I’m familiar with these, having been installing the high end German branded ones for decades, so I had no difficulty putting it together and getting it working. The exhaust pipe that comes with it is one of the places where money has clearly been saved, but overall, this is easily a match for the major brands.
The controller is feature packed, even including a key fob remote control. Learning to set the timer and countdown timer is not as easy as it might be, because some of the steps have been omitted from the instructions. However, unlike most Chinese products, the manual has been translated into English pretty well. There’s no gibberish in it, just a step or two missing in places.
What really lets this otherwise excellent product down is the clock. After less than a week, the clock is over 20 minutes slow. So you can’t set it to come on at the same time every day and run for a set duration, because the clock doesn’t keep time. It’s such a shame, with all the useful features the fancy controller should provide, not to be able to use most of them.
A minor niggle is, you can’t use the remote to turn the system on. If it’s fully off, you have to power it on, using the controller, before it will respond to the remote. But it’s wonderful to be able to switch it off, or adjust it up or down, without getting up. That’s a feature you don’t get with the expensive brands.
Overall, I’m very happy with this. For €100-ish, I’ve got all the functionality of a €1200+ model, with a few nice extra functions. If it needs replacing sooner, so what? A new one will cost less than a service on the expensive one. As a professional installer, I was not expecting this. Even the fuel pump, which everyone seems to complain about, is simply not audible in the passenger compartment, once correctly positioned. All you can hear is the air flow and, if you concentrate, the fan noise.
I’ve been using this for almost a month, keeping two rooms warm in my house, during the coldest part of winter, while we’re working on the heating system. It’s been absolutely fantastic, keeping those rooms at 19 deg C, even with -5 deg C outside. Cold enough to freeze bottles of water in unheated parts of the house.
Sort out the controller/timer issues and this is a 5 star product. It may well be the case that the Bluetooth model solves it, but I was trying to pinch pennies and I didn’t pay the extra for that.
If I’m buying another, I’ll try that.