Air Conditioner power toggle support

Feature Requests
1

Currently climate modules do not support the ability to turn a device off (at least, the MQTT HVAC module does not). It’s noteworthy that Air Conditioners are distinct from thermostats, in that they are not always powered on (and for many regions, like mine, are usually turned off, because they’re big energy consumers, and only occasionally needed).

This also falters with the Google Smart Home integration, because Hass currently maps any and all “climate” modules to the Thermostat trait, which results in missing out on the ability to control things like fan speed and, most importantly, the ability to turn the AC off.

So, my feature request is:

  • Add support for explicitly turning off an air conditioner
  • Extend the Google Smart Home integration so that the Air Conditioning trait can be supported
2

I’m not using this component but the docs mention a power command.

3

From what I gathered from tying it, that command isn’t really an explicit command that’s available for toggling power but rather, it publishes an additional MQTT message to that topic, when you perform a command that would require the AC to be on. So, for example, if the AC is off initially, and you issue a command to set the AC to “cool” mode, then it will publish the mode to MQTT, but also publish an “on” message.

I was never able to issue anything to say power off.

4

Certainly other climate components allow you to switch on/off - I am using sensibo and it certainly does.

5

Okay cool, I’m probably doing something wrong in that part in that case.

The Google Smart Home issue still remains though, in that all climate devices are being classified as thermostats, which means the OnOff trait is lost.

6

I’m also interested if google assistant can be configured in a way to be able to switch A/C on and off.

7

Did you find any solution to switch A/C on using Google Home?
All the climate are wrongly exposed as Thermostat also if Google Home support the A/C as device type.

8

I know this is an older request, but since Home Assistant 0.107.x, the climate/airconditioning control from Google has been intermittent.
I can say “Set the air-conditioner to cool” and that works fine.
I can say “Set the air-conditioner to 27” and that works fine (I work in Celsius :slight_smile: )

If I say “Set the air-conditioner to off” Google often just says “I don’t understand” or gives me web results.
If I say “Turn off the air-conditioner” I get the same result as saying set to off.

Is anyone else getting this issue now and is it a bug or do I have a glitch in my system?

9

Does your integration have an “off”? What are HVAC_MODES in the states panel?

10

I use a Z-Wave device and it does have an “OFF”

I was doing some experiments today.

If I explicitly say “Set the air-conditioner mode to off” it will turn off the airconditioner. It will only do it when I explicitly add “mode to off” though, it does not do it if I just say “Turn the airconditioner off”.

This is sounding like it may be a Google bug rather than a HA bug, but I am interested in other views.

From the states page on Developers tab.
As a note, I’ve never been able to get fan modes to work.

hvac_modes:
  - dry
  - heat
  - 'off'
  - heat_cool
  - cool
  - fan_only
min_temp: 7
max_temp: 35
fan_modes:
  - On High
  - On Low
  - On Medium
  - Auto
preset_modes:
  - Resume
  - none

I have a Remotec ZXT-600 and the above is how it is setup when included via OZW.