"Dan you muppet, why did you buy a water heater that uses an app"

Well a couple years ago my roof started leaking

I called out the going-up-ladders people because there's only so many different types of danger my spouse will let me get into, given how many people she knows who've fallen off them. The ladder people tell me alright you've got some shingles damaged and some flashing leaking, that's no big deal, but the mid deal is that my chimney's so badly knackered that it's way beyond a simple slap-some-mortar-in job, there's several courses of bricks unaccounted for, I go "Oh aye I did find some underneath my window," the chimney was bollocksed is the headline, and it was gonna cost a LOT of money to fix it.

It was gonna cost so much money, in fact, that it'd be cheaper to remove the need for a chimney in the first place. The only thing left in the house that still used the chimney was the 20-odd-year-old gas water heater. I figured that thing was probably getting ready to rupture anyway so hell, heat pump water heater time.

So I order this inside-out-fridge contraption from a company called RHEEM, also known as RUUD, and yes I very much am naming and shaming this company, and after going back and forth to the hardware store eight times I was on first name terms with the lady in the plumbing aisle and the proud owner of a new 240v line and a machine that makes my water hot by making my basement cold.

And there was a QR code on the side and a thing saying Download The Econet App! and I said "Pfft no" and if all went sensibly that should have been the end of it

Things didn't go sensibly because an unrelated series of events did not go sensibly a few years before, and now I have a couch that reclines in such a way that my head enters an adjacent room.

Why do I recline into the next room over? For the same reason I had to build a four inch wide coffee table. Don't ask me questions about that today. The important part is that when I settle down at night with a glass of whiskey and some Star Trek, I press a button and lean my head back into a void in a rack that sits in my workshop, which is where this water heater lives, and the water heater, being a fridge, goes BRRRRRRRR

It occurred to me at some point that if I had the app, I could tell this water heater Dude, it's ten o'clock at night, there's no need to be actively making more hot water right now, be quiet.

So I scanned the barcode and downloaded the app, which didn't work.

In fairness to Rheem, the way the app didn't work WAS pretty funny. See, it made you register with them before you could schedule your water heater. So first it'd ask you what username you wanted.

I'm not gonna tell you my Rheem username, you'll have to wait for the inevitable data breach for that, so let's say it was ifixcoinops. So you tap the box (you have to do this on a phone, you can't register in a browser) and you tap the letter i on the keyboard and a little i pops up on the screen, quite clever really, then you press the f and the text hole has iif in it. Hmm. Alright well the next letter in "ifixcoinops" is another i, let's press the i on my keyboard, the text hole now says iififi.

Which is slightly unconventional, but okay, let's see where this is going, iifiifiiififiifix. So I introduce myself as mister iififiifixifixcifixcoifixcoiifixcoinifixcoinoifixcoinopifixcoinops, and it tells me there's not enough digits in my phone number

Now I'm vaguely aware on some level that an awful lot of android apps are just a web browser with no clothes on, and that's certainly what this feels like, and buddy lemme tell you, HTML wants to work. It takes concerted, dedicated effort to make something fail this hard. Like, you've gotta code up some truly trollish javascript to make that kinda thing happen. So I guess hats off to Rheem.

Did I mention there wasn't even a place to put my phone number

I'm scratching my head over this and wondering if maybe something in my autocomplete settings are screwing with the input, I eventually figure out that they've somehow managed to make a form field that only works with specific software keyboards.

This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this. There's something new in the world. It's oddly beautiful, but haunting, a little melancholy. Luckily I have a few different keyboards installed on this thing so I change around a bunch until one of them works and lets me input normal words instead of this whimsy.

But there's still nowhere to put this phone number it's been asking me for, and no way to proceed, so I cast the app out of my mind for several more months

Eventually one night listening to it go BRRRRRR I get big mad and want all the functions that I paid the better part of two grand (!) for, and I search around for other people having the same problem.

(note: I want to schedule the water heater's heaty times. There's a big dotmatrix screen and a bunch of buttons on the water heater itself. Someone at some point should have said "Wait.")

Turns out everyone's having this problem! Everyone's been having this problem for over four months! But in the meantime, instead of using the Rheem app, try the Rheem Econet app, or the Econet app.

These are real apps made by Rheem. They all do the same job but fail in different ways at different points

Eventually - and I mean the sort of eventually that's measured in seasons - one of these apps lets me register for a Rheem account (why they couldn't just give me a link to those webpages I could access in a browser, I do not know) and then crashes, but another one lets me get the water heater connected to the wifi (there's no ethernet hole on this 300kg tank of water plumbed and wired into the house, it uses wifi only like your phone or handheld game console) and holy shit it works

It actually works

About 50% of the time

Tip: if Rheem doesn't work try EcoNet, if EcoNet doesn't work try Rheem EcoNet, if Rheem EcoNet doesn't work you can also try Ruud

If one of them works, DO NOT ALLOW IT TO UPDATE

Anyway at some point one of Rheem's other customers got pissed off enough with this tragicomedy to just completely write their own software from scratch, and of COURSE it works way better than the dogshit that Rheem put out

So yeah, the solution is to install Home Assistant on and old Raspberry Pi, get an ESP32 module and some phone wire, plug into the diagnostic port on the front and bypass everything to do with the official app and wifi interface entirely in favour of one that works.

Unfortunately this means you now have Home Assistant in your home, which means you now have a new hobby whether you want it or not

You don't expect to have emotions about a water heater

It's supposed to be the most boring machine in the house

I actually rang Rheem today, dude picked straight up on the first ring, his proposed solution was to try another phone

Mate every other app works on my phone

I was like, alright where does this thing spit out its logs, I'll email them to you, he's like I Don't Know

Didn't occur to him to go and find someone who does know

Should never have to get on the phone to talk about a water heater

Yes hello I would like to have a lengthy conversation about a tube that makes water hot, this is a good use of two peoples' time

Let's make the grey cylinder exciting, let's make it part of a hobby

The world isn't complex enough yet

The times are not interesting enough yet

Let's confuse a fridge into heating water and put it on the internet and give it anxiety

Sensitive content Click to open/close

Actual quote from the Home Assistant Community Store:

"To download HACS

"How you download HACS depends on your Home Assistant installation type. In the instructions below, select the tab that matches your installation type (OS/Supervised, Container, or Core).

Warning

If you don't know what type of Home Assistant installation you are running, you should not use HACS (or any other custom integration)."

Is there a link to find that out? Is there any further explanation of what these terms mean? Is there so much as a crumb of information available to help answer this question?

Did the operator of this website install a sense of smug FOSSbro elitism where they should have wired in, say, competence?

This is the most useless documentation I've seen in years. And that includes the monitor schematic that had the middle third replaced with a lewd limerick.

"If you installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi imaging tool, choose OS/Supervised" there, fixed, wasn't hard. Jesus.

Nothing winds me up harder than people who chat like they're clever while being aggressively, stubbornly incompetent.

You know how when you go to the house of an absolute colossal nerd and you ask them

🐇 Hey, how do I watch Netflix?

🦝 Yeah no problem, well first you've gotta turn on the amp. That's the power button on this remote here. The right-hand power button that is, the left-hand one isn't programmed to anything yet

🐇 OK

🦝 Sometimes that makes the TV come on automatically, but if it doesn't then you've gotta turn on the TV. That's this button here on this other remote.

🐇 So we're on two remotes now

🦝 Nearly finished. Oh by the way, if you want to adjust the volume, use the first remote, the volume on the second remote doesn't do anything. Well it does, but it sounds terrible because that's the TV speakers, so leave that at zero

🐇 But I'm *watching* tv

🦝 Yes but you're *listening* to the amp. Oh, sorry, forgot, set the amp input to 2.

🐇 on the amp remote?

🦝 Yeah, the video goes through the amp too.

🐇 In my house we set the TV to a different input, should -

🦝 Don't do that here. Don't. The TV stays on input 1 with its sound muted. Next you've just gotta use this third remote, for the -

🐇 for Netflix?

🦝 Well, technically for Kodi, but that's nothing to worry about yet

🐇 yet?

🦝 We'll come to that,

🐇 I'm being *so* patient right now, I'm really proud of myself

Anyway, imagine that, but your your lightbulbs. This is what Home Assistant promises

This is literally why no one in my household ever uses the home cinema system except me.

(Fine, my mum plays Switch on it. But for watching movies and stuff.)

My takeaway is that AV receivers, although cool and useful, are surprisingly user-hostile for devices that have big labelled buttons on the front.