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Review on πŸ”₯ Anova Culinary Sous Vide Precision Cooker with WiFi and Bluetooth, 900W (No Longer Available) by Alexandria Richmond

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Skip WiFi and save money. Wifi is buggy and insecure. There are many better offline sous vide cookers on the market.

Be careful when making a purchase decision. The main reason people buy the Anova over many of the cheaper devices is because they want the wireless control that this particular product offers. a thread of people trying to troubleshoot a wireless network setup issue here. This is because, for some reason, Anova chose not to follow the RFC and not use a standard wireless driver. Instead, they appear to have written their own solution, which is frankly an unsafe piece of crap. After 4+ hours of troubleshooting I can tell you the following: - If you normally use a reasonably strong WiFi password, Anova expects you to lower your security. Your Wi-Fi product does not support special characters or spaces in the password. It also doesn't support passwords longer than 18 characters. For this to work, I had to change the WiFi password on every device in my house. If your network SSID contains a space, this will also not work. And Anova tech support doesn't even know it's a problem to tell you. They asked me to run a wireless network diagnostic and send them the data, which I did and they found no problems. But the reality is I had to remove all spaces from the SSID before it would work. You must disable wireless masking. There's no need to do that since you're already connected via Bluetooth. It should be easy to send probes, but they obviously didn't include this functionality - guest networks and other networks can cause problems. They made me disable my child network and my guest network to make this work. You need to disable 5GHz and only use 2.4GHz. For some reason they don't support that either. Basically their firmware is a specially written piece of crap that is not at all standard. This isn't rocket science. Standard wireless interfaces are well-defined and public, and there's no reason for them to kill their own proprietary version. Now that I finally figured out the spaces in the SSID I got it working but it doesn't matter. I'm going to return it and buy a quality off-grid device instead (it will still be cheaper than the "sale"). Now you might think that this doesn't matter in your case, but let me also make a few statements about your support organization. Over a year ago there were countless reports from people having various wireless problems. According to reports, their engineers repaired it at the time. But here we are, a year later, and the problems are still there. They will not support you. - If you need tech support, they are extremely inattentive. I wrote to their support team telling them what I had tried and in the next email they asked me to try the same. This happened not just once, but repeatedly. They clearly don't read their message, but instead reply with trite, ineffective, canned answers that won't solve your problems. a high-quality device that dispenses with overpriced, barely functional bells and whistles

Pros
  • EASY TO CLEAN - Removable skirt and precision cooker stainless steel discs are dishwasher safe, making this kitchen utensil easy to clean and maintain. Temperature range - from 0 to 92 degrees Celsius
Cons
  • unreliable