I have quite a few Kasa switches and smart plugs in my house that I've collected/installed over the last few years. I just had my first experience with the TP-Link/Kasa warranty service.  Has anyone else used the RMA process to get a device replaced?  It really isn't worth it because you have to pay shipping which can be moe than the device actuallly cost.

I bought a 3-pack of HS200's from Amazon in September for $35 (i.e. < $12/switch) to control my family room recessed lights.  A couple of weeks ago, I walked over to the switches and when I went to touch one of them, a fairly good static discharge jumped from my finger to the switch.  The lights for that switch shut off and the Wifi signal light began flashing between orange and green.  If I manually turned the lights on with the switch, they turned on for about 5-8 seconds and then went off again. 

Nothing I did (e.g. reboot, factory reset, etc) could get the switch working again.  Since this is a heavily used set of lights, I had no choice but to pull the HS200 and put the toggle switch back in.  I couldn't even use the switch in a normal manual mode.

I called the TP-Link service # and before they'd do anything, they insisted that I send them a picture of the light and how it was wired.  Since it was no longer installed, I needed time to do this, so they sent me email and switched the case over to an email exchange so that I could respond when I had re-installed the switch and could send them a picture. The process wasn't too difficult and they generally responded to each email I sent within 24 hours. Eventually they became convinced that the device had failed and would require an RMA. 

Has anyone used the RMA process?  For a single device, it's almost not worth it.  Once approved for an RMA, you are told to select the preferred shipping method.  There are 4 choices:

1. Standard:  Ship back the defective device and they will then send me a replacement.  Note that TP-Link does NOT pay the shipping cost for you to send them the defective device.

2. Advanced Basic: you have to pay $15 and they will ship you a new device first (via ground transport) and then you can ship the bad one back

3. Advanced 2-day:  Same as Advanced Basic except it's 2-day shipping.  This one costs $25

4. Advanced Next day Shippping:  This one costs $50!

Obviously I'm not going to choose method 2, 3, or 4 for a device that only cost me $12 !!!

Even the standard shipping method is probably going to cost me $8-12 using any of the flat-rate shipping methods thru UPS, FedEx or USPS.

The alternative to doing the RMA is to of course just buy a new one from Amazon.  Since I don't need another 3-pack of HS200's I'll need to byuy a single which is $15.  That's still pretty close to what it costs for RMA shipping and instead of waiting a couple of weeks for ground shipping, I'll have the replacement in a couple of days (we are Prime members).

IMO, it's pretty annoying when a warranty is basically useless becase the vendor doesn't cover the costs of getting you the replacement.