EMBER Smart Heating Control

Socket error all the time when away from the house. Not great when you work away. Trying to save money and CO2 and this app lets me down all the time. App works in the house, but didn’t need to pay for that. So disappointed.

First time away from home trying to control the heating this evening and I get “Socket error” when trying to change the mode. That’s not a very user friendly, helpful or descriptive error is it? What’s worse is temperature changes don’t actually take affect, but they appear to. The activity log shows the temperature change as “temperature error” so it clearly didn’t successfully send the command to the boiler but it would be impossible to tell from the UI since the temperature change looks to take effect, there’s no immediate alert. Even the “on/off” animation is clearly written to be purely client side and not an actual indication that the boiler has received instruction to turn on and is actually on. At least when the mode change errors I’m told with an alert even if it’s a completely non user-friendly error message. Your temperature change error doesn’t even alert. What exception encompasses a socket error? Why can’t you give me instructions on what might fix it? I tried the obviously like changing network etc, does my device need to restart? Maybe my device should be capable of auto restarting if it can’t reach out to something like 8.8.8.8 or whatever…

The app does what it needs to - I can control the heating from my phone. However a lot of the time when you change the temperature, two seconds later it flips back as the change hasn’t taken effect. So you’ll turn it down to go to bed and not realise it’s still on. This should be fixed ideally by ensuring the correct temperature is set even when the app has been closed via a background process, without requiring you to reset the temperature as many times as it takes for the controller to receive the change. Also there’s no home/siri integration.

Great when it works almost impossible to reconnect…. Use a different make.

Works fine on my 14" M1 Macbook Pro.

Endless problems with it. Sometime it works quickly. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes it takes ages to recognise a command. Hopelessly inconsistent.

Half the time this app doesn’t work it either says ‘Network Error’ when there is absolutely no issues with WiFi and all lights functioning correctly, or it will let you turn on your heating and tell you that your heating is on but when you get home you find that it hasn’t even come on!! Cannot rely on the app so I just have to turn use the manual heating controls as this app is too unreliable.

Seems to take around a 30-60 seconds before actioning command on the app. Will update review if improvers.

I recently bought a house that already had an Ember temperature control system. I couldn’t connect to the gateway because it was linked to the previous owners phone. I wrote an email to get help from Ember, and got help within minutes. We wrote back and fourth a few times, and I was up and running quickly. Great support!

Great guidance from Colin on how to set up my ember app to allow me to control the heating remotely - very important at this time of rising costs. Very patient clear instruction and effective outcome. Thank you