Struggling With NCE

I've said before that outside of the cabs and boosters it makes, I've had a 30-50% defect rate in NCE products across its line. I'm not sure why the boosters and cabs seem to be exempt from this. I've had a Power Cab for seven years that's worked without a problem, and earlier this year I got an SB5 that so far works fine. But their decoders are a completely different story.

The NCE Illuminator is a recent product that can substitute for the Woodland Scenics Light Hub in its Just Plug system. It has some real potential advantages that include the ability to program individual outputs for features like flashing, random on-off, and even flickering fluorescent bulbs. Another one from my point of view is that it can run off the DCC power bus, which can minimize layout wiring. In particular, since T-Trak uses the Kato Unijoiners to carry power between modules, the track can become the DCC bus, and Illuminators can run off the track DCC via a terminal strip on individual T-Trak modules.

The problem is that, as I've been working with Illuminators on T-Trak modules, I've been finding the defect rate is about the highest I've experienced with any NCE decoder. Last month, I packed up four and sent them back to NCE for warranty support. One problem, though, is that NCE's warranty support is slow -- even if they replace a decoder, it takes them weeks and months to ship the replacement, which puts any project on hold or requires you to buy a new one anyhow if you want to finish the project on time -- but there's no guarantee that the new one or the replacement will work, either.

Their warranty support is a guy named Matt, whom I've gotten experience working with over the past year or so. He's a passive-aggressive sort of guy who's slow to get back to you. Rather than use e-mail, he leaves phone messages, and if you try to reply to his phone message with an e-mail (rather than play phone tag), he simply doesn't answer. But if you return his call, he wants to talk to you for half a hour.

Based on my experience this past week, I located the guy who seems to be in charge at NCE (he isn't listed on the web site), who seems to be James Scorse. I sent him a snail-mail letter, since his e-mail isn't public:

Dear Mr Scorse,

Over the past several months, I’ve purchased eight NCE Illuminators. Five of these have had various problems, including not functioning at all when connected to DCC power and output ports set to non-default values. In two cases, I was able to debug the problems myself.

Nevertheless, I think you’ll agree that a new product unpacked from its factory package that does not function according to the documentation shipped with the product is defective. This is a defect rate for recently purchased Illuminators of over 60%.

I was unable to debug three of these and returned them, along with another one that had burned out, to Matt in Warranty Support, on October 26. Matt left me a phone message on November 6, and I had a phone discussion with him on November 7, at about 11:15 AM EST. In that discussion, Matt insisted that there was “nothing wrong with” these Illuminators.

It took about 15 minutes for me to ask enough questions to get Matt to explain to me that what happens is that at the factory, technicians will do things like turn off the Illuminators or change CVs to test them, but they do not return them to factory default values. Matt was, in my opinion, extremely argumentative and sometimes sarcastic and condescending in explaining this, and his view seems to have been that I should have figured this out for myself and not claimed the Illuminators were defective. The entire discussion lasted over 30 minutes, in my view because Matt was unwilling to acknowledge that NCE had shipped defective decoders.

However, the decoders were either non-functional or did not function as documented when shipped from the factory. Matt admitted as much.

I can’t tell you how to run your business, Mr Scorse, but it appears to me that you have a problem in your factory, which is shipping products not set to factory default values, and you have a problem in Matt, who seems extremely defensive and unwilling to resolve a legitimate customer problem promptly or courteously.

My experience with NCE is that its products have unacceptably high defect rates, with support staff unwilling to resolve problems promptly or courteously. My preferred DCC vendor is not NCE.

I applied additional pressure on NCE to retrieve the four decoders I sent in (or get replacements), and I got a shipment notice Friday. We'll have to see how many work when I get them back. I'm hoping to salvage at least a few for use on T-Trak modules, but I've decided it's too much of a crap shoot to continue using them on my HO layout.

I'll update if I get any reply or better treatment from NCE, but I'm not expecting anything.