Cheap Leviton MDI06-1LW Decora Mural Digital Dimmer 600-Watt 15A 120V

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This is a great high-end dimmer and excellently suited for rooms like the master bedroom where training kids and guests will not be a problem. The fade on/fade off feature is pleasant, and the memory feature that remembers your last intensity setting is also nice.

I made the mistake of installing these in the rooms of my young children where it's heavily used by them, their friends, babysitters/nannies, and other visitors. It's not well-suited for this kind of mixed audience for the following reasons:

1) A single push on the top of the switch fades on the lights to the last used intensity. A single touch at the bottom fades it off. Holding the switch down in either direction triggers the dimming/undimming. This distinction is lost on small children and visitors, who always end up holding the switch and dimming and undimming to the desired intensity. This is annoying to them when they simply want to turn the lights on and off. This misunderstanding is aggravated by the fact that it takes a split second to begin fading off when you touch it on.

2) Say that you last had the dimmer to 100% intensity then turned it off. If you need to go into the room in the middle of the night (e.g. your child is crying) and you want to turn it on to 50%, it's difficult to do this without going all the way to blazing 100% and then back down to 50%. When you touch OR hold, the switch will rapidly head toward 100%, and you can stop it by quickly touching down to stop it before it gets to 100%. You can imagine this being undesirable in many cases.

Again, it's a nice switch, but it you ought to think twice about where you're putting it.

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Once upon a time, the big names in light switches Leviton, Lightolier and Cooper made electronic dimming switches that worked correctly. You tap the top to turn it on, and the bottom to turn it off. You hold the top to brighten, and the bottom to dim.

Now-a-days, the name-brand switches have moved to a bizarre "tap the bottom to toggle" model. This doesn't work for anyone I know, especially in a house like ours where many of the light switches are in places where you can't easily see the lights, such as the garage, deck, some bathrooms.

This switch works as it should. The top brightens, the bottom dims. It cannot handle flourescents and the side fins may need to be trimmed off (they're designed for that; wriggle them with a pair of pliers a few times and off they pop) to fit in a multi-gang (side-by-side light switch) box. But other than that, it's about perfect.

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This is a fantastic dimmer. You can set it to go up to 80% so, if used with halogen fixtures the bulbs will last forever. It is also easy to use and a breeze to install.

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I installed this dimmer in a bathroom because the wall sconces I bought with Xenon bulbs were a bit overpowering. I wanted a dimmer with memory that was easy to use and this one seemed the simplest no additional buttons or knobs to fiddle with. The only problem I've noticed is that some guests who use the bathroom don't get the hang of tapping the switch to turn on or off. Instead they hold the switch down to turn off, which dims the lights, but does not completely shut them off. I find myself having to explain how to use the light switch, which embarassed one guest.

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I love this dimmer. We recently moved from a house that had lots of recessed lighting with dimmers and our new house had lots of recessed lights but no dimmers. I bought some of these leviton mural dimmers to install in the kitchen, dining, family and game room. I couldn't be happier with these. I love the way they fade-in or fade-out with one touch of the rocker. I have to imagine that the fade feature is easier on the light bulbs since most bulbs seem to fail when you first turn them on. And the small LEDs are helpful to find the switches in the dark -things our old house's dimmers didn't do. I'm planning on putting these throughout most of the rest of the house where they make sense. These are way better than a simple rocker switch or a simple sliding dimmer, but there is a very small learning curve to using them. (ie. there are 5 or 6 different functions depending on how you tap or hold ). Its actually quite intuitive, but if you are the type that wants super simple, then I'd stick with a sliding dimmer.