ConnectMyPool 4+

Cannot believe a market leader of technical pool accessories can get this so wrong. The pool & system supplied by Leisure pools was without a control panel near the pool. The control panel was behind the garage with the pumps approx 30 Meters away. I complained that walking often in the dark navigating around the pool fence in a bush block was not workable for me…. Let alone my young children. The pool supplier didn’t even think to pre-run a control cable to bring the user panel close to the pool and spa. The comment was “You don’t need it. Just use the App”. To start- not everyone will bring their smartphone to the pool…. Guests will not have access to the app or passwords needed for connection…. Finally, you cannot rely on the app. It has very poor responsiveness (BTW-I have excellent Wi-Fi connection and the system is hardwired) In my view it has lots of bugs that make it extremely difficult to use…because it is not intuitive and you have to constantly check if the settings have set correctly… Did I mention the incredibly frustrating lag between setting and response?

We’ve had our pool and Astral equipment for just over a year now. This is hooked up to an equilibrium and viron connect to control via this app. The app is functional allowing us to turn on, off or set auto all of the viron connected units like the filter/pump, waterfall, spa, gas heater. We also have pool lighting and you can set theme modes or just solid colours from a range. We get feedback on current water temps, set the heater output temp, and with the PH sensor option see the water balance. You can do all this from anywhere and overall I am very happy with these features.

There are some drawbacks however. The app is a little clunky, hasn’t been updated for newer phones, only works in portrait mode. Feedback can be a little slow at times. It logs out very quickly leading to constant logins pretty much every time you put your phone down. It lacks some feedback like it’s hard to tell if the spa heater is running unless you are seeing the temp go up. Messages from the equilibrium are not shown such as low salt or acid. You can not control dosing so must be done manually via the unit.

Again these are criticisms of the app and controls but I am generally happy with how everything works. It would be nice to see some improvements and I feel it would be more professional of Astral to provide a modern app especially given today’s society and expectations.

This is an update to my review posted a couple of years ago. While the app was somewhat functional a couple of years back it has begun to reach being near unusable. For instance it can take minutes from clicking an action on the app to when it will actually turn the relevant pool equipment on. It may not sound like a big problem but it can lead to pool equipment damage. For instance, the pool heater was on but needed to turn the pump on. Turned the pump on via the app but it took almost 5 minutes after clicking the icon before the pump started. This meant that the heater was on but no water flowing which can cause significant problems for the heater. That’s just one example and there are several more. I’d suggest that if there are alternate pool equipment providers with app functionality that you consider looking at those first as given the lack of updates by Astral to date I think the Connect 10 system has been left to wither and die on the vine to coin a phrase.