More home Automation!

We had an LG Ducted Aircon system fitted in our Australian house back in 2015 – an LG B55AWY-7G6 I believe , a 15.1Kw Beast.

Well, turns out they take a lot of power…

And this is on a warmer day!

With Australian energy prices spiralling ever upwards… it gets expensive to run this. It draws just over 5kW…or, around $2.5o per hour to run during peak hours.

To make things more efficient, 3 zones were installed. Just hooked up to a 3 way electrical light switch, entirely manually controlled.

• Zone 3 – the 4 bedrooms
• Zone 1 – The main living area
• Zone 2 – The Lounge / TV area

This isn’t enough zones – our ‘middle’ bedroom gets too hot – this is the outlet closest to the internal Aircon unit

The furthest bedroom doesn’t heat much at all – the furthest.

So, Enter Home Assistant

Normal people would call a professional and get an intelligent home climate control system installed (like This, or This) to take care of the ducts automatically.

That’d be too easy

I Purchased a couple of Zigbee relays

And grabbed a whole bunch of Zigbee Temperature and Humidity sensors

I found some cheap damper actuators which have an annoying RJ12 connection on them, they use internally a simple 50TKyj24-2.5-4700 AC Synchronous motor which has a ‘common’ and two other wires, one for driving clockwise, the other for driving anti clockwise

And, those RJ12’s are the reason for my Adaptor PCB. I need to feed 4 actuators with AC on either the red or the yellow lines, AND have the other side of the AC ‘common’ …it would quite a mess if it were all cabled up!

So, Thankyou to JLCPCB for having such a well priced PCB service.

The other PCB – is inspired by a number of people – https://github.com/Flameeyes/esphome-lg-pqrcuds0/tree/main

https://www.instructables.com/Hacking-an-LG-Ducted-Split-for-Home-Automation/

and the latest one – https://github.com/JanM321/esphome-lg-controller/tree/main

It just converts the LG controller’s protocol into MQTT so Home assistant can make it easy to integrate….Not much to write really, LG’s old wifi implementation (circa 2013/4) is pretty flakey nowadays, this ESP32 based local wifi connection should be much more stable.