Bosch Home Connect Direct - Bad wifi

Off-Topic
1

Hi everyone,

I’m using the Home Connect Direct Binding, and it works great.
What doesn’t work so great, though, are the Bosch devices themselves.
Maybe someone here has a suggestion, because Bosch Support isn’t being very helpful.

What’s the problem?
I’ve connected a dishwasher, an induction stove, and a hood to the binding.
That worked fine so far.
Controlling them via openHAB also works.
However, after a while, the appliances lose their network connection and don’t re-establish it.

I’ve noticed that the Wi-Fi module in these appliances seems to be absurdly poor.
I set up a small access point right in the kitchen.
When it’s 2 meters away from the dishwasher, the connection holds.
Through monitoring, I could see that the ping times fluctuate between 5 ms and 500 ms.

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The stove and the range hood don’t like to connect to the access point right in the kitchen and prefer to use the one farther away.
Of the two, the stove maintains the connection “best,” with latencies ranging from 1,000 ms to 40,000 ms — yes, 40 seconds.
The range hood usually drops the connection completely after 4–5 hours.

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What I’ve noticed is that when I have the devices running and have first completely powered them down via the circuit breaker so they can reconnect to the Wi-Fi, the latencies are really good (50–500 ms).
If I turn them off, the latencies immediately become extremely poor.
It’s as if an “Eco Mode” or something similar kicks in.

The hood has a work light that I’d like to control via openHAB using a motion sensor, for example, to have a little “path light.”
I often can’t use this because the Wi-Fi connection is so absurdly bad that the control signals don’t get through.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of behavior?
Yes, I’ve already re-registered it on the Wi-Fi network several times and even tried using a different SSID.
Nothing helps.

Here’s a quick info on Bosch Support:
I’ve provided them with all the details via email.
When I mentioned that I’m running the devices on an offline network, they just said they had to be online.
I explicitly pointed out that the devices can’t even maintain the Wi-Fi connection on their own even if they had internet connection.
After that, I never received a reply; three weeks later, I got the support invoice for 0€ — lol.

Why did I even buy these Bosch appliances?
They came with the kitchen and work just fine without all that smart stuff.
They’re actually good, but the Wi-Fi is terrible.
That’s why I have them :slight_smile:

2

First thing I would try to only use wireless 2.4 GHz, switch off 5 GHz.

3

I second turning off the 5GHz and for test also keep the wifi ssid with out extended characters or spaces in the name and do the same for the password.

4

So, in all honesty my entire kitchen is Bosch. My kitchen ap is located about… 5meters from all appliances. Never had one disconnect, and I have the 2.4 and the 5ghz bands merged.
Contrary to what others say, it makes no difference to separate them, the Bosch modules (i think they are Texas Instruments if I’m not mistaken) don’t even see the 5ghz. Sure some devices used to have problems with that but that’s been largely sorted with new WiFi stacks. (Or at least it’s been years since I’ve last had an issue with them - this is my experience.).
With that in mind, I have more problems with my air conditioning units than the appliances.
Have you tried increasing the Dbs of the access point? Smartphone antennas aren’t the best for output if you are trying to use one for testing.

5

I had already tested it using only the 2.4 GHz band, even with an extra SSID on the AP in the kitchen.
None of that helped. I also experimented a bit with the encryption settings — sometimes WPA2 + WPA3, sometimes just WPA2… but that didn’t help either.

Turning off the 5 GHz band is only intended for pairing mode, so that your smartphone isn’t on the 5 GHz band but is also on the 2.4 GHz band.
Once such devices are connected, you can use the 5 GHz band again without any problems.

My IoT Wi-Fi is only 2.4 GHz anyway, because I don’t have any devices that benefit from the 5 GHz band.

The transmission power on the AP is set to maximum.
I’ve even placed it directly on the range hood or 1 meter away from it, but that didn’t really improve things.

I’m using OpenWrt on all my access points, so I can tweak the settings quite a bit :slight_smile:

Something I noticed while working on another project is that inexpensive Wi-Fi devices in particular can have poor-quality antennas.
I have a small board with an ESP32 on it that has the Wi-Fi antenna built right in.
These come with either an SMA connector or a built-in antenna.
In that case, I had to extend the antenna by a few centimeters to keep the Wi-Fi connection stable.
I mentioned this to the board’s developer, and he was surprised that such a simple solution actually helped.
… and i was not alone with this problem.
If Bosch hasn’t installed a good Wi-Fi antenna in these devices either, that would go some way toward explaining the behavior.

7

Yes, I’m also experiencing connection issues with my WGB264A0IT washing machine, even when using their own app. The Wi-Fi connection is on a 5GHz network.

8

The trade-off: penetration of solid objects is still poorer than 2.4 GHz, which limits range and often requires more power.

9

I agree with you, but in this case, it’s not a signal coverage issue. The access point is in the same room.