Bosch home-connect, useless
I got a Bosch Series-8 fridge in late 2017. I checked the manual, and it mentions a wifi-dongle. Emailed Bosch support, they asked which country I was in, told them I’m in Spain… and never heard from them again. Typical corporate support.
Years later, I was chatting with a friend who just got a Samsung fridge and decided to go non-smart. So I remembered that I’ve actually got a ‘smart’ fridge and easily googled the part number of Bosch Home-Connect wifi-dongle for my model. 38 euros and a couple of days later, amazon.de delivered the item. I was ready to set it up.
There’s something to be said about German engineering. One thing is painfully obvious, though — you should never-ever allow them anywhere near user interfaces. Nothing but misery comes out of it.
In 2020 you expect to plug a device in, fire up the app, and just click through. A-ha, not so fast! After replacing the power cord (the wifi-dongle is part of the power cord, which is a clever solution but not quite obvious), you need to click and hold multiple buttons on the fridge. And it’s easy to do it wrong. And then you have to re-set and re-start. Ugh.
Finally, buttons are pressed, the app fired up, and after some interactions with the app (WHY?!), you get ERROR 5014. The person who presents these kinds of messages to the end-user is just sick. But the manager who allows this crap to ship — he should be taken to the backyard and shot. Twice. One in the head, and one in the heart, just to make sure.
How do you fix it? No official word on the Bosch sites. Community forums present a wide range of ideas. None of them worked. I ended up assigning a static IP to the dongle and power-cycling the fridge. It worked!
And what do I get for 38 euros and a wasted couple of hours? Almost nothing. I can see the temperatures, I can switch and modify modes.. and that’s it! And I can get messages when a door is opened/closed. No power monitoring, no self-diagnostics, it can’t even tell me which of the two doors is being opened/closed!
Since the money’s spent, I decided to connect it to my Home-Assistant and be done with it. Well, another surprise awaits: a Home-connect account and a Home-connect-developer account are two different things. And it’s not explained anywhere. Ugh.
A final word — to make your fridge really smart, just get a 10-euro smart-socket with power monitoring and two door-sensors. Total cost ~30 euros (if you have a smart-home solution already). Don’t buy anything ‘smart’ from Bosch.
