KOHLER Konnect

Update: Koehler reached out to me to make it right. I would rather them add support back, but they did do the right thing. Original: Purchased HomeKit compatible Koehler faucet. When it arrived, the hardware was throwing an error. When Koehler replaced it, they replaced it with a non-HomeKit compatible board. The tech said they deprecated HomeKit compatibility on all hardware and no longer support it…even if you purchased it with the feature. I have over 50 HomeKit devices in my home, from over 10 different venders. Never had a problem like this from any of them…and my Koehler faucet was the most expensive out of all of them.

When this baby works, there’s nothing better. I set it up through my Alexa and can turn my whole bathroom setup (lights, fans, showers) from anywhere in the house, which is fantastic because the controller is a 6 port valve that is located on the back wall of our massive enclosure housing 2 showers and a freestanding tub. I love that I don’t have to be in the bathroom, nor inside my shower, to turn it on and warm it up. Where the issue lies is that at least 1-2x a week, the KohlerKonnect app is offline. I used to screw around on the controller reprogramming it but I’ve realized it needs to be rebooted every time, which for me is a trip downstairs, and then outside around my house into a storage room where the contractors ran my plumbing and electrical for our primary bathroom addition that was just completed 8 months ago. Not a fun thing to do when you just want to take a shower at 5:30am. I would end up turning it on inside the shower and trying to remember to reset it (hopefully before my husband takes a shower so I don’t have to hear him also complaining about this controller). I just recently decided to add a smart plug in that storage room to plug in my KohlerKonnect, so I no longer have to go outside to reboot it—that has made my life far easier, BUT it should not have come to these work arounds. It should just work! Do I think it should never have problems and work perfectly every day? No, but this issue should not occur a few times a week. Also, I have a friend who has this app and has the exact same issue of it being offline, so clearly it’s a flaw in the execution of this system. It’s a shame because it really could be great.

There are a lot of negative reviews for this application from what appears to be a lot of folks that have “smart homes” and everything setup to work from their phone etc and love to let everyone know about it and holy dependent on fool proof solutions that have 5 or less steps lol. some of you were asking a lot out of a application that was likely developed fairly quickly and attempting to work for a variety of smart phones across the spectrum and expect people to work around the clock to continually develop this application without any understanding of how any of it works or the cost that goes into it. If you never deviate from the instructions and don’t actually know how all this works then this may not be for you as it sometimes requires googling and tinkering with your phone settings to make it connect every time. The fact that they even updated this application recently has me surprised since that means the companies allocating people and money to continue building out this simple app.