Rinnai Control-r 2.0‪™‬ 4+

Update: I took the plunge and updated to app 2.1 Monday and tried it. Took an hour of going round and round in circles with nothing on the upgrade process matching what was happening such as led light color, but by dumb luck finally got WiFi connected, FW 223 and unit recognized. The circulate now worked for 12 hours then became unresponsive the next day. The Scheduled recirc never worked, with or without vacation mode on and no matter what the readout said. Temperature dial was most often blank. So it’s back to the brute force lamp timer. Just curious if the handful of those reporting it working if you could report back if app suddenly becomes unresponsive —like it did for me.

FW upgrade failed, old app broken, new app doesn’t work , zero customer support over holiday weekend. Based on comment of earlier reviewer we found a brute force workaround to get recirc to run on a daily schedule. If you are comfortable with it, open unit and unplug Control R WiFi box from circuitboard. This will cause recirc to always be on, which of course you don’t want. We then put a dumb lamp timer (grounded) on the plug to the whole unit and set a schedule. It works but there is no hot water during the off intervals. Our unit is easily accessible so we can manually turn ithe timer/unit on and off as well. Hopefully Rinnai will get this fixed soon so I don’t have to resort to this nonsense fix for too much longer.

Once again Rinnai, you really know how to displease a homeowner. After struggling for over seven months with my ControlR module with stability issues. It became bricked and was sent a replacement unit that mostly works with newer firmware but times out in the prior app. Now I get an email a few days ago to update firmware and install this lousy software. First, the process to update the firmware was horrible. I could not get the old app to update the ControlR firmware. So after trying to call your tech support (which by the way is unable to take calls because everyone is having issues AND you decide that this must be done during the holidays - nice Christmas present, Rinnai), I decided to just download this new app and see if firmware would update. It did update but the app is very limited. Seems like a downgrade to what was in old version and now the recirculating schedule does not work. It is also not optimized for iPad either which the older version did have. What kind of Mickey Mouse operation do you have Rinnai?!? Would love to just rip out my system and go with another brand but obviously can not due to cost to change everything out. Thanks for making my holidays so relaxing and joyful idiots.

I was concerned about the negative reviews, but in my case, account creation, sign-in, module pairing, software update, network connection, and finishing setup were all successful first time around. I created AM and PM recirculation schedules that are working, and successfully initiated on-demand recirculation today when I wanted a shower.

So why only three stars? Although setup was successful, it could have been smoother. The Rinnai device uses WiFi direct instead of Bluetooth to pair with the phone, which is a pain, because you have to exit the app, enter your WiFi settings, scan and find the new WiFi “network”, bring the app back up. This is exacerbated by the second problem, which is that the Rinnai device unexpectedly needs to pair a second time after downloading the latest update and rebooting (no nonvolatile storage?), and at first it looks you’ve been looped back to the previous step. I hope this isn’t an issue after every software update. The status screen also seems to lag the actual status of the heater by an indeterminate amount of time.

It would also be really great if the app provided support for Apple Shortcuts or HomeKit.