We had to replace our tankless water heater last June, and while the new unit (same make/model, a Navien NPE-24A2) works great, the hot water isn’t always instantly there when we want it. That’s probably because the installer set it to “intelligent” mode, where it tries to learn our usage patterns…which aren’t always constant. I suspect the earlier unit had been set to make hot water available 24/7, which burns more gas, of course…but we didn’t know that.

In researching how to solve the availability problem I learned you can program the heater manually to keep hot water recirculating at certain times. That sounded like the way to go, although programming a week’s worth of hourly entries didn’t sound like fun.

Then I discovered there’s a WiFi/smartphone app accessory that lets you do all that on your iPhone. Sign me up!

Sigh.

Someday I may learn that loving gadgets, and computers, and being, personally, a perfectionist, does not guarantee that “cool” things developed and manufactured by others will actually be cool.

But not today.

Oh, in the end I was able to get everything working without too much trouble. Just the loss of several hours on what really should’ve been a 20-minute job. Because:

• Not one of the steps laid out in the Navien documentation for installing or configuring the accessory were correct. Not one¹!
• There was no picture or illustration showing where to attach the cable connecting the heater to the accessory.
• Turns out there had been a couple of design changes to the water heater main circuit board…which weren’t reflected in any of the publicly available documentation.
• Tech support, when I finally got to the right level, didn’t even have access to current pictures and illustrations.
• Speaking of tech support, I almost couldn’t get any because the James Caccia Plumbing technician who installed the new unit back in June never bothered to register it…which the installer is supposed to do, so that the homeowner can gain access to tech support².

Oh, and when I finally got everything working, it turns out one of the functions I could’ve sworn they advertised — press a button on your smartphone to fire up the heater — isn’t actually available.

1. Example: Select item 3, Application Menu. Only that’s not what item 3 is. In fact, the menu you want is a submenu of a different menu item…which you need a password to get into, a password that wasn’t provided to me upon installation. Fortunately, it was a really simple/dumb password which tech support was happy to share…after I called them back for the fourth time. ↩

2. Fortunately, tech support took pity on me. Or maybe they could detect the edge in my voice… ↩