We just recently bought a house and it came with some window air conditioners. I spent 2 hours yesterday cleaning and installing the big one for the main part of the house, just to find out that it doesn’t work! So now I am in the market to get a new one ASAP as the temperature is getting consistently hotter now and we need to cool the house.
I am looking for some recommendations of what window units will work with home assistant easily. I would really like something that won’t require another piece of hardware or a lot of custom programming. I see brands like GE, LG, Samsung all have Wifi enabled units. Are these able to talk directly with home assistant or has that not been figured out yet? I am fine with using IFTTT to do it also if that is the way to make it work.
Let me know what what is known to work well.
I recently installed a split system and looked at the various wifi options. Typically they all came as an option which added about 15% to the cost of a normal unit INCLUDING installation! I felt this was outrageous, so just went with IR control from HA. It’s a bit painful because the unit doesn’t really want to support you, since the remote sends the complete status every time you press a button - temp up might mean temp 20%, fan high, eco on, etc. While this is an initial pain, I preferred it to the cost. And I hid the remote, which has the extra benefit that I’m in control of the temperature, not the kids.
I used a cheapo window AC unit with manual temp control (knob) and on/off switch that would stay in position. Had this connected to a Z wave switch and a temp sensor in the room. Would have the ac set at a normal temp and switched ‘on’ and then used the z wave switch to turn the whole unit of/on when out of the house or away. Basic and worked great. Had 4 of these going in the rooms of the house for years before going to central AC.
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I did some research and found that a lot of the newer window units, even though they are digital, will resume where they left off when power is cut to them then restored. I ended up not needing to buy one. My house a previously owned by and electrician and he installed GFI breakers in the entire panel. For some reason every time the ac would kick on it would trip it. I’ve had weird issues with them tripping even when just turning lights on. I swapped out the GFI breaker for a regular one and everything works perfect now. Once I got the A/C working I swapped out the receptacle for a z-wave controlled one and used a remote Ecobee sensor to sense room temperature and am now working on the programming is HA for it all