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) 

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.