Fortress Power Owner

To level-set: I retired as Fellow at Cisco Systems, having built mission-critical networking code and systems for decades. The Fortress gateway, cloud server, and iOS app manage to stop communicating way too frequently. The last app release adds the ability to manage the device locally via Bluetooth, which is a godsend. The battery scheduler is virtually useless. Changes to key parameters (min charge state, max sell-to-grid rate, etc.) take effect immediately. If you want to run your house on the battery from 6 to 9am (to avoid Duke’s prime / critical prime rate winter window) set your alarm clock for 5:55am, manually adjust a couple of sliders, and hit save. That is IF the device, cloud server and app are willing to play nicely. Multiple timeouts are to be expected. If you’re on site, Bluetooth is your friend. If not, reset everything in sight and hope for the best.

This app has never worked right and as such doesn’t provide the necessary information to monitor the system and ensure it is operational.

This app is poorly designed and written and barely works half the time.