I do my absolutions best to minimise my electricity usage. In the end, though, I don't want to glow too profusely. In the past, my day time escape was to go to the office during the week, see a movie during the weekend or go see a friend who has A/C. However, we are in Coronavirus times (That's 2020 for those people in the future) and we had a very hot summer this year so I finally broke down and bought A/C.
My plan, eventually, it that we'll upgrade our heater, put in central A/C, etc. This, though is going to be a massive job and, quite frankly, I don't have the money. This leaves me with a temporary solution, which was to buy Window units. Fortunately, GE Appliances make HomeKit compatible units and so I went off to find one.
First of all, GE appliances don't make it easy to find out which units are HomeKit compatible. They used to, but seem to have dropped that from descriptions. It took a great deal of searching , and I finally found their page on "Smart Air Conditioners"... but, nope, this doesn't show the complete list. This is the search that you need. I don't think I've ever found it so hard to find out information from a vendor on their own products.
Oh, and GE Appliances is not GE any more. It's owned by a Chinese company called Haier. I have no view on that, but they have been on a spending spree and have also bought my favourite Kitchen/laundry brand Fisher and Paykel who, at the moment, seem to be resisting anything too smart.
Back to subject.....
The section of the house where the aircon units were being placed is, essentially a huge open plan area as there are no doors between some of the rooms. Although you could consider them to be 2 zones:
- Living Room & Dining Room
- Kitchen and Home office
I was also limited by Voltage. Apparently 220V+ is a good idea (powerful Window A/C, Dryers, tools in the workshop), but I have 110v because this is 'Merica!
I was also limited by the width of my windows. Even here, I found it difficult to get accurate information, with different sites giving me different info as to what width window the unit would fit in. For reference, the windows I needed to fit in were 58.5cm/23.03" in the dining room and 58cm/22.83" in the kitchen.
In the end I purchased:
Personally, I think the kitchen unit looks better, but there isn't a model in th e"profile" series that gives the output that the Dining Room model does and, for some reason, the profile series is more expensive:
Tip: Don't buy from the GE Appliances web site. Look around on the net. When I was buying Amazon was the cheapest by quite a bit.
Neither of these units are big enough that they need support on the outside of the window... especially the PHC08LY.
Installation was actually quite easy, except getting the units into the window. You can see that they were a tight squeeze... especially the kitchen unit.
You need to download the GE Comfort App, and both of them needed a firmware upgrade which worked with no problem at all. Both of the easily appeared in HomeKit.
My only complaint is that they both still advertise as needing a firmware upgrade in the Home app. This is because the firmware, as seen in HomeKit is 0.7.90, whilst inside the Comfort App it is 0.0.7.90. GE's first response was that it is an Apple problem and would take no responsibility. I hate it when a vendor refuses to take responsibility for an issue, and puts the customer in between. I called Apple, and they tried all kinds of things and were, eventually, going to make me blow away my HomeKit setup. So Apple, that is not a solution.... especially when I had informed them I wa snot the only one. Eventually, by sheer persistence, when I noticed what the issue was and took it back to GE, they accepted responsibility. Whilst it does not prevent operation of the unit.... it is annoying!
Automation
In the Settings inside HomeKit, you can change the temperature units from F (default) to C. You can also change the operation of the A/C Unit.
When the unit is off, it shows the current temperature
When the unit is On, you can define the "cool to" temperature.
This means that you have to really have another temperature sensor in the room as you can't automate turning off the A/C unit with HomeKit and, I find, that if you don't then the Unit effectively goes into a standby state where it never actually turns off - wasting electricity.
The other thing I've noticed is that the A/C Unit is usually out by a few degrees from the other temp sensors I have in the room (Ecobee for heating and part of my Hue Motion Sensor) which happen to generally be the same, or very similar. This makes me question the temperature sensor in the A/C Unit.
The Comfort App has a nice feature where it shows how much power you have been using.
Unfortunately, no way to set up notifications.
What I have are two automations that turn on, and turn off the A/C Units. I had to use the Eve app again as the Home app does not let you do triggers with temp sensors for some weird reason.
IF
between 1 hr after sunrise and 3hrs after sunset
AND
the Dining room temp sensor (Using Hue) is 29C/84F
THEN
Turn on the A/C Unit and cool to 26.5
ENDIF
I have a similar automation that switches the A/C unit off when it reaches 26C/79F which, in the South Bay's rather drier climate I find acceptable. It may be a different story if I was still in Sydney as it's more Humid there.
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