Subscription charge for smart-heating system

renov8

Just looking for opinions on this, not sure where we stand. Renovated our house a couple of years back and installed the Owl Intuition heating system. Allowed for remote/phone control of the heating via WiFi as opposed to SIM card. One reason we opted for this was that there was no subscription fee.

Fast forward to today and I get an email from the company saying that our 2 year warranty is out and they will now be charging a subscription. They say this will cover online support, access to your data and software and firmware updates. Here's the rub: anyone who doesn't pay the subscription and is outside of 2 year warranty will be disconnected!

Can this be done? To my mind, we bought the system which includes the online controls/dashboard. Any updates should be supplied by the company free of charge, no? The company are UK based.

Ionised

Is it just updates and support they are charging for? Will you still be able to access the system remotely?

It's quite an old system so I'd imagine there would be few, if any, software updates at this point.

If you can still access remotely without subscription I'd just ignore the email.

CeilingFly

Site seems clear about the subscription after 2 years of £19.99 for a further two years.

Seems to be for software updates / reporting systems rather than for operation of system

renov8

CeilingFly wrote: »

Site seems clear about the subscription after 2 years of £19.99 for a further two years.

Seems to be for software updates / reporting systems rather than for operation of system

Yeah, checked the small print on the website and you're right, it does say that. Don't remember noting that when I purchased but serves me right for ignoring the small print!

However, the email they sent was clear in saying that you will be 'disconnected' if you don't subscribe.

ED E

Not the first case of this recently. Buying connected devices that rely on their sellers to keep servers online is a poor long term choice. Even Logitech tried their arm at it last week.


If you were to get a refund for this setup, assuming the terms changed after you were installed, they'd have to offer many many people the same. That precedent would destroy them so expect heavy resistance.

CeilingFly

renov8 wrote: »

Yeah, checked the small print on the website and you're right, it does say that. Don't remember noting that when I purchased but serves me right for ignoring the small print!

However, the email they sent was clear in saying that you will be 'disconnected' if you don't subscribe.

It's not in small print, it is quite upfront about it and its stated in the first few lines - you don't even need to scroll down to see it.

Yep, you'll be disconnected from their dashboard that gives you useage details / analysis. But doesn't mean the system will be disconnected - that seems fairly clear too from what I read too.

vectorvictor

CeilingFly wrote: »

Site seems clear about the subscription after 2 years of £19.99 for a further two years.

Seems to be for software updates / reporting systems rather than for operation of system

What is relevant to the op here is that the same site two years ago contained no such detail and didn't even have a subscription tab at that time (I didnt dig deeper to see if it's buried anywhere else)

Unable to post links but I selected a version of the site from November 2015 using web.archive.org