Coaxing a manufacturer unsupported reverse cycle air conditioner back into being a smart device

After the pandemic, we decided to upgrade to a larger house. I sold the old one, and we moved into a nicer, larger house. Whilst I've since done some upgrades to the new house, it still has the two reverse cycle air conditioners that it came with.

These are Samsung "The Triangle"  AR09FSSSCWKN and AR24FSSSCWKN units.

Inititally when I moved into the house, I contacted Samsung about how to connect them to the wifi.. and got sent around in circles. Try their SmartThings app. Try the old app. The old app just would not work...

Leaving gas behind, and monitoring my home energy usage with Home Assistant

So earlier this year, I took the all-electric jump given the dubious nature of the East coast gas market, and what the air quality monitor we had near our kitchen showed every time we fired up the gas cooktop.

• Upped solar from ~7kW to ~17kW
• Replaced Fronius Primo grid tied inverter with Sigenergy hybrid
  (... anyone want an old Fronius Primo? ... it's sitting on floor of my garage)
• Added Sigenergy ~32kWh battery)
• Added Sigenergy whole home gateway
• Replaced central gas heating with additional RCACs (Reverse Cycle Air Conditioners)
• Replaced gas cooktop with Westinghouse induction (20A model, boost on a single zone at a time, needed stonemason with full PPE to work with manufactured stone counter top; already had a separate electric oven)
• Replaced gas instant HWS (Hot Water Service; was a failed gas boosted solar, where solar loop had failed) with Aqua Pro heat pump HWS
• Decommissioned the gas connection to our house (retailer arranged for distributor to come out to house, remove the meter, and disconnect the line at the street) 

Home Assistant and Tuya - which path did I choose?

Tuya licenses an IoT platform that is VERY popular with the OEMs of various IoT products. If you buy something from a big box IoT store, ALDI, etc., chances are in a lot of cases, it's going to be powered by Tuya technology.

Initially they used chips from Espressif, and these were easily reflashed to other firmwares, but more recently they have moved to using different SoCs which either require physical connection to re-flash OR cannot be reflashed and need to be replaced if you wish to use different firmware.

Tuya does provide a cloud integration for Home Assistant, "Tuya", but it is a cloud integration, which means that to control your local devices, you need to reach out to the Tuya cloud and back to control things.

I don't know about you, but the idea of needing to reach out to the cloud and back to be able to turn something on and off seems counter intuitive. Additionally, the official Tuya cloud integration only supports some devices. So once you connect it to your Tuya account, you might find some devices are seen, but HA cannot provide any control of the device. Work is being undertaken over time for the cloud integration to have broader device support, but it's slow going.

Firewall upgrade

After noting that my long serving Asus RT-AC5300 running Merlin AsusWRT had gone EoL (and had long since had its WiFi duties taken over by two UniFi WiFi 6 Lites), I decided to dip my toe into perhaps a more advanced setup, and set about configuring a small mini-server to host a containerisation and virtualisation solution for my networking needs. It's working, but it's also still a work in progress.

Getting Matter going on an SLZB-MR4 with Home Assistant

After going backwards and forwards on different home automation radio options, I eventually settled on an SMLight SLZB-MR4 Zigbee / Thread / PoE Ethernet / USB adapter.

I chose the SLZB-MR4 because my Home Assistant server is all the way in one corner of my house, and I wanted the option to centrally place the radios, and that doing that with power supplied over ethernet made it really easy to put it wherever the nearest RJ45 was.

Trying to install HACS on HomeAssistant OS 2026 / v17 I got sent around in loops until...

I have Home Assistant - and at the time of trying to initially install HACS I had:

Installation method Home Assistant OS
Core 2026.2.2
Supervisor 2026.02.1
Operating System 17.1
Frontend 20260128.6

I'd been trying to install HACS for ages. When clicking web buttons to install it into my HAOS instance, it would redirect from the HACS site, to my Home Assistant instance, but continually say it couldn't find the app.

Lots of web matches said you could run the get.hacs.xyz script through shell, but didn't recommend it for OS version of HA.

I noticed the repository in the HACS site in the URL being passed to my HA instance was:  

https://github.com/hacs/addons

... so I went to my HA settings, went to Apps, went to Install App, went to the meatball menu in the top right, selected Repositories, and then added the above URL.

I then went back to the HACS website, used the add link, and it found the app!

 

Google Workspace Calendar sucks for editing recurring events!

 GAAAAAAH!