How to make your dumb IR controlled air conditioner smart in Home Assistant!

Most solutions in making air conditioners smart require a remote control with a screen. This solution does not need that.

This is also working in HomeKit!

What do you need?

To control your air conditioner and get feedback you need a univeral infrared remote control and a smart plug that can measure the power consumption. Do do this I used:

• A broadlink RM Mini 3 to send the IR command to the AC
• A NOUS A1 with Tasmota to measure the current energy consumption
• A zigbee temperature sensor

How to set it up?

1. First of all, the IR remote control must be integrated into Home Assistant. With the RM mini 3, the integrated Broadlink plugin could be used.
2. Then the IR remote control of your air conditioner must be learned to the remote control. To do this with a broadlink Device, follow the steps from the Home Assistant Broadlink plugin page. Create a remote.send_command script to send the command to the AC.
3. Now the smart plug must be integrated into Home Assistant. Follow the instructions of the plugin you need.
4. Create a binary_sensor that detects if the device is on or off based on the energy consumption.
5. Now create a switch consisting of the binary_sensor and the remote.send_command script. This can switch the air conditioner, and can detect its state.
6. Last, a generic_thermostat must be created. To do this, enter the switch entity and the temperature sensor entity in the config. All the settings can be found here.
7. To add it to Homekit, just add it to the homekit config.

Pictures:

This card config can be found here.