Update and fitting a Candy washing machine / dryer

 The bathroom is almost finished. Just need to get the aluminium arm that connects the glass side panel to the ceiling. The company that fitted the bathroom have gone quiet, which is a bit worrying. But that's OK as they are now not going to be doing the kitchen.

Unpacking the machine

My washing machine arrived two weeks ago now. I must admit I was a bit worried if it would fit through the door of the bathroom. 

Here it is being unpacked. Its a 9kg/6kg washer dryer from Candy and it can be controlled from your smart phone, more on that later.

The one I got wasn't the one I had originally planned for, and the bathroom  door width was designed for the old one. This new one was 1 cm deeper. 

But as they say measure twice and cut once, so measured about three times and thought it will fit I have 0.5cm clearance, and I could always take the top off and it would be an easier fit. Taking the top off would make the whole thing about 2 cm less deep. Any way it fitted fine what was I worried about.

Fitting it through the door

As you can see it went through the door with out any problems. Next I had to plumb it in. The tap had the wrong fitting on it and I had every adapter possible except the right one. A quick trip to the local DIY store remedied that and 45 minutes later I was plumbing the machine in.

Snug as a bug

So now its all in place the next thing was to switch it on and try and connect it to the Candy SimplyFi app. The process was actually quite pain free. The only thing to remember is that if you ever change your router to set the WiFi ssid name and password to the same as the old one. Then you don't have to do the setup again.

Some things it can do are more gimmicks than useful. I can place my washing in front of the machine take a picture, from within the app and it will tell me what program to use. 

The app itself is a bit slow and I think poorly coded, as sometimes it refuses to connect  to the machine, or take ages to connect.

I know its the app, as I can connect to the machine via my web browser. But you get just a text based page with some cryptic headings and values. But these are useful, if you know what to do with them.

 Using these cryptic headings and values,  I have also managed to get it to talk to my home automation system. So I know the status, and how long is left to go. I am in the process of trying to decode the cycle phase of the program its on. Then I will know if its washing, spinning rinsing etc.

This picture show what my home automation displays about the washing machine. 

In general I am very pleased with it but the app lets down what could be a very good product. You can save programs in a favourites folder, but there is no favourites folder available in the app. I also found out the the machine has an ESP module from Espressif Systems. These amazing programable wifi modules are in all sorts of things these days.

So what's next well the kitchen, and the lighting in the lounge. I have just received an ESP module based LED controller (yes similar to whats in my washing machine). I will be using this to control a 5m LED strip in my lounge dining room. So watch this space.