We’re currenty looking into airconditioning devices for one of our rooms. We’ve been quoted the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries “SRK20-50ZS-W Single-Split (R32)” wall module, and the seller has included a WiFi Module (I think the AM-MHI-01) so we can control it with our phones.
Since I want to integrate the airco into our home assistant as well, I wanted to check if it is possible with these modules. The sellers says so, but I’ve got the feeling that he isn’t necessarily versed in this field.
So my questions are:
Is it possible to integrate this module, or should we switch to a different one?
If possible, do we need any (third party) software/API’s/hardware etc to integrate it?
We just had a MHI SRK35ZSA-W and a SRK50ZSA-W installed about a month ago and I remember doing similar investigations. This thread was interesting because it made me remember I also wanted local control vs having a manufacturer’s cloud in the mix.
After going round in circles with the various adapter and code options I ended up pausing on the wifi approach, because a) it was taking me too long to research and I really needed the heatpumps installed, and b) the wifi modules can be added just as easily after the heatpumps are installed.
To integrate them with HA for now I just got a couple of pre-owned Broadlink RM4 Mini devices (one for each space); these are little IR blasters that connect via wifi and in my country new ones are about a quarter of the price of heatpump wifi modules (pre-owned even cheaper). The downside with them is you don’t get info back from the heatpump about what it is doing; you’re basically just automating its handheld remote. But if you’re OK with that then they work brilliantly.
Oh, and the superb SmartIR integration has all the infrared codes that the Broadlink needs (you can check this section to see if it has codes for your model).
I’ll pick up my ‘heatpump wifi project’ again later, but for now the IR approach is working perfectly for me, so just thought I’d share this info with you in case it helped. If you do get the wifi sorted, though, then I’d love to hear what you went with!
The only system I know of, that is controllable 100% locally, is Midea with ESPHome. All other integrations are in need of a cloud connection, and that’s something I wouldn’t want to have.
If this is an important criteria for you, stay with a Midea or a branded model, you’ll love it!
@juan11perez I’ll look into it tonight, thanks! Is it basically the way Protoncek and @CJB describe, so a third party hardware module in between?
@Protoncek Just so I understand correctly (I’m not very experienced):
It’s possible to control through Mitsubishi Melcloud, but it’s unreliable so not advisable
A second option is to add some sort of 3rd party hardware controller in combination with the ESP home API, which controls the airco device, and we don’t need the €100 WiFi Module that is optional with this device
Does this 3rd party module work both ways? So read info from the module but also send info from HA to the module? Or is it like Somfy shutters for example, where it can’t read what position they have but it can still give ‘orders’ to do A or B?
Is that correct?
@paddy0174@ferbulous I’d rather stay with this module. To be honest it has been a hassle to find a trustworthy someone who can install an airconditioning unit (the space in which it will be installed is a sun room: like, glass on 3 sides which includes the ceiling). And we wanted it dark-colored as well (black walls). Basically the options that we had were Mitsubishi, Daikin, Qventi and LG. The last one was adamantly discouraged by the two other airconditioning people. Daikin is very expensive, and Qventi is quite new as I understand it, so I’m hesitant about it being trustworthy long-term –software + warranty wise at least.
Honestly, they all had their downsides. Mitsubitshi was called old-fashioned and behind in innovation (though when they finally added an innovation, it worked better, less errors etc. At least according to the few salespeople we had over haha).
When you say compatible for local control, what does that entail exactly? What is needed to get it to work, and what is the difference with, say, the ESP Home integration mentioned here as well? What are its advantages?
Just thought I’d offer a couple of items in case these help:
Your original post mentioned Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), but a later post mentioned a black internal unit and Melcloud. Black head units and Melcloud are offered by Mitsubishi Electric, which is a completely different company. This is important as the wifi modules aren’t interchangeable and the solutions you’d use to integrate each directly with wifi to HA are completely different. (My previous heatpump was Mitsubishi Electric and my new ones are Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, so I’m aware of how different they are.)
If I understand correctly, @juan11perez has a Mitsubishi Electric model and is using the Swicago integration, which utilises a small device you can build yourself for about $10, and it plugs directly into the head unit via its CN105 port and it then connects to your wifi network.
I’m pretty sure @Protoncek is also talking about a Mitsubishi Electric solution.
(Please correct me if any of my guesses are wrong, people! )
Oh Melcloud was mentioned here, I just assumed that was for my unit as well. The quoted one I have described is MHI indeed, the product name that is mentioned in the OP is correct but we’re getting the black/grey variant of it (product number of the internal unit is 7001403 according to the quote, if that helps, it apparently falls under the product name as mentioned in the OP).
But that means that the solutions the others mentioned aren’t applicable in my case then?
Before accepting the quote I’d like to know what I got in terms of how to add it to my HA system haha.
Yes, i’m talking about Mitsubishi electric.
Answering to Lisa:
Melcloud works, i’ve had that a few years, but lately Mitsubishi kind off changes settings etc… pretty frequently, so there are quite a few connection drop-outs… you can read THIS topic and you’ll see out discussion regarding drop-outs.
ESPHome solution works just like original, except you don’t control your climate via MelCloud app (and you can’t potentially update climate’s firmware, if it will exist), but only via Home Assistant. Communication goes both ways: you can control climate and you also get info from it (temperature, status). It goes even further: with esphome module you can set an external temperature sensor to be “the one” to control climate, not original embedded one, so temperature in your room will be better controlled.
MELCloud = Mitsubishi Electric Limited Cloud. This cloud is what their mobile app uses to connect to Mitsubishi Electric units’ wifi adaptors.
On the other hand, MHI uses the Intesis AC Cloud Control app (and a different cloud) that a bunch of other AC manufacturers (LG, Daikin, Panasonic, Toshiba, Fujitsu) also seem to use. And those manufacturers all need different wifi hardware for their units even though they’re connecting to the same cloud for control.
So yes, if you’re only looking at MHI products then any wifi solution related to Mitsubishi Electric won’t work for you. Even though both companies have “Mitsubishi” in their name, they’re not related, their wifi solutions are not compatible with each other, and you need very different HA solutions for each.
AC manufacturers are generally huge and while they know people want to control their AC from their smartphones and have begrudgingly developed some barely-passable solutions to allow that, they don’t really care about the very small home automation market (yet!), so they haven’t made any effort to make it easy for their wifi solutions to talk to anything other than their own clouds and apps. So integrating their wifi solutions to HA - whichever manufacturer you go for - will be a technical challenge (read: time plus research plus upskilling).
As a time- and stress-saving alternative for your consideration (that means you can skip buying the wifi add-on for now): an IR blaster is cheap, runs fully locally, straightforward to add to HA, fast to respond when using, is an off-the-shelf purchase rather than needing to do soldering and firmware flashing, easy to replace if you decide you want to try to ‘upgrade’ it later to a wifi solution, will work with pretty much any common heatpump unit you go for, and the blaster can also control any other IR device in the same area. (This was the thought process I used for my own installation, anyway! )
I know it’s expensive and that Midea was already mentioned as a locally-controlled alternative, but the Daikin ACs can be controlled locally using Faikin.
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