Convince me I need wifi!

Hey everyone… I’m ready to pull the trigger on APC and am trying to decide between BT and wifi. My main concern is cooking when I’m asleep or at work and I want to know if power goes out or unit stops. Don’t want a plate full of bacteria for dinner. I’m assuming that’s one of the big advantages of the wifi model? Any other big selling points? If I decide to go BT, can I use an iPad that stays at home to monitor the unit? That way, when I get home I can have a look at iPad and know how everything went. I haven’t downloaded the app yet since I haven’t bought the unit, so I have no idea what the features are and it’s been a little hard to find any detailed info online. So… hit me with it. What are the pros and cons, strictly wifi vs BT, of each model?

Dignon,

Personally I have no use for the WiFi functionality. When I first bought my APC it was a neat feature and great to impress your friends at work “See what I can do!”. Start and stop cooks and get notifications that the water was ready. Not that I could do anything about it since I was not there. If the iOS/Android app had the ability to then drop to a holding temp, I might then get excited. But no, you don’t get that.

When it worked.

Which was NOT most of the time.

I finally gave up on it and learned to blacklist the APC from WiFi and just use Bluetooth to get the most basic notifications because most of the time using the APC I was at home.

As I have continued to use the Sous Vide technique I now understand that what is really is important is temperature not time.

I now actually really appreciate the simplicity of other Sous Vide devices such as the Sansaire and PolyScience. It does what is does without a timer and without a connection to The Internet.

That being said I would really like to give a big shout out to Hunter Conrad from Anova who really helped me to understand how to use the manual timer function from YouTube when I thought it was useful.

Anyway, I continue to use my APC in basic “dumb” mode. Do a little planning and load it up before work knowing I will going to be back in 8 hours, or you are at home and start a cook that will last for one, two or four hours and take care of the gardens and mow the lawns.

Just some random thoughts.

Hi, like you, I have found the WiFi to be not worth the effort. It continually loses contact with my WiFi network and so cannot tell me what’s happening. Please can you tell me how you ‘blacklisted’ the unit from your WiFi setup. I would prefer to use Bluetooth, like you I am at home most of the time.

Thanks for the help. Sounds like wifi is not worth the trouble. Can you tell me if the apc or a device using Bluetooth will log or alert you if power goes out, unit stops, or temp drops for some reason? Like I said, I’m mostly concerned with using it while asleep or away from home and would need to know if power happened to blink so we don’t eat unsafe food…

IIRC, the unit won’t automatically restart after a power failure, so if that happens, you’ll know when you get home.

If you look at professional food service machines, they don’t have wi-fi, BT or timers. I know some people like these features, I personally have no use for them. The BT was a novelty when I first got the unit, it really does nothing though. All it saves you is turning the dial on the front to set the temp, and for that, you trade reliability for what? A flaky wireless connection. You’ll spend more time trying to get the app to work than you would ever spend twirling the dial on the front of the unit.

The Anova timer is worthless, it does nothing except beep annoyingly. If you have a cell phone to run the BT or wi-fi, then you have a stopwatch function on it. Use that, it’s on your person and far easier to program, and, your cellphone timer can actually be set to 1 minute increments, which is critical for eggs and shrimp (in fairness, it doesn’t really matter for much else though). Buy the BT model with the current discounts and coupons, and put $40 of the money you saved to Thermoworks for a Timestick Trio.

Oh, yeah and let’s not forget the software update fiasco from last year. If you had wi-fi, your unit was screwed. A blotched update went out, making the units behave in an insane manner, and it took Anova’s crack software team 3 weeks to fix the problem. 3 weeks.

It does not log an alert if the power goes out. If the power does go out, and comes back on before you get back, the unit will be on, but not heating or circulating water. The current water temp will give you a clue how long it was off for. Say you were cooking at 145, and now the temp reads 140, it was probably only off for a few minutes.

Downside of this is that a one minute power outage early on in your 8 hour cook can totally ruin your cook, because the unit will not automatically resume cooking once the power is restored. It has to be this way for food safety purposes, so that you will know your cook was interrupted. think about it this way - you start an eight hour cook then leave, after an hour the power goes out. Six hours later the power comes back on. If the Anova automatically started back up after an outage, you would never know it, and potentially eat dangerous food.

With the wifi model, you start your cook, and an hour later the power goes out. You get a notification on your phone no mater where you are that the Anova has lost its connection. Power comes back on five minutes later, you get another notification, and then you open the app and get your cook going again. That’s the benefit of the wifi model. Otherwise you get home and discover that nice dinner that you have been waiting all day for is a bust.

perfect… that’s exactly the info i was looking for! thanks for the help. i’m pulling the trigger today…

I have the Wifi version, I’m very satisfied with it.
Wifi connection is very stable, that work from anywhere without any special settings. It’s definitely more convenient than Bluetooth. And hope Anova will offer multi device connection soon, to use it both on iPad at home and from iPhone when outside. And it has more power and it is faster than the Bluetooth version.