Bradford White Connect™

The Daily usage section of the app is nonsensical. It appears to use data from the past 24 hour period, instead of a day beginning and ending at midnight. Thus, it gives the appearance that usage has occurred in the future. For example, if you open the app in the morning, the graph will show usage for 6-9am (today) followed by 3-6pm (yesterday?). This data carries over to the Weekly view, incorrectly attributing part of the usage from, say, Monday on Tuesday. It would be very useful if the app showed *real-time* information such whether the heat pump or resistance elements are actively running. There does not appear to be a way to set the temperature in a schedule. Some people (especially those with mixing valves) like to “charge” their tank overnight to take advantage of lower energy rates, but this important feature seems to be missing. The app requires frequent restarts, due to “error code 401” or because “…energy data is not available.” The app allows a user to enter their Cost per kWh but it forgets this entry every time the app restarts. Bradford White, please give this app some attention to make it as excellent as your water heaters.

The app itself is mediocre. Maybe 3 stars. But there’s a bigger problem underneath. The app talks to an Amazon server. That works most of the time. But you’re just using an app to communicate with a web server. It’s thousands of miles away from your water heater. How does your water heater know that you changed a setting on a web server far away? Your water heater is connected to the internet via an adapter box. And that adapter is painfully unreliable. It might go offline for a few hours or days or weeks. The recommended fix is to reboot it. How do you know if it has failed and needs to be rebooted? You don’t. The Connect app won’t tell you. It will just pretend like your water heater actually did what you asked. So the net result is an app that appears to control your water heater, but you don’t know whether that’s actually happening or if it’s just ignoring everything behind the scenes. You don’t get reliable feedback

The concept is great, but since I installed the app and heat pump 9 months ago it has been almost useless. I’ve connected and reconnected I don’t know how many times since installation and it continues to disconnect. To monitor your electrical usage, it’s been sporadic at best. I now look at my SoCal Edison usage every day to estimate usage. What I liked best when it did work was the ability to change settings on whether to use more ambient air or electrical to heat our water. Now I have to go into the water closet every time I need to change settings. Not convenient! Fix it or delete from the play store and stop wasting your customers’ time.

I try to adjust the temperature and it takes 20 attempts to actually respond. It shows power usage but loses the data every few months, now it doesn’t even show it at all. I try to change modes (heat pump water heater) and I literally was unable to 50 times. Finally I went downstairs and did this manually. I’ve tried restarting the network device, restarting the app, rebooting the phone, and power cycling the water heater itself. Nothing works. This app is badly in need of an update. It was one of the selling points for me to go to a BW water heater but if this app doesn’t work soon I’ll likely never buy this brand again. PLEASE FIX THIS APP

I got this water heater at a second home because we're not there all the time. The main goal of the BWConnect app and device was to be able to remotely turn on and off vacation mode so I could put it in heat pump mode a couple of days before going so I could save energy and still have hot water when I arrive. However, the device randomly disconnects from the internet and cannot reconnect without me physically going to it and connecting with Bluetooth. This is unacceptable for a "smart" device. It needs to automatically reestablish its connection to the internet when it loses it. There's a Hotspot close to it, and I have many smart devices and no others have this problem. There are other problems with the app and device, but this one makes the whole system not reliable enough to be usable.

Bradford white, do yourself a favor… just retire the app and come back when you can develop an working app! The basic function … the changing of the heating mode is buggy… when you change it it goes back to the original mode (I think it never changes the mode successfully in the first place although the ui says it did and when you go back to tab it shows the original setting) This is not that hard! For now please retire the app! /update @developer response: you have had so many of this exact same feed back about not changing the mode… for months now… instead of the canned response. fix it…

Rarely worked. Always lose WiFi connection. Once the connection lost, to reconnect this adapter using its Bluetooth is like mission impossible. Whoever designed this adapter and this mobile app deserved to be relieved duties immediately.

It should let me know the actual water temperature so I know if it’s recovered and I am ready to take a shower.

Scheduling in the app isn’t that great and it disconnects from my system all the time. Hopefully this will get fixed because when it does work it’s good. I’d love to see the amount of hot water remaining added to the app.

Is there a plan to make this app work? The vacation mode hasn’t shown the days in months. The settings early apply to the heater. What’s the plan here? This is a very expensive paperweight when I still need to go to the basement and change the settings on my heater.