Req Teq App.

[BoostLife]

It's been an issue off and on during the time I've owned my RT-700. A while back there were issues with the app not giving any notifications. It was addressed successfully with an update to the app a while ago and alerts worked nicely.

More recently we've seen issues with notifications sometimes being delayed or not happening at all. You can still connect to the grill via WiFi and control it, so it's not a WiFi or 2.4 vs 5 GHz issue - but alerts are affected. The general speculation is that there's some issue with their cloud infrastructure. It tends to be noticed around holidays when more people would be using their grills, so perhaps increased data traffic is a factor. The truth is none of us know for certain. More people using their grill means more people would see the issue but doesn't necessarily mean the increased traffic is the cause.

If people are displeased with the issue, I'd suggest contacting Recteq directly. Call Ray himself. This is a private forum and to my knowledge, they don't monitor it for discussions.

It will be interesting once I start using the grill. It arrived Monday, I thought my first cook would have been yesterday but the wife had other plans. I just made up some brine and will put the chicken thighs in at noon and will fire it up for burn in just before dinner. I will try it out but I also have other probes and a TP MK4 to check. It will be a good opportunity to try it out. I can also do some packet capture to see what is going on between the grill, cloud and phone. I am actually kind of shocked that the grill isn't very chatty on my network so far. A lot of IoT stuff like this is very noisy. I will dig into it a lot more but it won't be any solutions. At a high level I would say the cloud service doesn't appear to be in the US. I haven't done a full trace on it yet though. Just some basic visibility I have in my network sensors.

 

[bobjones]

Lack of notifications for defined probe alarms has happened for every cook I've done so far with my 590 and I've contacted support every time. The last time I spoke with support I was told there was an app update coming to fix this, the time before that they called me in the middle of a Tuesday and had me test the probes, at which time the notifications didn't work initially, but by the end of the ~10 minute call, notifications eventually arrived. I've had no trouble monitoring or controlling my grill using the app, the only failure has been in probe notifications and I tend to do long cooks on the weekends when most other recteq owners are probably doing the same. All of this leads me to believe the problem is on their cloud side, resulting in delays or straight up failures to send notifications properly.

 

[Ostrichsak]

Well I am so new to RecTeq that I haven't even fired up my grill for the first time yet. The RT700 has been around for a while. Has this always been an issue since they came out with the wifi control features I assume around when the 700 came out? I know it is also used in other grills like the 590 but I don't know when they came out vs the 700. I don't think this was a thing with the 680 but like I said I am new to this.

Before buying I was reading of some complaints about people not getting notifications during busy cook times like holidays. I guess it is possible that they are having the same issues and they just have sold that many more grills where almost every day is a holiday load for whatever cloud system they are using. I really haven't had much time to do a full packet capture on the traffic the grill is sending to the cloud yet but I will at some point. When I was talking to my delivery driver on Monday he said he sure has been delivering a lot of these lately. He went on to say he goes into a neighborhood and delivers one. Then a few weeks later he is back in the same neighborhood delivering 5 more.

However, I also read a lot of stuff about only connecting it to 2.4 GHz wifi. Connecting it to a mixed 2.4/5GHz wifi network can cause reliability issues. They were very clear in this so is that the case with some people? I have that ability with my home network but my home network is far from what the average home looks like. Granted I also work in the IT field so it is more closely related to an enterprise network. I know with some off the shelf Best Buy or off the virtual shelf Amazon consumer network equipment it can still be done but it is far from a normal configuration. I haven't had the grill long enough to play around with whatever this issue is. I will say that it does make sense to have it on 2.4GHz anyhow as you are not going to need the speed that 5GHz can do and 2.4GHz does better going through walls. Being most grills are outside this is an advantage to have the grill on 2.4GHz. I do find this a little interesting in that one would think fine use a radio only capable of talking on 2.4GHz. It would completely ignore the 5GHz. However in some cases, maybe not yours this could be causing an issue. Sometimes people don't follow the directions or if they do read it, don't understand what it means or how to do it. I don't work in the grill industry but when it comes to our employees trying to work from home we are really careful in not providing support for home networks. The next thing you know they can't get to Netflix and we are supporting that. I just kicked someone off our network a week ago because their home network is so bad and we just gave them a hotspot because we are not dealing with that crap. I told them you have issues, I can't go into it as I simply don't have time but that they should either look at rebuilding everything or hiring someone to assist because if it was my network, I wouldn't trust it enough to do things like banking or much of anything based on what I was seeing. Working from home has been interesting. We are not that large of a company but have a few thousand workers still working from home.

I've read countless posts by people having WiFi issues that are clearly used error. FWIW this isn't a WiFi issue nor is it anything I've got control over. I've got an all-UniFi network with a UDM Pro at the heart & rocking AC AP Pros for the WiFi piece even though most all of my clients are hard-wired whenever possible. I've gone way overkill for our networking needs & my system is fully tuned & micromanaged regularly.The issue isn't on my end & I know this 100%.

 

[Ostrichsak]

Lack of notifications for defined probe alarms has happened for every cook I've done so far with my 590 and I've contacted support every time. The last time I spoke with support I was told there was an app update coming to fix this, the time before that they called me in the middle of a Tuesday and had me test the probes, at which time the notifications didn't work initially, but by the end of the ~10 minute call, notifications eventually arrived. I've had no trouble monitoring or controlling my grill using the app, the only failure has been in probe notifications and I tend to do long cooks on the weekends when most other recteq owners are probably doing the same. All of this leads me to believe the problem is on their cloud side, resulting in delays or straight up failures to send notifications properly.

This was my speculation as well but whenever I ventured a guess in a threat I was berated for guessing w/o actually knowing specifics. Not my job to know specifics other than one of the most important (to me) aspects of the smoker I paid for doesn't work. I get no answers & no resolution.

 

[BoostLife]

I've read countless posts by people having WiFi issues that are clearly used error. FWIW this isn't a WiFi issue nor is it anything I've got control over. I've got an all-UniFi network with a UDM Pro at the heart & rocking AC AP Pros for the WiFi piece even though most all of my clients are hard-wired whenever possible. I've gone way overkill for our networking needs & my system is fully tuned & micromanaged regularly.The issue isn't on my end & I know this 100%.

I also am a Unifi user. UDM PRO as well with several Unifi Switches, UAP AC Pro, UAP AC LR and UAP-nanoHD. Also a few of their cameras. Much of my network is hardwired with CAT6 as possible with fiber runs to detached buildings. The nanoHD is in one of my garages which is where my RT 700 is. Though it will likley move eventually out to the patio just outside the garage. I set up a VLAN that is a 2.4GHZ only IoT network for this and a couple other fussy devices. I have been a Ubiquiti customer for years. Ran the Edge Router X for a long time. I sure do miss the command line on that. There are quite a few things that I can't do anymore with the newer OS on the UDMP.

Never said it was your issue, just that they were pretty clear about this limitation and I don't know how it comes into play.

I finally got around to my first cook but didn't use the probes. I did get an alert once my grill hit the set point of 400 for the burn in. Now I did drop in temp quite a bit loading in the chicken thighs after the 1 hr burn in was done. I never did get any alerts when I recovered back to 400. Not sure if it would do that though. I will try out the probes in the future but won't rely on them. I will be using my remote thermometer as well.

 

[Greg Jones]

Never said it was your issue, just that they were pretty clear about this limitation and I don't know how it comes into play.

They (I assume recteq) were pretty clear about what limitation? That notifications don’t work?

 

[BoostLife]

They (I assume recteq) were pretty clear about what limitation? That notifications don’t work?

That the wifi only works with 2.4GHz wireless not 5GHz. See step 1:

https://www.recteq.com/wifi-setup

By no means am I saying it is the cause of all of this but it might be in some cases. Everyone has different technical abilities and this very well might go straight over someone's head. I suspect in most cases, as other have stated it is likely a cloud provider issue. A vendor that over promises and under delivers. Lets just hope that the cloud provider can fix it or that the provider isn't hard coded into the grills and that an app update can allow them to switch to a better service or maybe bring it in house.

 

[Wslayer]

I will be using my remote thermometer as well

Sound advice, I always set additional.

 

[NBK]

Love the tech talk...I am running a dedicated 2.4 GHz channel specifically for the Recteq. This issue is not user based and Recteq has marketed a product feature that does not work. UI needs to be simple and elegant for the masses. Few people have tech ability and folks shouldn't have to labor over getting the product to work.

I solved the problem the old fashioned way. I threw money at it. I purchased the Thermoworks "Signal " and problem solved. Simple setup, accurate measurements and everything works. Unfortunately, I should not have had to spend the $200+ to fix a product I have already paid for. When I purchased the RT-700, nothing was ever said about the buggy app...and I had multiple conversations with Recteq. I like my grill but I am a little bummed with having to spend money to solve their problem. Recteq is not the only player out there. They need to fix their stuff (insert different word).

 

[Greg Jones]

By no means am I saying it is the cause of all of this but it might be in some cases…

I disagree, this is not the problem with the lack of alarms at all. Those having notification problems, myself included, can control the grill-on, off, make temp changes. In my case, the grills are connected to my 2.4GHz-only guest network. Additionally, it’s not possible for a 2.4GHz device to just jump to a 5GHz band on its own. Everyone in this thread, and in other threads, complaining about the lack of notifications are not having an issue with the grill not connecting to WiFi.

 

[IdioticDummyhead]

I decided to send them a note with a link to this thread on the forum. I received a quick response this morning. Hopefully this isn’t just smoke (pun!) being blown somewhere unpleasant.

 

[Ostrichsak]

This would be SUCH a good thing if they truly fixed it and it stayed fixed. I absolutely HATE bagging on Recteq because I was among their biggest supporters and fans prior to this. Hell, I even sold several my first couple of months of ownership based on how much I liked it compared to many other smokers I've owned, some in a similar segment. That said, there really should be some sort of a referral program. I digress. I felt like a turd when everyone who I just sold on the product was pissed their important meals during holidays and what not were getting ruined.

For me personally, it wasn't bad enough though that the issue happened. I realize that we're all human and humans make mistakes. I expect businesses to make a few mistakes here and there and endeavor to minimize them. That's all we can ask. What I was NOT happy with was how the problem as addressed when brought to their attention. Between acting like it wasn't a problem, lying about the fact that it was a one-off situation and would be addressed right away and finally taking months to even state it's been fixed (I'm still not even convinced it has been until I see MINE function 100% as promised) I'm not as all-in on this company as I once was.

The sign of good customer support isn't answering the phone when they call, that's expected. The sign of good customer service is fixing the problem. Period. This lack of urgency on what was a customer-wide issue for months ongoing will make me think twice about referring more buyers their way.. It's honestly going to take some length of time of uninterrupted use before I trust them after they told me on multiple occasions that they were aware of they issue and it would be fixed. That's the opposite of good customer service. I'll give kudos if it's truly fixed but I won't forget how long it took or how I was made to feel like my "problem" was in my head by acting like my thousand-dollar-smoker worked 100% as advertised even w/o this critical (to some) feature.

I have no allegiance to any company who doesn't share the same level of allegiance to me. The moment I realize it's just business I'm more than happy to let my buying dollar do the same.

I'll put on my fire suit now as the Rectec fanbois are sure to not like my honesty and logical thinking on this topic.