I love Meaco devices. I’ve got their Arete Two 12L de-humidifier and their Sefte Pro 10″ table fan, and they’re fantastic. Well designed, well built, and a British company too.

Somehow I managed to add the Arete Two to the Meaco app when I got it last year. Not sure how though, because I got the Sefte Pro 10″ today and when I followed the paper manual’s instructions for adding the device to the app I hit a solid brick wall.

Here’s what it says, slightly paraphrased:

Connecting your air circulator to your Meaco app

1. plug the air circulator into the main
2. Hold the Mode button for 5 seconds
3. It’ll beep and a wifi symbol flashes
4. In the Meaco app, press the + button in the top right corner and then ‘Add device’
5. The app will search for nearby devices, wait till yours appears, click ‘Add’
6. Once paired the symbol will stop flashing.

Okay so first let’s just ignore their use of ‘press’ and ‘click’ instead of ‘tap’ in a touch screen app.

The problem is Step 4 where you tap the + button. It doesn’t specify which tab to do this from, so it makes sense to do it from the Home tab right? That’s where the devices are all listed and their controls accessed from, after all.

As we’ll see, and as you’ve probably guessed, that’s a mistake.

I spent at least 10 full minutes trying to get this to work from the Home tab button, but as currently designed it’s impossible. The Home tab does have a + button, but nothing in the screen that comes up allows you to add a device.

In fact, I still don’t really understand what it does do. Something about smart devices and favourites, but it seems to me that the one and only thing a + button on the Home tab should do is add new devices, and it doesn’t do that.

So here’s how you actually add a new Meaco device to the Meaco app in 2026.

1. plug it in, yep
2. hold the mode button for 5 seconds
3. it’ll beep and flash the wifi symbol
4. In the Meaco app DO NOT TAP + ON THE HOME TAB. Instead go to the bottom and select the ROUTINE tab.
5. Tap the + button on the ROUTINE tab, and a sub-menu will appear with ‘Add device’, tap that
6. A device selection screen appears, and your device should appear at the top above a list of compatible Meaco devices (presumably for if you need to add it manually)
7. Pair your device, symbol stops flashing, done.

Now you should see the device on the Home tab of the app, and from here you can tap it to access the controls etc.

I’m one of the people my friends come to for technical help but this stumped me so hard I had to go looking online where I found a helpful Reddit thread.

The problem here isn’t so much the manual itself – although it’s wrong in this case it makes complete sense to add new devices the way it describes, so I don’t get why the app does it so differently. I wonder if these instructions have just been copied over from an older device when the app worked like that?

Either way the problem is the app design. Whoever signed off on it needs to have a good hard think about what they’ve done, and then, y’know… fix it?