Anyone successfully integrated their AO Smith Hybrid water heater?

Third party integrations
1

So, I bought a new hot water heater for my home. Its a AO Smith HP10-50H45DV that I bought from Lowe’s. Now, years back, Lowe’s dabbled in their smart home field with Iris, but is now defunct. They did make a controller that connected to hot water heaters with a special 14 pin Molex(similar to a ATX power supply Molex) but that device required Iris cloud integration, which was terminated. Calling Lowes, and AO Smith, has proved fruitless. Doing my own research, it appears there is serial data from a few of the pins. I am wondering, has anyone successfully integrated with HA their AO Smith hot water heater, or am I the first to explore this territory?

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2

I just had one installed today, and immediately started googling how to connect it.

I found this forum thread talking about how to read the data on the communications port.

I haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet, but will take a look in the coming months.

3

Reviving an old topic…

I just installed an AO Smith 900 hybrid water heater. Has there been any updates on this topic? Do I need to build an MQTT interface for this like I did for the Sol-Ark 12Ks?

Thanks in advance of any available info.

Bill

4

Haven’t found a lot of info yet, but I believe I have enough to go on. I’m building some hardware and will then attack the protocol.

AO Smith’s customer service was of no help at all for this customer, told me there is no protocol and no port available. Now it’s a challenge. :slight_smile:

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5

@bshaw have you made any progress? I am in the process of getting hardware to do the same

6

Just getting one of these myself. Anyone make an integration yet?

7

I kind wanna make one their app seems so basic.

8

if you just want to see how much hot water is in the tank I believe you can estimate it from the energy usage of the heat pump with a hardcoded lookup table. for my setpoint of 132F it almost always stops around 450 watts.

I tried a setpoint of 145F and it stopped at 506 watts.

9

If anyone is still looking for this, I’ve created an A. O. Smith integration. It should work with any water heater that works with the A. O. Smith mobile app.

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10

I also talked to AO Smith and State Water Heaters. The only info they could give on my HPX-50 for the port was it was for a utility company module. I did some digging and found the Kenmore 58000 smart module with Kenmore Smart App should work. The Kenmore Elite HP water heater is a rebranded OA SMith. IF this doesnt work I will look into the OA smith ICC BMS system.

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@bdr9
does the wifi app work on the 300 series? I have been reading the reviews of the 900 heat pump series and they are terrible. I am willing to spend the extra 300 bucks for wifi, but now I am concerned.

12

@PapaLanc There is a list of known compatible models in the integration documentation here. What is the model number of the water heater you’re looking at?

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Model #EE9-40R55DV

I see it is listed. My question is does it work well :slight_smile:

14

A lot of the reviews on lowes.com do not speak well for the app? Is there a web interface that works better?

15

I got it, but it will not connect to wifi. Connects to ICOMMMxxx then says cannot find the list of networks :frowning:

16

I don’t have any experience with this particular water heater model. But in general, it seems that initially connecting to wifi can be a pain, but once it’s connected it should work well. Make sure you’re using a 2.4 GHz wifi network. It might take a few tries, maybe try using a different phone if you can’t get it to work.

17

Thanks. Not sure if it helped but I turned off one of my access points thinking it might be seeing more than it could handle and it connected.

Not the fault of your integration, but I feel like I wasted $300 for the wifi. It does not show what the water temp actually is nor does it even show if the water heater is “on”/ heating water. And if you want to raise the temperature you have to punch the buttons on the heater.
At first it was going to be installed under the house but I do not know how to use a ruler, and it would not fit :frowning: I was hoping to switch to vacation mode without going under. But now it is in a closet it would be simple to change it.

Couple questions.

  1. Your integration signs me out of the app. I tried setting up another email but I need a second phone Or could I delete the app and start over?

  2. It has only been 24 hours on Wi-Fi? How long does the usage data take to show up? I see on the promo website the app has an Icon for energy usage but mine does not. Will it start at sometime without being logged into the app?

  3. Hot water availability so far is always high. It has been on vacation mode for 24 hours. Does it ever show anything diff?

  4. All of the entries say updated a long time ago. I guess that time only changes if the value changes?

Thanks again,
Grey

18

Yes, unfortunately the capabilities of the API are pretty limited. The water heater does not report water temperature or real-time heating state, so there is no way for the integration to get that information. Regarding raising the temperature, I have found that raising it manually once is enough to “unlock” the higher temperatures. After raising the temperature once, you should be able to freely lower and raise it using the integration.

Regarding your questions:

  1. Yes, I’ve noticed this too. It doesn’t bother me much because I mostly just use the integration and almost never need to use the app. If you need to use both, a workaround might be to create a second A. O. Smith account and use the “Users” feature in the app to grant it access to the water heater. Then, use one account with the app and the other account with the integration. I haven’t tested this though. If you try it, please let me know if it works!
  2. If your water heater supports energy usage data, then it should show up after a few days.
  3. The hot water availability seems to be relative to the current target temperature. Since enabling vacation mode sets the target temperature to 50 °F, it will always show “high” as long as the water in the tank is at least 50 °F. When not using vacation mode, I have noticed the hot water availability changing to medium/low after using some hot water.
  4. Yes, it will only change if the value changes. This is the way all entities in Home Assistant work.
19

It has been online since Sunday. Still no energy usage and availability is always high.
Set it to 110 degrees yesterday as I know the water was cold and no changes to usage or availability.
Again, not your code, just terrible AO Smith

edit
well there is some data in there now, but zeros

    "energy_use_data": {
      "a0lQk000002JbIrIAK": {
        "average": 0,
        "graphData": [
          {
            "date": "2024-03-27T04:00:00.000Z",
            "kwh": 0
          },
          {
            "date": "2024-03-28T04:00:00.000Z",
            "kwh": 0
          },
          {
            "date": "2024-03-29T04:00:00.000Z",
            "kwh": 0
          }
        ],
        "lifetimeKwh": 0,
        "startDate": "Mar 27"
      }