Home Assistant Adapter for GE appliances

We needed a new washer and while browsing what could be interesting to integrate in Home-Assistant, I saw that the closest I could get to local control was GE appliances with this project : GitHub - mulcmu/esphome-ge-laundry-uart: ESPHome interface to GE Washer & Dryer

I would need to build the board and compile the firmware but that was nothing I didn’t do in the past. Would prove slightly challenging but better than what I did before : guessing what the appliance was doing by following it’s power usage.

We went with the GE UltraFast Combo, which is a washer and dryer with a heat pump.

We verified at first that it would have what’s called the GEA port, in my case it was a GEA3 port, their 3rd generation bus protocol.

We bought the appliance and while waiting for delivery, FirstBuild (a GE Appliances venture) announced a Home-Assistant adapter for GEA3 appliances beta, a successor of the GreenBean.

The timing was perfect. I sign-up and a couple weeks later, received the board.

It is a carrier board that you attach a ESP32-C3 and compile their GEA to MQTT firmware to it. It is self powered from the bus.

This picture show the port but the auto-dispenser is normally there.

The firmware will then subscribe to the appliance and output the erds of the machine directly onto the MQTT broker.

The data is quite raw which require a bit of handling but on the other hand, gives incredible flexibility.

You can then handle those values which are documented here.

Example of MQTT handling :

mqtt:
  switch:
    - name: "Séchage supplémentaire"
      state_topic: "geappliances/ultrafast-combo/erd/0x213a/value"
      command_topic: "geappliances/ultrafast-combo/erd/0x213b/write"
      payload_on: "01"
      payload_off: "00"
      state_on: "01"
      state_off: "00"
      unique_id: "4cdcbdf6-1e15-408b-9675-409745d265ca"
      icon: mdi:tumble-dryer
      device:
        identifiers: "a92a4cf2-efe9-4561-a24e-0432bc7bcfa5"
        name: "Ultrafast Combo"
        manufacturer: "GE Appliances"
        model: "PFQ97HSPVDS"

After some work, you’ll end up with an impressive amount of sensors and controls :

And still missing…

Now with all of that I was able to build a nice dashboard for it giving me every control on the appliance :

But also create nice automations like knowing when a cycle is finished. Since I know when I opened the door, I can also clear this notification when the clothes have been taken out of the machine :

The possibilities are limitless. You realized you won’t be home because the party will last longer than expected? How about adding extra dryness from the car?

I really love what FirstBuild and GE is doing here. Full local control of their appliances, now possible.

If you are interested in one, you can sign-up here : Home Assistant adapter

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this is sick, thanks for sharing!

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Amazing project !!

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Very nice description and documentation!!
will keep in mind when it will be time to renew our appliances

great work

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Nice! If you can, post some telemetry data from both washing and drying various loads. I’m in the US, and heat pump dryers are not yet a “thing” here but I know exactly how much power my older electric dryer pulls (a lot) and would be interested in seeing how much a heat pump drying system uses by comparison.

Also do you have the condensate line plumbed to the drain or do you have to empty the tray? How often?

Washing and drying is a kilowatt and a half max total with this machine.

By the way, its an American product. It’s a hot seller in Canada and the US at the moment.

Condensation is drained by the machine in a water drain. You can see the pump status as well with this adapter. Also since it’s gentle on the clothes, it produces maybe ⅓ of the lint a regular dryer would do so you only need to clean the filter when the machine tells you to.

I’ll see what I can do for some data you might like to see.

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Curious how you got all those sensors working, I got the same adapter but have not had much luck. It seems like my washer perhaps is using a different version or something as when I was trying to decode data I was getting a bunch of gibberish

You have the FirstBuild adapter?

By gibberish you mean hexadecimal data? You have to more than often convert hexadecimal to decimal.

Do you have more information on your setup? Can you see the ERDs?
Maybe start a new forum post and mention me, we could look at it.

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Yes, I also bought it but didnt get to set it up till a few days ago.

By gibberish I mean I check the ERD and it shows some hexadecimal data. I tried converting it to decimal then ASCII which my understand is what is used, but I dont get a modle number or anything. I just get a serious of random characters. For instance p eܕGN(

Regarding my setup, I just setup the adapter, and plugged it into my washer. I can see all the ERDs via MQTT browser, just cant make sense of the data.

Hey @starsoccer, can you create a GitHub issue with more info at GitHub · Where software is built? We should be able to help you get things up and running.

By the way, we’re working on a Home Assistant integration that will handle a lot of the set up automatically, but we’re not there yet. Stay tuned!

Created an issue there. Happy to dm an example of the data or something, but would prefer to avoid posting the ERD 1 publicly since it has the Serial number in it