Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

The system uses RS422, with a base64 encoded AES key in the aaservice binary, and I was contemplating building an esp32 based open source implementation of the controller.

That’s a crazy weird coincidence.

Now back to connecting an orange-pi zero to the petcube cam someone bought me for Christmas. I’ve found TTL pins on there and I want to know what’s going on…

  Pin 1: RS422 +/B
  Pin 2: RS422 -/A
  Pin 3: ? - appears to be unused; connected to unpopulated pad on PCB
  Pin 4: GND
  Pin 5: ~14.2v DC unloaded
  Pin 6: GND
  Pin 7: ?
  Pin 8: ?
  Shield: GND

Note: the RS422 protocol has a basic bus arbitration built-in to allow both ends to communicate. The control unit sends Ping messages, after which it opens a slot for the Tablet to communicate back to it. At least on my system xx represents a simple CRC value that can be used to validate message authenticity. I haven’t seen any AES encryption in use, messages I’ve seen are all plaintext, maybe the AES encryption was introduced in a later revision.

I got inspired, and have plugged in my scope, and then an RS422 to serial adapter, and I’m getting XML encoded (weird) CAN messages, which I presume are the same as what’s on the CAN bus exposed on some of the control box’s ports. I’ll get out the can analyser tomorrow and check.

Now the trick will be to reverse engineer this protocol. Here’s a tiny sample:

  <U>setCAN 0201000000236000000000000 </U=ce><U>getCAN 1 </U=00><U>Ping</U=db> <U>ackCAN 1</U=aa><U>Ping</U=db> <U>setCAN </U=b2><U>getCAN 1 </U=00><U>Ping</U=db> <U>ackCAN 1</U=aa><U>Ping</U=db> <U>setCAN </U=b2><U>getCAN 1 </U=00><U>Ping</U=db> <U>ackCAN 1</U=aa><U>Ping</U=db> <U>setCAN </U=b2><U>getCAN 1 </U=00><U>Ping</U=db> <U>ackCAN 1</U=aa><U>Ping</U=db> <U>setCAN </U=b2><U>getCAN 1 </U=00><U>Ping</U=db> <U>ackCAN 1</U=aa><U>Ping</U=db>

    <string name="parse_block_tag_ping">&lt;U&gt;Ping&lt;/U=db&gt;</string>
    ...
    private static final byte() f2305f = "getCAN ".getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset());
    private static final byte() g = MyApp.a().getString(R.string.parse_block_tag_ping).getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset());
    private static final byte() h = MyApp.a().getString(R.string.parse_block_tag_startu).getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset());
    private static final byte() i = "<request>Unknown</request>".getBytes(Charset.defaultCharset());

You can do the same, or alternatively ping me if you’d like me to email you the source package.

I do, have 2 spare USB-C to JST-SH adapters that suit the round advantage air circuit board if anyone wants one (Perth, Free). Email in profile.

It’s caused tons of headache for people doing home automation stuff, especially since Chamberlain has cut off API access to home assistant. Then the home assistant people figure they’ll just rig a raspberry pi or something to short two wires, but then they hit this encryption nonsense.

Unless this scummy manufacturer also works with the aircon makers to lock those to their controllers. (That would be a great lawsuit to watch.)

I’m willing to bet money on that it’s planned obsolescence, especially considering their “technology keeps moving forward” bullshit.

They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change.

I’ve seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the guaranteed write cycles of the flash memory were consumed.

I don’t think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe. A device breaking right after warranty is not a good strategy to get repeat customers. It’s also a huge risk if you miscalculated and you suddenly get a lot of warranty cases. You want a lot of margin there.

I’ve been involved in the design of a thing myself, where something the manufacturer hadn’t clearly communicated – and we just barely caught – could have made the device die just around a typical warranty period for such a device. When we found out, of course we worked on this problem to make sure it didn’t die prematurely.

Also, their claim is that they’re not outsourcing. If you check their website, it claims everything is designed and manufactured in Australia.

Nevertheless, I’d have given them the benefit of the doubt if it were not for:

1. The only option being a full system replacement.

2. Communication protocol being encrypted.

3. App being locked down to certain hard-coded models.

None of these give me any hope that this is a well-meaning company that just has some issues.

Also, I think a company that sells a product most customers would only buy once or twice in their lives is not a company that expects many repeat customers.

Looking at pictures like (1) and (2)

I suppose it’s possible they’re making their own generic android tablet control panel,

designed and manufactured in Australia

and they just happened to add a camera, side-mounted USB charging connector, a headphone socket, microsd card slot, and a battery charge level indicator, loads of space for a battery that isn’t present, a connector named VBAT

and also a chinese-language bootloader

but accidentally forgot to include the power and data connector they need, poking out the back of the device

so they had someone bodge it on afterwards by hand with a soldering iron

but IMHO it’s more likely they mean

“manufactured in Australia from components sourced internationally”

and one of those components is a generic android tablet.

(1) https://www.myplacenz.co.nz/are-you-making-the-most-of-your-…
(2) https://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/advantage-air-ezone-ta…

It’s very obvious they just went for the cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel tablet Alibaba has to offer on one of their main products. I wouldn’t trust this company to do anything competently.

By contrast ACs are on the decadal scale.

Integrating a tablet can’t work. It’s a dumb idea from the outset.

Similar hardware can work. There are touchscreen UIs that do last for a long time, especially on an AC unit where they’re not getting used all the time. But they aren’t tablets. In particular I’d finger the lithium ion batteries optimized for tablet-style usage as something you don’t put into a system you want to last about ten years. Most of my tablets “die” when the battery just becomes unusable.

And you probably want an LCD chosen for robustness rather than being the cheapest possible high resolution display… again, plenty of LCDs can last for a long time, but the trifecta of “high resolution”, “cheap”, and “lasts a long time” is asking an awful lot for a fleet of systems. (“Cheap” and “lasts a long time” is, by contrast, readily available; it just won’t be pretty. But it’ll work fine.) And by “high resolution” I don’t mean “retina display”, just anything suitable for a tablet. Ye Olde 640×480 is plenty for an AC display, even in monochrome.

You want something pretty, give it a way for a real app to access it on the network. Except don’t bother, really, because there’s no way you’re going to maintain that for 10 years either.

I’ve been saying this for a while.

Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They’ll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime.

Manufacturers know this and there’s a race to the bottom on pricing. To get pricing as low as possible, quality and durability take a hit.

Working in the electronics industry, I have never once heard anyone talk about this. Engineers love engineering, and if it was real their would be a whole field devoted to it. But there isn’t.

Also, since this board is stacked with software guys…

Planned obsolescence is way easier to implement in software. How many of you have been asked to put a time bomb in a warrantied product?

Planned obsolescence is a term that lay people use to describe unfortunate breaking of things that are sufficiently complex to be considered “a magical black box”. In reality it is just another apparition of Murphy’s law.

Opting out of a more durable solution when you know the device will break right after warranty is still planned obsolescence.

This device should not need to write to storage. It has to save settings when the user manually changes them, which can’t be more than a few kilobytes per year. Any other writes are likely an oversight on the developer’s part.

https://git.nethack.net/rob/aircon

Essentially it just talks to the android tablet API to do things so it’s no help if (when) the tablet dies, but it means I can do things like:

– have the entire unit turn on/off as needed based on average zone temperatures

– open/close vents based on room owners’ devices being online, or temperatures of nearby zones

– dump zone temperatures to influxdb

I should really write that up at some point too.

Shame on this manufacturer.

I usually get the ‘oh did not think of that’ because logging is a serious afterthought in many cases. It is boring and you just drop in log4j and log away right?

log4j had big vulnerability a while back and it was a huge pain to contact all our vendors and find out if they had patched for it or not.

Also congrats to the OP! Sadly, european aircon appliances are usually built the same way (last only as long as the warranty).

(in fact, replacing basic central heating thermostats with a tablet device has been very successful for one energy company in my country, see https://www.eneco.nl/energieproducten/toon-thermostaat/; it wouldn’t have been possible if the thermostat data thing was some complicated / encrypted nonsense)

There is no single control for the whole house but on the other hand I never let it run when I am away and I am never in 2 rooms at the same time so I just close the door so I only have to keep one room cool. I fail to see the need of an aircon I could control remotely with a smartphone or any smart bullshit system that control every room at the same time. And I think if I ever needed that I would probably just control the individual aircon via small esp32 with irtransmitter driven by a home server. That way the individual remotes would still be usable in case of an individual failure.

It is also handy if it is extremely hot like now and we’re both out to monitor if it gets over 30 inside, so we can remotely get it cooler so the plants, cats or server will not suffer too much.

OTOH, they can find an industrial display + a Linux SoM (system-on-module) that can run linux or Android for under $200 in quantity.

Same diff though: no one cared, so they got what was cheap.

People like you are the ones that make the internet worth logging on for.

I just got done (mostly) reassembling a wardrobe. It’s a bit more wobbly around the edges. I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t put the shelves back in the exact spots (wasn’t thinking and didn’t label them during disassembly) or if it’s something else, but once we decide it’s not good enough for the room upstairs where it now lives, it’s getting put in the dumpster.

Solid wood is expensive, in a lot of the world.

And for furniture, you can’t do a good job with cheap wood – if it twists or bows the doors won’t close right, or the drawer will be tight. Need a hole in a particular position, but there’s a knot? You’re going to have a bad time. Wood with loads of knots doesn’t look great. And of course, some types of wood cost a lot more than others.

Chipboard with veneer, though? It’s super cheap. You can have any colour you like. It machines consistently, with no knots or checks like that. The response to temperature and humidity is even and consistent. If you need more strength, you can just order thicker boards. Sure, you can’t leave it outside in the rain – but so what?

The main downside to flat pack furniture is a lot of people don’t manage to assemble it right. A nightstand will end up in an awful state if the person who assembled it forgot to nail the back on properly, or used a short screw where a long screw was called for, or put a part in the wrong way around.

Wood veneer over cheaper materials has been common for over a century at this point though.

Personally, the main thing I can’t stand is that you have only limited ability to “choose your own adventure” and just go straight to the thing you’re there to buy. I don’t want to spend 25 minutes wandering through their corporate-curated displays to get to the kitchen faucets.

I think they still have a good price on AA NiMH batteries, though.

Edit: I am speaking to the US stores, I have no idea what IKEA is like closer to their homeland.

Sure you can, just go down to the basement area where you pick up all the boxes anyway. You only need to browse if you don’t know what you want.

I have a tiny hardly updated blog where I post stuff I do and assume nobody at all will ever read it. A month ago I got an email from somebody asking about a detail because her granddaughter’s toy has the same problem that my daughter’s did. It is so rewarding that some work I did for myself can continue to have value for people across the world.

I specifically went for units that were IR controlled rather than any proprietary smart B.S.

For the smarts, I used cheap IR blasters from AliExpress and hooked them up to HomeAssistant.

I just mounted cheap Lenovo tablets to the wall to do the room-dashboard thing to allow controlling lights/AC without a phone.

These kind of horror stories only serve to reinforce my decision.

Since there’s no feedback mechanism, how do you solve for when the state of the unit(s) gets out of sync with HomeAssistant’s?

It just doesn’t matter that much in my experience. If an issued command didn’t work, it’s easy to tell anyway (it’s hot/cold), and you can just repeat it. HomeAssistant also has bits of special handling for items that don’t communicate their state back, called “assumed state”.

For the rare times I want to control my AC when being away from home, I have an air monitor nearby. I can just check if the temperature/humidity has changed, and repeat the command if it didn’t work. If you _really_ cared you probably could script it to do it automagically, but I didn’t feel the need to bother.

I have home assistant controlling an air conditioner in one room. (Well, mostly Node-RED.)

Every couple minutes it checks the temperature in the room and makes a decision on whether to call for cooling and tells the AC to turn on or off.

If it’s already on and cooling and it tells it to turn on… it’s a no-op, nothing happens. If it tells it to turn on and the command doesn’t go through… the room will stay warm so it will try the same thing in a couple of minutes. Same thing the other way (turning it off).

I guess you should hide those remote in a drawer and remove the batteries when you start using homeassistant

If you are in the room, you’ll know soon enough, otherwise I guess it could be possible to rely on the audio feedback (a light beep) that the AC probably emits when it successfully receives a command. (and add a temperature sensor to check that it’s working properly)

I have Zigbee contact sensors that provide on/off feedback to HA by detecting if the louvers are open.

The completely overkill setup would be to get a different remote control, get my DIY receiver to accept that and convert it to my AC unit’s IR code, updating HA while at it. The remote’s state would be out of sync still, but it’ll keep the units in sync with HA.

I built an esp32 IR sender and put Tasmota IR on it. It has first class support for the Daikin. It can’t receive but it seems no need as it’s 100% reliable.

There are a fair number of DIY thermostat projects online, but all that I have found were one-offs by their creators, or were for specific kinds of systems like boilers.

I’ve been batting around the idea of starting a general-purpose IoT thermostat that only uses cheap, widely-available components that anyone can easily duplicate with a BOM and 3D printer.

For one of the rooms i opted for a IR/RF transmitter and the RF covers any RF enabled devices in the house (433mhz + 315mhz(i think but haven’t tested))

The IKEA Tradfri system is all Zigbee based – I have a bunch of their light bulbs and strips, plus a few smart power plugs. I personally have them attached to my own Zigbee controller, but there’s also a Home Assistant Tradfri integration if you want to keep using their Smart Hub controller.

There’s also a Home Assistant homekit integration, so you can use HA to orchestrate events happening on the Tradfri side to trigger something in the Homekit side, or vice versa.

(I don’t have the Tradfri smart hub or Homekit devices, so YMMV on specific possible options)

By the way the tradfri gateway is weird piece of hardware, the thing is mostly empty and only contains small board with apparently the same RFSoC as all the other tradfri peripherals connected somehow to ethernet PHY…

You can! Just pair them with a ZigBee hub directly.

I use AC units that come with IR remotes (Samsung maybe??) but the timers don’t work for some reason. It would be great to hand roll some automation, but I never “hacked” IR remote/receiver systems.

Home Assistant supports a huge range of integrations.

Personally I am using Broadlink RM4 Mini IR blasters. One in each room. They get added to Home Assistant as devices.

Then I use one of the climate add-ons that can send IR commands via the Broadlinks.

Out of curiousity, did you have any resources you were following to set this up? I’m pretty new to HA – basic devices etc seem fine, but I’m not entirely sure where to go next!

I’m using Broadlink RM4 Mini’s I got off AliExpress. They’ve got a powerful enough IR signal that I’ve found I don’t need them sitting way out in the open and obvious. One is tucked behind a TV and not quite in direct LoS, one is behind, but it reflects off the wall just fine, another behind a bedside table.

For the integration/Climate control thing I’m using SmartIR. Configuring it is a bit weird, you have to put it direct into the configuration.yaml file unlike other integrations.

    smartir:
      check_updates: true

    climate:
      - platform: smartir
        name: Bedroom AC
        unique_id: bedroom_ac
        device_code: 1293 
        # https://github.com/smartHomeHub/SmartIR/blob/master/docs/CLIMATE.md#available-codes-for-climate-devices
        controller_data: remote.mini4c_bedroom
        temperature_sensor: sensor.airquality_ikea_bedroom_temperature
        humidity_sensor: sensor.airquality_ikea_bedroom_humidity
        power_sensor: binary_sensor.contact_bed_ac

The Broadlinks RM4 minis were pretty cheap on AliExpress. I think I paid about $15 each? Might have to wait for specials to come up to get the lowest price.

Lennox uses a proprietary system like this one but the old school controls were visible on the control boards and due to a freak accident when an installer was levelling the floors for new flooring and cut the old wire I had a 5 wire thermostat wire installed instead of the 4 wire it came with.

Perfect.

$50 thermostat, wired it in. Powers on. Fan powers on. A/C condenser? Nada.

Official replacements were $700+, upgrades were $800.

Checked around, found an offerup seller selling the upgraded model for $400. Deal.

Met the guy, he gave strong, “I stole this, don’t ask too many questions” vibes at first glance, and I was about to back out of the deal, but something clicked in my gut and I went with it.

Got it home, wired it up. Fan turns on. No AC. @#$@!#$%@#$^

On a hunch, went outside and checked the power for the heat exchanger. I had unplugged it for safety reasons but plugged it back in afterward, but gave it the snuggy test just in case.

Sparks shot out as it re-engaged. It’s Alive!

The $50 one might have done the job, but no point in re-rewiring the whole shebang as the money is already spent.

If this system goes down, I’m going mini-split ductless. Forget this noise.

There is a very real need for modern variable-speed units, and vendors just keep fucking it up by using proprietary protocols locked into their ecosystem. TRANE in the US is similar.

And this is really annoying because variable-speed pumps solve all the problems with short cycling and oversized systems.

I was also told if my unit was a Trane, they weren’t allowed to sell me the combo! (My unit is a Goodman.) What a rip off!

I have mine running through EVCC.io, setting it up was as simple as throwing that thing in a docker container and figuring out the IP address of the chargepoint.

That entirely depends LOL

So for AC chargers you are correct – 1 or 3 phases that go through a relay and, where required by code such as in Germany, a DC-sensitive RCBO, plus a small control board negotiating with the vehicle and monitoring voltage/current on one side and, again depending on where required by code, negotiating with the grid operator.

DC chargers are one hell of another beast, these have to contain all of the above plus powerful rectifiers, smoothing capacitors, EMI compliance…

Worst case, you just buy another one. It’ll set you back a couple hundred dollars. Unpleasant, but not a big deal.

Air conditioning systems can easily cost more than $10k.

Temperature sensors are all standardized for the most part (well, they don’t seem to be anything special) but I’m not sure about chlorinators… Mine has a strange (electrical) connector and 100% proprietary threads on the PVC connectors (that were easy enough to reverse engineer in OpenSCAD: https://www.printables.com/model/24144-t-cell-cleaning-stand).

Fortunately there’s plenty of 3rd party competition for things like that. Even though I had a Hayward system I was able to purchase a compatible chlorinator off Amazon for a fraction of the price Hayward was charging.

If you can’t sell your product to the dealers because there in bed with the incumbents and the incumbent products generate service call work for the dealer, it doesn’t matter how good the tech is.

This is a people problem, not a technology problem. It can’t be solved by a couple programmers.

Unless you want to build your own nationwide network of installers, you’re relying on third parties who already have existing relationships with pool equipment suppliers, which is why I said it’s a people problem and not a tech problem.

I’m all about stupid, but repairable appliances now.

But the insane control systems compensate for it.

While it would be nice for the protocol to be documented (would realistically only be used by a very small number of users), the only real way you would be able to get a standard for something like this to work is if you went the Bluetooth route and did generic scenario-based profiles (e.g. HFP, A2DP, SPP), and optionally some “GATT” or “generic attribute” parameters. However, as we see with Bluetooth LE, everyone just uses GATT and implements their own little proprietary thing over it and you’re back to the same problem.

Some of these systems attempt to be “smart” and just use the 24V C/W/Y1/Y2 etc protocol as a “standards compliant fallback”. You don’t necessarily lose ALL of the smarts, but the unit has to essentially use physics magic to make an educated guess about the information (for example, if you use a on-off thermostat, you can’t really measure the temperature of the setpoint, so you don’t know how close you are unless you somehow make an observation over many cycles.

I think that reasonable attempts to address this problem could involve some kind of extension to the old 24V interface – say, by offloading the actual “policy” part of system control to the “thermostat” i.e. have something that goes from 0-10V where 5V is off, 0V is full cooling and 10V is full heating. This allows you to choose your own temperature sensor situation, but complicates setups where more than one zone or thermostat is required. Of course, it will be very difficult for the industry to settle on a solution to this. Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 was a very simple protocol similar to this, which was essentially self-documenting and not something that needed versioning, but of course, needs changed, 3.0 came and went, 4.0 came and went, and by the time USB C and USB PD came around you ended up with a full on data protocol API with all the OSI layers and of course, vendor specific extensions.

You could define some complicated protocol where you don’t conform to a standard but you publish an API for your system (of course, there is no incentive to do this), and larger vendors like Control4 or Lutron, Crestron can program their products to interface with it. Unfortunately this doesn’t allow the customer full choice over thermostats, because now you have to deal with N vendors x N thermostat vendors, which isn’t scalable and you’ll end up in dependency hell.

The closest thing I can think of to a standard, and the way it is solved in larger buildings, is through something called BACnet. It appears to use the Bluetooth model of “scenario based profiles”, with all of the disadvantages that come with that, but the primary disadvantage is that it has to be to some degree manually configured to route data where it needs to go – and I don’t think this is something installers are currently equipped to do at home scale.

Realistically, the “thermostat” is just a vestigial component in modern terms and really, it’s just a user interface and thermometer now. Without getting into the wish to have open sourced app control or whatever, it’s hard to define what the “thermostat” does and what the “system” is doing, and whether the device that sits on the wall is really a “thermostat” deserving of being interchangeable anyway. I have heard from a friend that does home automation integration that many clients don’t like the default thermostat because it doesn’t look very aesthetically pleasing. In this case, I’m definitely sympathetic to the need for customizability but it seems difficult to achieve in practice.

Alas, vendors that interface with customers do not sell appliances – they sell “solutions”, specifically solutions to the problem of their own making, i.e. them inserting themselves between the buyer and the appliance they’re buying.

There really is nothing complicated there. I have some background in lift (elevator) systems, and they have similar requirements. Modern lift systems use variable frequency drives for smooth start/stop, and they came up with compatible protocols that allow users to mix-and-match controllers.

In the end, there just needs to be a simple protocol to command the motor to run at a certain speed. It can be CAN-based, it can be based on RS-485, etc. For additional smarts, throw in readings from the sensors inside the AC units (pressure, coils temperatures).

Then the control units can be made by third parties. They can do all kinds of prediction-based logic, complicated PID controllers, whatever.

> Some of these systems attempt to be “smart” and just use the 24V C/W/Y1/Y2 etc protocol as a “standards compliant fallback”. You don’t necessarily lose ALL of the smarts

You actually do with TRANE units. They become completely dumb, not even 2-stage emulation.

> The closest thing I can think of to a standard, and the way it is solved in larger buildings, is through something called BACnet.

I have BACnet at home, for wired temperature/humidity sensors, the same RS-485 network is also used for Somfy shades ( https://github.com/Cyberax/py-somfy-sdn ). BACnet is a low-level system, and it needs higher-level profiles. But yes, exposing the motors and the sensors inside the AC units over BACnet would be a great start.

Any tablet worked. The only reason it die not work ootb were completely arbitrary restrictions.

The control boxes can do whatever complicated things they want. But the interface to control them should and can be standardized.

Yes, any tablet worked, but it required running an app customized for the hardware. That only proves that we can standardize at the level of Android app APIs.

What a fun, completely coincidental quirk that that time appears to fall outside the warranty window, hey?

The people who have been in the field for a decade or more can’t be arsed putting up with all that and so you get stupid issues which were solved years ago but the devs were not aware of them.

My guess is that their “RAM Plus” feature (aka swap) combined with the memory hungry modern android apps turned out to be a nasty timebomb. Which has or still is bricking millions of smartphones after a few years of usage.

I do not have exact statistics but I believe that this is the most common failure mode of SD cards in embedded systems that we supply (but a friend who works for certain ARM and PowerPC SoC vendor told me that he has statistics that disprove my theory, so take that with a grain of salt).

With bottom-of-the-barrel (and/or “value add”) IoT garbage, hardware suppliers are a commodity, and under competitive pressure, the winners will be ones that can make cheapest hardware that just about outlasts a typical warranty period of their customers’ products. Shorter-lived parts will not bring repeat business; longer-lived parts will get value-optimized further. Failing just after warranty period is Just Right.

(Just look at Amazon marketplace if you think I’m exaggerating.)

Customers have been “noticing” this pattern for couple decades now; it’s not just in tech, but everywhere across the board – from foodstuffs, through appliances, sports equipment, clothing, hygiene, all the way to computing. Unfortunately, this is a pattern in the same sense a tsunami is – you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there’s fuck all you can do about it.

In terms of online shopping, if the distributor cooperates with the consumer then there is something to do about it.
One of the largest Swiss online shop started to share warranty statistics of all products. That information is quite useful to avoid the cheap and soon to break stuff. Of course it’s not perfect, since it only tracks faults within the 2 year warranty period. But it provides a proxy signal for quality. But maybe that only works in smaller markets with less incentives to game the statistics.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34536344

Depends. For some product lines there’s the “commercial grade” stuff available – for TVs, look into Digital Signage product lines and add some sort of TV stick (or an rpi) to them for the brains, for power tools look at what the tradespeople use (it’s probably Bosch blue series, Makita or DeWalt), for kitchen equipment ask your nearest restaurant. For computing, I’d go to Apple (if your ecosystem supports it), Lenovo/Dell/HPs business line stuff (you don’t need to buy the next day on-site package, but you want the models that do have that as an option because that’s the ones that are both made for easy repair and have better components in the first place) or Framework. You pay quite the hefty premium over Chinesium stuff, but it’s worth it.

Only thing I’d stay far away from if you’re not trained on how to use them is cleaning supplies of all kinds, hair and body shampoo as the commercial ones are way stronger concentrated and you can do serious damage to your (or your loved ones) bodies if you, say, leave them on too long.

The underlying flash memory is trash and the controller already does a ton of heavy lifting to keep the data coherent.

Its a shame mobile devices don’t have a SMART equivalent, would be nice to have some warning as something approaches the end of its life.

You can find out a bit more here https://www.seagate.com/gb/en/blog/ssd-over-provisioning-and…

I also remember a guide a while ago on how to reprogram a SSD to operate in SLC mode instead of MLC. You lost disk capacity but gained a large performance boost and a reduced error rate.

I had a Phillips 4K LED TV I purchased on sale in April 2021. The TV was glitchy, and I’d get all sorts of weird problems with it – but nothing really terrible.

Then two weeks into January this year, the picture suddenly becomes a jumbled mess of vertical stripes. One second it’s fine, the next second it’s broken.

Luckily we have a general 5 year warranty period here in Norway, and TVs are expected to last for at least 5 years. I called the shop, and they told me to just bring the TV.

When I get there with the TV, I notice two other identical TVs. I check out the note that hangs on them, and see that they are broken, with the same symptoms as mine. Both had purchase dates around March / April 2021.

I can only assume some component failure.

At the end of the day, I could probably buy an aftermarket fan off the Internet and install it myself, spending far less than the certified technician would charge to install the “free” OEM replacement part.

It’s now out of warranty, but most of these units are built by either Gree (some Trane, Tosot, Gree, some Lennox iirc) or Midea (MrCool, Eco-Air, Senville, Pioneer, Carrier), so searching for the “canonical name” of your system can be helpful in finding parts. (usually, its of a pattern like “M5OG-48HFN1-M”, can be found with meticulous googling for catalogs). There is a lot of parts commonality between units. You have to be creative with finding parts on AliExpress as they go by any number of names that you wouldn’t expect, and a lot of this stuff is bought by eye (or random dimensions, of which there are some canonical ones for each part) and not by part number unfortunately.

Great, right?

The local carrier dealer lied and said the unit wasn’t under warranty. They lied again when reminded of the class-action settlement, claiming only part were included and said would cost a fortune in labor.

When I called Carrier and told them what their factory authorized gold/preferred/whatever-they’re-called dealer was pulling, Carrier confirmed I was correct and even verified the unit’s serial number and said that if the dealer had checked the SN, they would have found it was covered.

The dealer then said ‘fine, but those parts are going to take weeks to get from the warehouse’ knowing damn well I had no heat, in the winter. They had us over a barrel and they fucking knew it, and I didn’t have any way to prove that claim wrong.

Isn’t that the point of the warranty? They tell you they think the product will last for X years, and then it lasts about X years, just like they warranted.

Honestly, I think something needs to be done so that companies are held liable for expensive products failing and needing expensive repairs after a year or two.

It will most likely be “How do we restrict this hack” and will eventually get into more restricted/quirky hardware & software.

1. Someone owns one of these systems which is functioning perfectly well.

2. They stumble across a link allowing them to download the controller app, and so they install it on their normal tablet, expecting to be able to control the system from their tablet

3a. It doesn’t work, so they contact technical support. Technical support wastes a bunch of time before figuring out why the app isn’t working, only eventually to realize what’s going on.

3b. They can’t get the app to work, and so slag the system on social media.

Both have costs both to the people who end up downloading it, and to the company — costs which could be avoided by having a simple error message.

Paired with their attitude towards repairing the broken tablets, it’s clearly also a part of their “planned obsolescence” scam.

A couple of weeks ago my AC blower fan stopped working, the compressor would run. I went up and found out that the capacitor was bad, and took a picture of it, buying a replacement. Took about 15 minutes to replace and I probably saved myself at least $400 (no AC is an emergency in the desert, and they will charge you accordingly).

Fixing household appliances can be fun too!

I’ve done this repair myself, it takes maybe <15 minutes and is almost impossible to mess up. Even if you were find spending a couple hundred dollars to have someone come out and do it, you’d still go hours at least without AC. Which depending on the time of year can be miserable.

You don’t need the same model number as the original cap, it just has to have the same voltage rating, capacitance, and number of terminals. You might have to get creative with the mounting solution if the new cap is different than the old one in terms of shape or size.

Also, pro-tip: when you replace a the cap in the outside unit, install it upside-down so that water doesn’t pool on top of the cap and rust it out from the top.

I have a gas furnace and I also keep a spare ignitor handy. It’s not a matter of “if” those go bad, it’s “when.”

Just don’t cook yourself with the remaining good capacitance.

Personally, I wonder what could be done to temporarily get the capacitor to “kick” for a few more times to get your home temperature down as you get your replacement. Chill the capacitor?

Aside from that, you could strap on other capacitors as long as their voltage is the right value. A daisy chain of 50mf capacitors to shore up the blown capacitance might buy you a day or so of usage.

Best bet, if you have an old broken microwave nearby, would be to pull the cap from it and wire it in.

We’ve got some pretty fucked up protectionist rules about what you can and can’t do in/to your own home. It’s nuts.

Now, nobody is actually watching most of the time, so you’re usually fine, but it’s as stupid as being illegal to replace a tap or existing light fitting. Every so often state governments review the rules and get swamped by trade associations who say the rules are there to prevent people being ‘scammed’ by untrained ‘handymen’ and are there for your own protection. This regulatory capture means that legally you need to complete a four year apprenticeship before you’re allowed to change a plug! And another one if you want to do any basic water plumbing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if what the guy did in this blog is strictly speaking illegal – for instance when it comes to data cables, you need to be a qualified electrician with data specialty to install them. You can plug ethernet cables into your computers yourself (wow! such privilege!), but if you install them even by getting some stick-on plastic conduit and passing the cable through that, you’re in contravention and could potentially be fined, up to thousands of dollars. For sticking some plastic tubes to the wall in your own house.

Obviously there is some acceptable line here, but I think the States handles this decently well enough. In Austin where I live you can get what is called a “homeowners permit” in a lot of cases. Meaning the city will come look at your work and as long as it’s up to code you get a legal permit just like a contractor would get (https://www.austintexas.gov/page/homeowners-permit). You can only do this to your own home so it’s not a shortcut to running a chuck in a truck business without a license.

You place an order with the retailer (online retailers typically allow you to simply type in your prescription values when adding lenses to your online cart; you don’t need to show an official written prescription) and specify your doctor’s name and phone number. Upon receiving your order, the retailer must call the doctor to see whether the doctor objects (invalid prescription). The retailer is to ship the order only if there is no objection (including no response at all) within 8 business hours. So just give the retailer the name and number of someone who won’t immediately object, which is quite easy (e.g. a permanently closed office).

Of course, you need a refraction to know your prescription values. But once that’s done, if your vision doesn’t change over time, this allows you to ignore the expiration date of the prescription.

Optomitrist asks if your current prescription is ok, asks you to stand 20ft back and read a few letters and you’ve got a script you can use wherever.

I mean holy fuck, “native mobile app” and “getting contacts” do not belong in the same sentence in any sane universe.

On the other hand, maybe I typed that in when I was first signing up two decades ago, and the optometrist I gave them has long since gone out of business?

My current hack, which is not as great as yours, is to put a reminder on my calendar for a few days before my 1 year prescription ends. If I order new contacts in the one year period for another year’s worth of contacts (even if I am not out yet), I essentially get to go 2 years between visits. I will try your hack next if I can figure out a good way to get contact info for an office that won’t object.

Neat trick though. I got lasik a few years ago but I would do this if I hadnt

Anecdotally this is far from true. Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK for example require a prescription for anything more complicated than reading glasses.

There are plenty of reasons why, mostly summed up by your comment about “whatever magnification you need” – eyeglasses for distance vision are infinitely more complex than “magnification” and if you’re buying anything other than reading glasses without a proper exam and matched lenses, you’re doing yourself harm.

Unless of course you are talking about reading glasses, in which case you’re also wrong, as you can get those for a couple of bucks pretty much anywhere in the US with no prescription.

(1): https://www.glassesdirect.co.uk/

I have never needed a prescription to get (non-reading) glasses in the Netherlands. In fact, there are webshops where you can purchase any pair of glasses (obviously, you have to enter the values of an eye examination).

I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Contact lenses have at least three parameters to define the lens. It’s not just “magnification”.

If you have an astigmatism, there are two more, and a further two if you have presbyopia (for a total of up to 7). Almost everyone has presbyopia by the age of 65, so it’s not some rare condition.

Do these pharmacies you speak of just have aisles upon aisles of contact lenses?

Here in Japan, you can easily buy contacts from optical stores. They have several shelves behind the counters where they stock many varieties. Sometimes they even put a bunch of unsold/unpopular ones out front for 1/2 off (a lot of these are color contacts). I get mine online; I don’t need a prescription.

One thing I did notice, as someone with astigmatism, is that the number of possible values is less here. My axis back in the US was 100, but here I have to use 90; they just don’t carry them in all the possible axis values here.

Anything else? Go for it. I fitted a bunch of taps and a toilet, changed single sockets to double+USB sockets, changed light fittings, fixed poorly wired lighting circuits, installed Cat-6 through the walls to a few rooms, all sorts of stuff. And none of it was anyone else’s business. You can (should?) get a professional inspection and safety certificate before you sell the house, but that’s about it AFAICT.

I’d be happy enough with the situation in Austin, so long as the city inspections were cheap or free. I’d be happy enough to do a short course in the basics before getting some sort of permit. Where we are now is nuts.

(But at least I can buy a pair of generic reading glasses pretty much wherever here!)

The pricing is reasonable enough – it’s cheap enough to actually be worthwhile to do several things yourself that normally you’d have to pay a contractor for. I did it when I ran some electrical conduit to my garage to add a few 120V receptacles in there.

My general rule of thumb is also I won’t touch gas. But also anything like plumbing that is INSIDE walls I usually am looking to have a professional handle as well. It’s harder to fix knucklehead DIY mistakes when they are covered up behind drywall.

It does make me want more plumbing setups like I’ve seen in Europe. When I lived in Sweden I loved for instance that a lot of bathroom plumbing is completely exposed, so DIY’ing plumbing work is actually pretty accessible. Here where you have to dig into the walls to get at it makes it much less appealing since not only do you have to be a a decent plumber you also have to be a decent drywall person as well.

One of the behind-the-scene videos was something like “that old steam-powered whatever they just happened to find in the scrapheap? Yeah, we’ve got the inspection certificate right here.”

Boiler explosions will do that to a country.

1. (Australia, New Zealand, slang, dated) A brash and impertinent, possibly violent, troublemaker, especially a youth; a hooligan.

2. (Australia, slang) A high-spirited person who playfully rebels against authority and conventional norms.

Today I learned a new word.

What’s left of larrikinism unfortunately seems to be cooked in the head these days. Australian politics is sorely in need of some decent larrikins, but they seem to be AWOL.

Germans tend to obsess over rules and processes in bureaucratic contexts and when it infringes on others but are very open with personal freedoms.

Whereas in Australia the answer is, it’s all illegal, and if you’re not a licensed whoever then they don’t want to tell you how it should be done in case gasp you do it yourself.

So of course everyone does do it themselves, and lies about it. And the quality of workmanship from the trades is…poor.

I can and often do do a better job on things myself, because I have more time and I care about getting it right. And with the apparent trade shortage (at least in part caused by how much you need them for real basic shit), it’s expensive and half the time the bastards won’t answer the phone or don’t show up to appointments. So stuff gets done on the down-low or it just doesn’t get done at all.

Gotta love the signs at the hardware store saying “You can buy this stuff but if you even think about installing it yourself, that’s illegal!”

What I think we really need to do though is make publishing these control standards mandatory under right-to-repair laws – no one should need to be reverse engineering them, you bring a product to market you have to provide the complete spec for it’s software interface and data.

Do that, and I bet we’d find in a few years every new appliance would support a common serial port standard and come with a code page in the manual for it (ironically the prevalence of Tuya-smart stuff has come very close to making this happen, but they go to absurd lengths to lock you out of the wi-fi microcontrollers).

(1) https://github.com/absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl

My fitbit wifi scale, which I love and has been doing a great job for the last 10 years has now lost support to pair it with the new fitbit app, thanks Google!

Perhaps someone has already made a home assistant plugin that does this?

It really is an easy repair. Needs a screwdriver and knowledge enough to shut off the electricity to touch the wires. According to code every one of these condenser units outside has a disconnect right there so you don’t even need to turn off the power at the breaker box. Just pull that disconnect, open up your outdoor condenser unit, snap a pic of the specs on the capacitor (it’s the only thing that looks like a soda can) and order one off Amazon and stash it somewhere. It’s a tiny part. It will take like 5 minutes max and save you several hundred bucks and a lot of sweat eventually.

FWIW, when ac dies it’s usually in this order of root causes:

Float switch: your condensate drain line got clogged because it just does and you need to clear it. You can proactively prevent this by pouring bleach or vinegar down the line periodically (what clogs it is usually some sort of gnarly plant like growth from all the moisture) or if it’s clogged you need to clear it. The hvac guys will charge you 300 bucks to blow pressurized air through the pipe or you can literally just duct tape a wet shop vac to the thing and suck it out yourself. Attachments can be purchased on Amazon for reasonable price.

A capacitor issue is the second most common. If it ain’t the float switch almost always it’s the capacitor. You can increase your capacitor longevity and also decrease your electric bill by changing your air filter regularly but also hosing down the outside condenser coils every few months or so. Almost everyone knows about the air filter but few people know about hosing down the coils. This makes a HUGE difference. We are talking like 20-30% of your electric bill in hot climates if you don’t do it. Just take a hose and spray downward on the grates and get all that dust and dead grass from mowing out of there. You won’t hurt the thing. Why does this help? Well, it’s better to think of AC not as adding cool air. There’s no such thing as adding cool air. Only removal of heat. How does heat get removed out of your house? Through that condenser unit. If those grates are clogged up the heat cannot escape and the unit must work harder to do less effective job. So keep those coils clean.

Everything else after that is way less common. Yeah compressors do die. Motors die. Refrigerant leaks. Computer components die. Thermostats fail. However it’s very rare that the issue is something other than these two things in comparison. Like probably 80% of all HVAC residential calls are probably the above two things I mentioned.

So he unscrews the panel, pulls off the leads, puts in the new capacitor and voila.
Then the guy says basically exactly what the above para starting with “A capacitor issue…”, including hosing down the coils.

So in 10 minutes I learned another mandatory skill on a Sunday morning, and it only cost $675. (Yes I know better than to place my tongue across the capacitor connectors)

Last year I fixed the condensate drain line clog myself, by uh, well, I was in a hurry, blowing into the pretty grotty drain line. I did purchase the exact model pump for a spare.

I still need to buy a spare capacitor though!

Now I could take it back for a warranty replacement, which would give me the same defective unit.

As a result of this, I don’t even recommend buying components locally any more. The capacitor from amazon cost about $12 and is still working years later.

As far as their danger there really isn’t any beyond getting shocked from dealing with live wires. Technically they can retain a bit of a charge so I’ve seen recommendations to wait X amount of time before touching them with your bare hands or to discharge it by touching it with an insulated screwdriver to discharge it but the risk is pretty low. Once the power is off (either at the breaker or via the disconnect at the condenser unit, power only goes in one way to those things so if you turn it off in one place there’s no way you’ll get a zap) it’s a soda can with 3 wires going into it. You just disconnect the 3 wires from the old soda can, remove it, replace and connect the new one. Not that much harder than changing a light bulb.

when power is disconnected they are not charged at all. it’s not like the capacitors you might find in a CRT

Some do it with an insulated screwdriver but that’s dangerous because it’s a short, can ark, fuse the driver to the capacitor, and result in a bad day.

There’s a bunch of similar capacitors on Amazon (or your local hardware store). They’re about the size of a soda can. I believe the “old” capacitor in your A/C can zap you if you don’t ground the lines together when you pull it out, if you watch youtube videos for this repair they’ll ground it with a screwdriver or other metal object.

My local HVAC supplier doesn’t sell to non-licensed people. I think they don’t like dealing with returns from people who don’t know what they’re doing. I needed a 24vac transformer once. My dad used the same HVAC company for his office for a long time, they still remembered him, and had the part I needed in stock.

My brother’s capacitor went out, but we found the part he needed at a local Grainger branch. https://www.grainger.com/category/motors/motor-capacitors

Two summers ago my AC didn’t sound right. IIRC the outside unit was clicking on and off. I pulled the breaker. Eventually I decided the problem was with the contactor (a switch controlled by 24vac). I took pictures of where the wires were connected and pulled the contactor. For no particular reason I started taking the old contactor apart, and found a cricket in the middle. I removed the bug, cleaned out the cricket residue, put the contactor back together, and returned it to the outside unit. My AC system resumed working perfectly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactor

FWIW there are some things that DO require licensing. Purchasing refrigerant requires an EPA number. Almost no shop will sell you full on ready to install systems without a contractors license. But off the shelf components like this don’t require one and they have unlicensed helpers coming in all the time buying stuff, so confidently pretending you’re one of those is usually enough in a pinch.

Why can I buy as many cans of it that I want for my car then? Is the stuff used in house systems that different?

I think refrigerator and AC repair companies are required to capture and recycle the refrigerant – they don’t seem to have the equipment to capture and measure refrigerant like auto mechanics.

R22 (phased out refrigerant for home AC) has chlorine in it, while R134a doesn’t have chlorine, making it easier on the ozone layer. R134a is being replaced with R1234yf.

The best refrigerant is CO2, but this has the greatest tendency to leak.

A good way to check if a place does retail sale is to ask for the city desk when calling in.

It stopped heating and it turned out there are solenoids that control the natural gas flow. Quick disassembly (back when products were made for easy repair) and swapping out two $8 solenoids from Amazon and I was back in business.

Unironically one of the proudest moments of my life was when I fixed the the belt on our dryer.

A $10 rubber belt and YouTube and voila!