Helpers: Groups - Why aren't all device types groupable?

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Specifically, climate devices and entities.

I have a bunch of mini-split AC/Heat Pumps integrated into HA via the LG ThinQ integration. I have 20 units across 5 compressor loops. The way mini-splits work with multi-head compressors is that all units on a given compressor can only be either heat or cool. You can’t have some heating and some cooling, not on the same shared compressor anyway. So I’d really like to be able to refer to them as 5 groups so I can say to a voice assistant (Alexa in my case) “turn loop A to heat” (or cool) and it’ll turn those all to the same mode. And perhaps set an arbitrary baseline temp for all units on that loop, or fan speed (which for some reason is not the same as a fan which is groupable), or on or off.

You can kind of mimic this by creating scenes, but it’s really pretty messy to do it that way and again it’s overly specific. The other issue is the LG mini-splits forget what their last state in that mode was after a while so just go full blast in whatever mode they haven’t seen in a while. Sometimes scenes catch this sometimes they don’t and you’ll walk into a room where the AC has been randomly set at 64F (18C) or heat at 86F (30C) and the fan on full tilt. It all depends on whether you specifically tweaked and saved that option when you created the scene. Like I said it’s messy and unreliable.

Also “mode” is not binary, so mode can be one of Heat/Cool/Dry/FanOnly, but anyway, point is all the units are the same so not sure why the option to group these wouldn’t be available, or why any climate devices wouldn’t be groupable, like thermostats as well for that matter. All those climate devices and entities are as similar to each other as RGB lights are from different integrations and those are groupable. It just seems like anything that is mostly the same should be able to make up a group and be controlled as some common purpose multi-device or multi-entity.

My particular problem is for climate devices, but I can see where this could be an issue for other types of devices as well, as the pick list for group inclusion seems to be for specific types of entities and not just any entity type. Why should this matter?

Anyway, you could do this by creating a group in the Alexa app, but I am trying to get to the point where Alexa only deals with Home Assistant exports and get rid of anything in it that relys on Alexa Skills or things configured directly in the Alexa app, as it gets pretty unmanageable pretty fast. And that means no native Alexa groups, perferably no Alexa skills, no Alexa routines (well except perhaps just routines to alias the annoying commonly misheard requests).

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Have you tried the old style yaml defined groups?

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/group/#old-style-groups

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Well no, but the first thing you see on that page is bold text saying: " We don’t recommend using these old-style groups anymore. ", which kind of eludes to not being a particularly great solution to invest a lot of time into.

Honestly, I’ve been using HA for quite a while now and only recently uncovered the rather convoluted way of creating groups. In every other platform it seems to be front and center, in HA it’s buried under “helpers”, which, well why? And why is it where it is in the GUI? Seems to me it would be more appropriately placed as something unto itself and probably better placed under “Automations & scenes”. I mean groups don’t really have that much to do with “integrations”, or “devices” or “entities” per se, and probably a lot more to do with “automations” and “scenes”, I’d argue perhaps more so than “Scripts” and “Blueprints” do.

I don’t really have that much of an issue using YAML, but I do have an issue where YAML seems to be “the old way” of doing things, and has aspects of that depreciated pretty regularly.

Anyway, groups should figure more prominently in the interface IMHO, and should be less restricted. The Alexa app (or Smartthings or even the Tuya SmartLife app, and pretty much just about every manufactures product specific app), all are products far less capable than Home Assistant, can do groups and do them with few restrictions within their scope, and feature them as a primary function of those apps. It’s kind of a principle aspect of automations, I have a bunch of these “things” that I want to treat as a common “thing”. Lights, switches and dimmers, of course, being probably the most common, but it should apply to anything of any type, assuming they share a mostly common function.

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I feel it should say:

We don’t recommend using these old-style groups anymore, if there’s an equivalent new-style group.

FWIW, I still use old-style groups.

Anyways, if you’re interested, there’s a custom integration that implements a Climate Group.

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