Rheem Hybrid HPWH

JakeCK

For those of you who use rheem's econet and are tired of relying on the cloud, this is the solution:

ESPhome and Home Assistant for a 100% local control connected system where you are 100% in control of the device and your data. I setup this up a few months ago(community has been working to reverse engineer their communication protocol for the better part of two years) and it has been amazing. No longer do I find that the heater did not get the signal to turn on from the cloud based schedule leading to a cold shower. No longer am I left wondering if it actually got the command to do something, and now I have full visibility of all the parameters that are on the computer.

This is how it should have been in the first place. Open and secure.

Want details message me.

WMno57

Very cool Jake.

I wonder if the cloud based software design was in preparation for the DOE requirement of grid aware appliances?

Are you able to use your water heater as a thermal battery for your solar. Could you have it run the temperature up to 150F in the afternoon, than in the evening drop the cut in for the HP down to 110F?

ethicalpaul

That's cool, but I'm curious…what was the situation where you got a cold shower due to a cloud failure?

JakeCK

This doesn't allow me to change any parameters to values that arent already supported. For example I can only set the temperature between 110 and 140. I always have mine set at 140. However I do maximize my solar usage by shutting off the tank at night after the sun goes down. And this is where relying on their cloud based schedule would routinely fail. Since it was entirely cloud based with no local storage of the schedule if anything between their servers and my tank failed it would not turn off or turn on when it was supposed to. And they apparently don't provide for verification that it was received or acted upon. Command to turn on is sent, and no verification so if Internet is down or even just the wifi is dodgy it would simply not follow the schedule. On more than one occasion either the wife or my self would have no hot water late morning because the tank was still off.

Try explaining that to your wife? Lol Thats like a negative WAF when it comes to home automation.

This mod completely bypasses even their own wifi. I can turn it off entirely. Its basically just a microcomputer that taps in to the serial port and reads the data directly. I can than choose to do whatever I want with it . In this case I feed it to Home Assistant and HA handles the schedule, locally. As long as my WiFi AP is functional it works. And since I am powering the module off the usb port from my server I could actually connect directly to it via USB.

ethicalpaul

On more than one occasion either the wife or my self would have no hot water late morning because the tank was still off.

The tank would cool off enough overnight that you wouldn't have hot water for a shower? That sounds strange. 140 is very high, try just leaving it at 133 24/7

JakeCK

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1802789#Comment_1802789

No, generally it would happen when the kids would get a bath or clothes were washed the night before so it was already drawn down by morning. However normally because of our schedules we don't need hot water until late morning giving it time to recover.

Thank you for the suggestion, but I like it at 140, and to optimize solar usage I run it during the day, not at night.

Bottom line is Rheems Econet is unreliable and failure prone because it relies on the cloud. This was a function I paid for. This mod eliminates all of those issues and delivers the experience I expected when I bought a "smart" water heater. I'm simply posting this if anyone else would like to have one less device talking to the cloud while still maintaining the functionality paid for.

Edit: This also had the benefit of allowing the wife to reliably control the water heater via the home automation, instead of the econet app which she doesn't even have an account for. Now if she is doing something she knows will use a lot of hot water she can change the settings herself such as setting it to high demand from the same interface/app everything else in the house uses.

Tom_133

I would love all that info on my phone while standing in front of it. We got one started the other day and it doesnt display much info so we couldn't tell if it was actually working in heat pump mode. It was doing a lot of the things you are used to seeing, but turns out no it wasn't. Sooo having the info you have would be great for each install!

JakeCK

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1802793#Comment_1802793

It wouldn't be hard to condense this down into one device such as a raspberry pi. And it is agnostic about which Rheem device its plugged into. If you read into it this supports much more than just their hpwh. Would make a handly little diagnostic tool. In fact this uses the diagnostic port. Call them and they'll tell you that is what it is for and not usable by the consumer. Lol

JakeCK

There is actually a lot more data available. I just hid most of it from the general UI. The home automation also stores and logs everything and presents it in pretty little graphs making it easy to spot trends and anomalies.

JakeCK

WMno57

I wonder if the data protocol is industry wide and not just Rheem?

Sounds like OBDII for cars. Industry wide standard from 1995. Originally OBDII didn't talk to the cloud (unless your car insurance company coerced you to put a dongle in your car's OBDII port). Recently several automakers got some bad press for sharing driving data with insurance companies without the owner's permission. GM owned up to the mistake and no longer shares data.

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/05/gm-ditches-onstar-smart-driver-feature/

I feel grid aware appliances are preferable to power outages, but I'm not confident my personal information will be secure.

JakeCK

Its easy to disconnect a car. Just find the antenna and cut the wire. Having a few inconsequential devices talking to a server, most probably in another country like china, doesn't bother me too much. My GE window shakers for example I'm not aware of anyway to get to them with out the cloud except for one that supports apple homekit. But my truck? Nah there aint no reason it needs to talk to the cloud via lte just so i can start and unlock it remotely. The ability to MAYBE locate it if stolen would be nice but that is tempered with the equally unlikely possibilty the truck gets hacked and forced into a median at highway speeds. My 2013 has a lot of computers it in. Just ask me about using my laptop and a bluetooth obd2 dongle to roll my windows down. But it aint connected to the cloud, and Im perfectly fine with that.