Love the DF700 - looks great and heats well. Love the fantastic Kiwi technical service after four years from Escea even more - went above and beyond to help us out. Show reply
Poor fireplace heat, and slow service for a fault – The unit lit easily twice from the remote really easily so I was impressed with that and after that I got error messages. The installing plumber from Classic attended, pulled the whole unit apart and phoned Escea with fake logs, stone a bits around him, just to be told that they’ve worked out that the fireplace needs a software upgrade! So I was… Read more
told they’d be in touch in a couple days but it took another few weeks for Escea phone, after a nudge, to make an appointment in another 3 weeks = 6 weeks to attend. Seriously, do yourself a favour and get an Illusion. Heat Output will be superior for the same price and the one I’ve had in a luxury rental has been hassle free. Talk about buyers regret. I’ll update this after the service.
Great heat output – We are over the moon with our Escea fireplace. We live in an old house and it's doing a great job of keeping our open plan living/ dining/ kitchen cozy. We had an issue initially and the service and resolution to this has been outstanding, I highly recommend Escea for a company that provides excellent after care and a quality product. Show details
Not Happy! – We have not had a good experience with our Escea DF 700 since we bought it. When we got it home we discovered a scratch on the side of the unit, which the retailer wouldn't do anything about because we had transported it home in our car (even though we had packed it very carefully, with the retailer's help, so none of the parts touched). Within a… Read more
couple of weeks after having it installed by a qualified gas fireplace installer the metal on the top of the unit started bubbling as if it was rusting under the paintwork. Our installer rang Escea in New Zealand while he was here sorting out a couple of other issues with the fireplace & told them about the bubbling paintwork. They said it should be replaced & they would get back to him but he, nor we, ever heard back from them. Each year when we've tried to light the fireplace at the start of winter we've experienced trouble getting it to light and more than once we've had to get the serviceman to come out because an error message (E2) has appeared on the remote control. Now our serviceman no longer does this sort of work so we have no one in our district who knows anything about these fireplaces - we think the nearest service person is about 200kms away. We have tried to light the fireplace this week without success and the same error message (E2) has appeared on the remote. So we have no heater. We found a serviceman who has never heard of Escea but he has been out & tried his best. He has contacted Escea and my wife has also phoned Escea, explained the situation and Escea said they will call back by today but neither the serviceman, nor my wife, have heard back from them. So, understandably, we are not happy and would either like the whole unit replaced or our purchase price refunded.
Nice fireplace. Unbelievably bad control App – I bought the freestanding DFS730 version of this heater. It's a very pretty unit which is one of the primary reasons we got it, and it also has App based control which is the other reason. I have a fully connected, automated home and everything can be controlled through my iPhone. I emailed Escea directly with several questions before I made the… Read more · 1
purchase but they never responded. I also emailed them twice more with some other queries and didn't hear a whisper back, so I'm pretty scared about the prospect of something going wrong with this unit. Which brings me to their App...
The idea of being able to control your gas log fire with your iPhone (either in the house, or from anywhere in the world) is a really good one. I always have my iPhone with me, I don't want to add another physical remote to the house, and everything else I have at home is digitally controlled. However the Escea App has been developed very poorly. Every morning I launch the App (from my bedroom) and try to turn the downstairs heater on, and it takes between 5 to 20 times of trying and re-trying for the App to find the heater (it just hangs, "refreshing"). I usually have to force quit the App 3-4 times and keep trying this over and over and over. It's unbearably annoying and sometimes I just give up. This is not an occasional happening, it's consistent every day. When using the App remotely (outside the house) it works much better, but I only do that occasionally. When inside the house over a local connection, it's a disaster. This App needs to be developed further to make the local connection reliable. At present I would rate that feature 1 star out of 5.
On top of this, the App is standalone and heater control hasn't been integrated into any of the platforms (Apple HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon Alexa) that specialise in enabling this functionality and enhancing the connected home. To say this was an oversight during the development process would be a remarkable understatement.
In terms of performance the fireplace does a fairly nice job, heating a large room adequately and not costing a fortune. It's no-where near as powerful as an old Archer unit I have but it's much more modern looking and gets the job done while looking stylish. There are two burner settings and two fan levels (at least - I was led to believe there were more but I haven't been able to see the evidence of that) which regulate the room's temperature. The single burner setting produces a pretty small flame that doesn't look very impressive but I guess that's a necessary compromise for gas saving. I've never been able to work out what the "effect only" feature does (one would assume it produces a flame but with no fanned heat) however it seems to do identical things to when the heater on its lowest setting.
I would recommend this unit but if you're buying a heater for the 21st century to control digitally or to integrate with any kind of smart home or home automation, this doesn't currently offer that.
Amazing product – Heats 700 squares very well Great being connected to wifi turn the fire on before you get home from your phone I wasn’t pay for this I am so happy The company deserved credit Made in New Zealand we had a fire place all ready changed to gas Show details · 1
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