As best as I can tell, Sensibo and Cielo do not know the current state of your mini-splits.
If you have a schedule to set the units on/off and someone in your house inadvertently uses the remote to toggle the on/off state, all your subsequent schedule triggers will be off — for instance an “off” action you create in the Cielo app will turn ON a mini-split that’s already off, because it’s only a basic, binary toggle.
Obviously this is annoying, so I’ve been researching for controls that are smarter. I have no experience with Kumo but I think I’d switch if I knew it had this functionality. Does anyone have any recommendations?
On Mitsubishi, some of their units have a PAC725 cable attachment and the Or/Y off that bundle will have 12v when the unit is on. We used this on dumb 14k units and on VRF. The cable attaches at the FCU. We use this to close a relay and turn on supply fans. You can use that signal for a lot.
I made my own, they work flawlessly! Full local control via home assistant, or if they aren’t connected to wifi they start broadcasting their own network allowing me to connect with a phone or computer and access a webpage.
My prototype vs the finished product.
If you feel like taking on a project I’d say go with making your own adapters and bring it into something like home assistant https://github.com/SwiCago/HeatPump cost me around $150 to get these set up for my 8 splits.
I went this way, as well (though I didn’t spend anywhere near $150 - it came to under $5 per mini-split ordered from AliExpress, plus $11.50 for the programming tool from Amazon [including shipping and taxes]). It works really well. I can even use the remotes, if I want to, but the remote won’t be updated with the state of the mini-split if I use Home Assistant to adjust settings. Home Assistant will get an update of the state of the mini-split if I adjust settings via the remote.
More accurately, I’m using this repo that supports ESPHome and Home Assistant.
The only issue I have is it doesn’t seem to let me control the horizontal vane, but I may have an issue with the config somewhere.
You might also need to add the additional fan speed options. My testing showed I was missing “diffuse” and “middle”. You can figure it out by seeing what the esp logs show when you set the fan speed of the remote to each level.
You could try doing the same with the horizontal vane, I haven’t tested that yet.
I hadn’t tried checking the logs while using the remote. Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, when I press “Wide Vane” on my remote, I don’t get an update in the logs about it. I do see updates when I change the mode or fan speed, as well as the vertical swing setting.
Well I didn’t have any of the required tools at all and to be honest that $150 probably includes some of the wrong pieces that I ordered lol and never returned lol
Working on this myself at the moment.
Mitsubishi2mqtt and Esphome-mitsubishiheatpump are what I am trying with Home Assistant . Leaning toward the esphome integration.
Op should checkout Hacking a Mitsubishi heat pump for more details but be warned that the latest Wemos D1 Mini’s don’t seem to communicate with the Mitsubishi (at least I couldn’t get them to).
Have some esp01s coming which I hope will work.
Actually that was my route. I learned the hard way that the D1 minis don’t work lol
The D1 minis or any esp8266 based device will work, you just need to use a bidirectional logic level converter. The units communicate on 5v levels and all esp based devices use 3.3v levels. Some ESP devices might be more tolerant of using 5v on their GPIO pins but none of them really support it.
You’ll have to get the official Mitsubishi module
This. Kumo works great. But fair warning, if you change anything using the app, that data won’t get sent back to the remote control. So if somebody set the temperature to 70 on the remote control, and you use the app to set it to 65, the remote control will still say it set to 70°, even though it is actually set to 65.
I solved this issue by hiding the controllers and forcing people to use Home app on iOS.
IR blaster + Home Assistant has been stable enough for me. The IR blaster uses different codes for On vs Off. And I have a temperature sensor near the unit for me to guess if it’s running.
But I’ve found that the Cielo app doesn’t even remember the state of a manual app trigger.
12p - schedule on 6p - schedule off
If you turn OFF the unit via the Cielo app at 3p because you’re heading out early to dinner, the units will still turn on at 6p. Fail.
But I’ve found that the Cielo app doesn’t even remember the state of a manual trigger.
12p - schedule on 6p - schedule off
If you turn OFF the unit via the Cielo app at 3p because you’re heading out early to dinner, the units will still turn on at 6p. Fail.
This doesn’t seem right, have you tried contacting cielo support to fix this issue ?
Look at Airzone and Coolmaster for solutions that directly communicate with the unit using their native protocols. They’ll “just work” for a price, and give you local control over wifi. Kumo works too, but requires the internet to be accessible.
I recall these guys targeting this exact problem when I saw them at CEDIA
