say 3 stars and move on from there. But that’s not how it goes when you contact their customer service. First I should say that apparently all their front-line service people are very nice, sincerely trying to be helpful, although not very knowledgeable, and devilishly cleverly set-up by Leviton to put their product over on the market despite its severe defect and limitations and without their even really knowing. I also must note that this dimmer switch device includes, on its upper front face, a small 2-position slider switch, a selector. The instructions that come with this dimmer switch call this the “Bulb Selector Switch,” saying that one position of the switch is for CFLs (compact fluorescent lights), the opposite position is for LEDs and incandescents. They even explain that the CFL position “provides a pre-set kick-start to aid the lamp in starting” - which even makes some sense for fluorescents, since they do often require some kind of electronic kick-start. So, when installing this dimmer, I set its bulb selector switch to LED/Incandescent position (since I was using LEDs, duh!), found that I was getting this crazy huge initial flash of the lights when I turned on the dimmer switch, and called Leviton. The very nice, helpful, fairly-knowledgeable-sounding rep. told me that they had changed the selector switch - or maybe just changed the labeling and the instructions, they weren’t clear about this - but now one switch position was said to be for hard/fast starts, the other position for slow/soft starts. They couldn’t really explain what this meant and how in general to use it, but said that, if I didn’t like the starting/turn-on behavior of the dimmer switch, I should use the other setting of the bulb selector, that should fix the problem. So I tried the opposite setting of the bulb selector switch - which fixed nothing, just altered the length of the nasty flash. I looked around online, found another couple different versions of the instructions. At this point I had the printed instructions that came with the dimmer switch, and the different version information from the Leviton phone rep., and two different instruction versions online - all 4 of them different, each one contradictory of all the others. And all of them actually wrong. Because at this point I determined to watch closely and try to just plain see in detail with my own eyes what exactly was really happening with this dimmer switch, what exactly it was doing. And what I see this switch does at turn-on, as I mentioned earlier here above, is it initially turns on the light apparently full brightness for a fraction of a second, then dims it down to the normal, slider-set level. And, again, this might even make some sense for some kinds of bulbs. But it does it always, on either setting of the bulb-selector switch, where one bulb-selector setting causes this nasty bright flash that lasts just a smallish fraction of a second before it dims, whereas the other bulb-selector setting produces the nasty bright flash for around a second - but anyway almost always a nasty bright flash. You can see this all plain as day if you just try it and look and watch really close. And this all contradicts all the four different versions of instructions/information I have from Leviton. So I called Leviton again. This time the rep. - a different rep., but still nice and helpful - notifies me that I have to use bulbs from their approved list of “compatible” LED bulbs if I expect it to work. So I go away and look online and call back Leviton for a third time. I point out to them that they have at least two different compatible-bulbs lists for this dimmer switch, one list with 100 or 200 different bulbs, another list with close to 800 bulbs, the two compatibles lists almost completely incompatible with each other - but either way including only around 1% of all the enormous number of otherwise-suitable LED bulbs sold on Amazon. In other words, they are saying publicly, up-front that their dimmer is non-compatible with like 99% of all the bulbs on the market - and that that’s not their problem! Meanwhile, at the same time, they hugely lie and say, ultra-falsely, right in this dimmer switch product’s title, that it is “universal” - NOT! And, for my chandelier, which takes bulbs with so-called E11/mini-chandelier bases, a moderately common bulb type, their compatibles lists include not a single compatible bulb, zero, none. When I point out this too to the Leviton rep., then they earnestly advise me that I should replace my chandelier (a perfectly fine, $1,000 chandelier) in order to achieve compatibility with their ($16) dimmer! That was too much nonsense out of Leviton for me. So I contacted Amazon, which itself is officially the on-Amazon seller of this dimmer switch, and they very kindly, promptly refunded my money, so I can now go and try to buy a good dimmer switch. Meanwhile, regarding this Leviton dimmer switch, significantly defective, hugely incompatible, but bolstered by layer upon layer of Leviton scamming, I now rate it 1 star.
