Bradford White Connect™

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.

I spent extra money for a BW heat pump instead of Rheem thinking it was the premium option. Unfortunately the app really holds it back. There is a mixture of broken functionality, feature gaps, and general bugginess. Examples: Bug: It shows the current mode, but if I try to change it, the change doesn’t hold. Missing feature: it shows set (desired) temperature but not current temperature. Bugginess: The app frequently fails to load with an authorization error and I have to restart it. But here’s what bothered me the most. The app has a feature that supposedly matches your schedule to utility TOU, but it’s unclear what it is doing behind the scenes because it doesn’t visualize the schedule. I figured it out by checking in the water heater regularly, and also learned that it was burning a lot of electricity with resistance heating at midnight when it had the whole night to use the heat pump to slowly bring the temperature back up. So I decided to try a manual schedule, but I was disappointed to see that I couldn’t adjust the temperature, so I ended up just sticking with a fixed mode and paying for the inefficiency. Based on other reviews, the schedule might not have worked anyways. Bradford White: you owe it to your customers and the environment to get this right. If you are looking for ideas, go take a look at your competitor’s offering.

The purpose of the app is great, when it works is great. Probably about once a month something glitches in the app and daily and weekly view no longer works and then it turns into an almost useless product. I want to monitor my heat pump to electric usage but this app makes things difficult. It shouldnt glitch out and say no data on usage checks.