First - with the exception of Alyssah, our community manager, the vast majority of people here are customers just like you. If you want to converse with tech support you need to either call them or e-mail them. (support@anovaculinary.com).
If you’re going out of coverage, there’s a few possibilities:
You don’t actually have wifi setup - your app connection is over bluetooth and you’re actually going out of bluetooth range. If the APC is connected to your wifi network, you should see it in the administration interface in your WAP as one of the connected clients.
Do you have a cellular data plan? If you don’t, the app doesn’t magically give you a data transport over cellular that you’re not paying for.
You’re going out of wifi coverage, but haven’t been out of wifi coverage long enough for the phone to notice - test this by bring up your browser and see if it’s responsive.
Lastly - make sure you’re running the latest OS and version of the App. You can actually test the app connectivity without walking anywhere - just go into settings and turn off the bluetooth, then wifi radios and see if you’re connected. (this is actually a little better - as when you’re in “fringe” wifi coverage, the phone may say that you’re still connected to the network, but the coverage is so poor that it’s not useful).
Agree on the timer. I use the calendar in my phone - gives me the added advantage of making sure I don’t book a dinner out when something’s going to be reading in my sous vide bath.
I wish they’de give me that option. Most modern decent routers these days have built in VPN servers capable of accepting secure and encrypted inbound connections to home while you’re on the move (and they’re not terribly difficult to setup these days). Anova’s cloud solution simply does not work. I tried it today. Connection Lost is all I get on the app when I’m on the movd (yes I have working mobile data (4G LTE), yes my APC is connected to my home WiFi). So without a working ANOVA app (or until they manage to figure out how to set it up properly), I would be happy to be able to talk directly to my APC via local network or over VPN when outside.
Btw, there is no need to open ports in the firewall if you can get in to your home network over VPN, which is also a much more secure way of doing it. I would feel safer if the APC only spoke to devices on my home local network than it being controlled by the cloud. What if that cloud gets hacked one day and the hackers send out 99C to all units? Judging by anova’s lack of abilities to fix quite basic problems (or inability to admit that there is no fix because of some hardware constraint that they wont disclose or own up to), it’s probably not a far fetched scenario. Worrying thought since a lot of containers could fail at that temp. I do hope they take the security of their cloud more seriously than their approach to the app!
I can answer general questions here, but individual Wi-Fi issues will need to be brought up with our tech support at support@anovaculinary.com. They’ll get into the details and really nail down what’s going on with your connection.
One more thing - make sure you’re actually logged into their cloud.
As for the VPN - many (most) people don’t know how to use VPN properly…then you have people loading apps from sources outside of the Apple/Google stores. If you have an active VPN connection to home or corporate and have malware on your phone, that can provide a pretty significant personal security risk. Much more likely for that to happen to people than Anova’s cloud to get hacked.
Not saying I agree with how they’ve designed their networking setup, but for the vast majority of people it obviously works, or we’d be having a lot more people in here complaining.
I do suspect that the tech team might spend its time more profitably by trying to nail down what is going wrong with their code, instead of worrying about what might be going on with a customer’s connection.
This is not correct. First off, as @fischersd pointed out, this one…
Phone <> Mobile phone network <> Home wifi <> Anova
…is missing the Anova cloud server(s) component. But even if we abstract that piece out and ignore it, this is still wrong:
You most certainly can communicate from your phone to your home router via Wi-Fi, and from there to the Anova cloud, back to your router and on to the APC itself. In fact you can use any Wi-Fi router/hotspot/etc that you have access to. Using cellular data is only necessary if you don’t have access to Wi-Fi.
That’s one of the reasons I never use the BT feature. Honestly, it’s not really useful anyway. If you’re close enough to your APC for a BT connection to be reliable, you’re home.
I gave myself an early birthday present and bought a new router (Netgear R7000P) this past weekend. I tried connecting my APC and it worked!!! It was actually pretty easy and quite painless. Im more than half way thru a 24 hour cook (turkey breast @131F) and haven’t had any issues. Took the dogs out to the park this morning and was able see and edit the current cooking temperature (Not the timer tho, no one uses that. Am I right?)
The kitchen is on the opposite side of the house from our home office where we spend a lot of our time and the BT has a hard time staying connected. Now I can confidently check my water to make sure it’s at temp. I have previously said that the WiFi feature is unnecessary and I still stand by that. Yeah I can monitor it when I’m away or out of BT range but my APC works flawlessly so there’s no need to. I use the timer on my phone because it always handy and it works better than the one in the app.
Thank you to the development team for making things work smoother (except for that dang timer) and thank you Anova for making an affordable immersion circulator, it’s changed the way I cook at home. And thank you all for reading this and keeping this site active and fresh. #Anovafoodnerd for life.
If I wanted to get frustrated and angry with buggy tech I would not cook. Honestly if it isn’t easy, it isn’t worth it. I have bought almost 10 various Anova units (a lot of gifts) and they all cook great without a phone or a WI-FI connection. In my experience the BT and WI-FI bells just don’t ring and are more a pain than they are worth.
I totally agree:
The wifi limitations are ridiculous. Having to reconfigure my entire home network is not an option. My wifi Key is a lot longer than what the device can accept and I do not want to downgrade my security.
I bought the wifi version for nothing and spent €50 extra for nothing….
