I’ve been trying for years to find a decent way to control my Lennox mini-split units. Until now, I’ve been using Flair pucks, but at this point I’m sick of them. I find their mini-split control functionality to be immature, and it seems like an afterthought. I’ve provided feedback to them on improvements it needs, as well as bugs I’ve encountered (ex: more than once, it has set my indoor units to conflicting modes causing them to go into an error state) but they never seem to address any of them. I’m ready to rip them out and replace them.
Problem is, I haven’t been able to find anything else that will do the job. I was looking recently at ESPHome figuring I’d just build something, but none of the Climate integrations have support for Lennox and I cannot realistically allocate the time required to learn how to decode the IR signals. I figured as a last ditch attempt, I’d ask the hivemind here if they know of anything I have missed. These are the features I need:
Home Assistant integration (obviously)
Control of Lennox mini-split units via IR. I’d rather not void my warranty by soldering stuff to the control boards.
The nice-to-haves:
Built-in proper handling of auto heat/cool mode in a multi-unit mini split system (basically, setting a range to keep temps in, then flipping between heat and cool when needed to keep it in that range, but also NOT setting the indoor units to conflicting modes, since they share an outdoor heat pump, so this causes an error)
Fully local control, I’ve been burned too much by Flairs terrible cloud control.
If I can fully control it from HA, then I’d be fine with writing my own automations there. Right now, the problem I have with Flair is that I cannot reliably control it directly and their control software is limited (to say the least) and confusing. I find that it cannot even reliable handle auto heat/cool mode reliably, which is a must where I live since there are significant portions of the year where the temperature gets high enough in the day to require AC and low enough at night to require heat, and I really don’t want to have to remember to manually switch it just to avoid their stupid software putting two units in conflicting states.
Sorry for the wall-of-text, I’m just really hoping someone can point me at an option I have missed so far.
I just found your post because I got a quote offering a Lennox M33C ceiling cassette + MLB 024S4S-1P outdoor unit and I’m looking for anyone who may have it working with Home Assistant. Unfotrunately, it seems like this combination isn’t too popular and I definitely don’t want to have to go to the cloud to control my HVAC. I already do that with my furnace/AC on Nest and it ain’t great
I’m in the process of trying to find a mini-split upgrade for my house that is fully local and Home Assistant compatible. I’ve seen some really cool stuff for Mitsubishi mini-splits so I asked my HVAC guy to quote both. The Mitsubishi unit installed is nearly a $5k adder on the price of the Lennox unit installed but I might go for it anyway because of local control.
I love ESPHome and I wouldn’t be afraid to solder stuff down to any unit if I knew it was possible and workable and would give me direct local control.
I finally ended up taking a leap of faith and buying a Remotec ZXT-800. After also porting the config for it over to z-wave js, it work pretty well actually. I will need to write some automations myself, but at least the device has built in support for my Lennox system.
FWIW I’m using a Broadlink RM4 Pro to control my Lennox mini-split with SmartIR and it works fine. However, I just have mine on a schedule and haven’t tried auto mode yet.
I’ll have to take a look at that. The Remotec controls my system just fine, but it is just a z-wave device that sends commands, I need to implement scheduling or “smart” features myself (or through some other app). As it is, I still have another room with a Flair puck that needs to be replaced, I only replaced one in case I didn’t end up liking the Remotec device, as they’re a bit pricey.
Following your post, I decided to get a Broadlink RM4 mini to try out. Managed to get it set up, and add my mini-split as a sub-device. It can control most of the functions (though the temperature control is a bit wonky, I think because it’s sending the values in C instead of F even though I have the app set to F). However, in HA the sub-device doesn’t show up at all, only the main broadlink device. It seems like I need to learn all the commands completely separately in HA, is that right? How do I even know what the names of the commands are that I need to learn? Any helpful documentation that you could point me to would be much appreciated, the HA docs for these are a bit sparse
I’m using SmartIR. All I had to do was add this to my configuration.yaml:
smartir:
climate:
- platform: smartir
name: Living room AC
unique_id: living_room_ac
device_code: 2161
controller_data: remote.broadlink_rm4_pro
name and unique_id are values I chose, device_code came from the SmartIR climate platform docs, and controller_data is the entity ID of my Broadlink device. After a restart, this created an entity called climate.living_room_ac that I could use with the Lovelace thermostat card or, ultimately, the Mushroom climate card. Hope that helps!
Oh, one more thing, speaking of ºC/ºF wonkiness. SmartIR doesn’t like Fahrenheit out of the box, so your thermostat card might not display correctly if you want ºF. Based on this comment I got it working by replacing /custom_components/smartir/climate.py with the version from this PR (i.e. climate.py). Annoying but stable AFAICT.
Bonjour,
J’utilise les thermostats MYSA. Pour les plinthes (220volts) et pour mes splits LENNOX. Pour les plinthes c’est correct, pour les thermopompes ça roule aussi, mais on ne voit pas toutes les options disponibles de la thermopompe. Le tout est HomeKit.
