Rinnai Control-r 2.0™

Before the WiFi controller , there was the hardwired controller. As a new construction builder I had to buy one so my home inspections could pass because most new homes don’t have Wi-Fi in them. When I built my personal house this year, I tried to install the Wi-Fi connector but had many issues. I hooked up the hardwired controller and everything works great. I know it kind of defeats the purpose of buying the unit with the Wi-Fi controller but it simply just doesn’t work. Looks like many updates have occurred since I bought my unit, I might hook it up in the next week or so and give it another try. It would be nice to control the heater from my phone.Update* After reading reviews, I began looking at other brands and their offerings. I found one other brand(name withheld )fairly quickly and then proceeded to read their app reviews. A lot of the same issues. I’m not a paid spokesperson for any brand, but a home builder who has used many brands over 20 years. The technology itself is way better than it was 15 years ago and Rinnai really is the go to for my HVAC and plumbers. Easy to install, and fewer call backs. Really recommend using the hardwired controller. You can’t change settings from your phone,but you can set up a pretty nice schedule manually and let it run. Up until about 8 years ago, a built in pump was not available. To my knowledge , Rinnai was the first to offer such a feature. In terms of new technology, tankless heaters and their accessories are fairly new to the scene. They’re great when they work, which is most of the time, but really stink when they go out. Definitely better than the old double hot water tanks looped together with an external pump and timer.

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.