FoxESS Community - Owners & Installers Forum

Good afternoon,

We had a Fox ess inverter installed several weeks ago. The installer could not get the dongle to connect to our home wifi, and said we'd get either a new dongle or an engineer would come to connect I via ethernet. Neither has happened and we are still unable to connect.

I have tried rebooting the inverter, resetting the home wifi, different Internet browsers, trying to connect to my phones hotspot. Nothing.

All 192.168.1.1 when connected to the dongles wifi shows is 'nothing' where my home wifi ssid should show, and the mac box is just grey.

How do I connect?

In all honesty it sounds like you have tried all of the obvious things, you should get a screen that looks like this (at step3)
If it doesn’t show that and you’ve power cycled etc.. it does sound like you have a faulty wifi stick and best to get onto your installer for a replacement (obviously you can buy one yourself for ~£25 but why should you)

This is where you can buy one if your installer is struggling to locate https://www.tradesparky.com/solarsparky ... onglestick

We have a similar issue.

The dongle can see other wifi networks in the vicinity but not our home network, however it can see an old wifi powerline extender that's attached to our router, but not the router itself. I wonder if this is because the router is WiFi6 and the old extender is 4 years old technology.

Hi, I had the same problem, the previous poster is correct the problem is your router is too new (WiFi6) for the Fox dongle, it will only see 2.4ghz WiFi. There are 2 possible options, firstly if you haven't already done so switch on the 2.4ghz SSID on your router, it will have one for backwards compatibility but often they are off by default.

For me this still didn't work, but fortunately I still had my old router. I switched off the new router, switched on the old one and configured the same 2.4ghz SSID name and password as the new router, dongle could see the SSID on the old router. Then I put the new router on and switched off the old one, the dongle connected to the new router remembering the setting.

I think the problem is the dongle can connect to new routers running 2.4ghz it just doesn't see the SSID so you can't select it in the dongle app. In my case I am a Virgin Media customer for broadband and had recently upgraded to 1Gbps service and they shipped their latest router (Hub 5).

I hope this helps.