For those that make the jump from tank water heaters to tankless, here is a little glimpse in to our experience.

We had two 50 gallon tank heaters in the attic of our home. After 13 years, they started to leak. We decided to go with a tankless replacement and hopefully reduce the potential problem with that much water in the attic.

We did quite a bit of research and worked to educate ourselves on the cost of the change along with the difference of user experience moving from one to the other.

We chose to go with the Rinnai RUR199iN Tankless heater with the Control-R wireless module for “control”.

 

We selected our installer from 4 bids that we received from Homeadvisor. This service was actually pretty efficient and we were able to get on the phone with several plumbing companies pretty quickly.

Once we made out selection, we negotiated the cost of the RUR199iN which turned out to be about what you see listed as the MSRP. Total install was around $3500, which we felt was fair based on what the crew had to do.

We had a very good experience with Paradigm Shift Plumbing. The guys did a great job.

 

Here is where I started to find a gap between the vision of the product and the support on the ground.

When I installed the Control-R interface, I felt that this should be much more tightly wound for the price. Clearly, the remote control side has some room to grow.

After installing the unit and working to get this baby online, I ran in to a wall. I could not get past the initial setup on the mobile app. The instructions online are missing some vital information of which, I am hoping to fill in.

The unit is pretty easy to install, which would lead you to believe the configuration would be as simple.

I spent an hour or so holding the connect button, resetting, walking through the app to no avail. I then called and used the “Contact Us” form to request a callback, which never happened. Several weeks of normal life went by and the Control-R problems had somewhat faded away until my wife mentioned, “what happened to the water heater thingie?” At which point, I realized I had a $100 widget hanging off the side of the heater that was still not working. I hadn’t received a call, text, tweet, etc, so I decided to revisit.

At some point in between, Rinnai had updated the app, so I was hopeful that we could get this going.

I went through the process again and decided to give them a call once again to get some assistance.

Finally go someone on the phone and went through the normal try this, try that dialogue and we were still not able to get this “thingie” working. I was politely transferred to a different technician and greeted by their voicemail, of which, I left details to the situation along with contact info to revert back.

Still no follow up, so I decided to investigate. Keep in mind that being a nerd has it’s benefits…

Knowing that the device had been cycling on my network by the detail of reports from my Tenable Nessus scans, I knew that some type of continuity was there. Let take a look at what was discovered and how I resolved getting this thing online.

After leaving the voicemail and deciding to troubleshoot, I fired up my trusty packet capture tool to see what this thing was doing on the wire(less).

After grabbing a few packets, I noticed something odd:

“I found the problem”…literally first stab at taking a look. Mind you that none of this was questioned during the 20 minutes on the phone with the young lady from support.

On my network, being a security nerd, I force specific parameters for clients that connect. This device is set to use DHCP, however, the DNS setting must be hard coded.

I made an exception in the config to allow this particular IoT device to use a DNS server other than what I preferred. In this case, the Google 8.8.8.8 DNS server. Once this change was made, the device appeared to have made contact with the Rinnai mother ship.

Once the connection was made I fiddled with the mobile app a few more times and was able to get the device registered successfully. I now have a device online in the app.

Now, to let Rinnai know that there are a few issues that I have found on the device. Hopefully this is not news to them.

Until next time…!