What’s the Beep?

Recently, I bought an AC unit: Pearl Plus by Haier. Soon after, working on my home automation setup, I’ve realized a few setbacks that come with communicating with the AC via web API (available through the hOn addon¹).

I could’ve lived with the slow response time or the constant fallback to default 22 °C and “medium” fan direction². I would also have accepted a non-functional temperature sensor, as updates from Haier API to Home Assistant only occurred upon temperature change, or the risk that, at some point, the integration might simply be banned by Haier³.

But I couldn’t stand one thing. The Beep.

Every change of state of the AC caused the electronic beep sound, that was especially burdensome whenever I wanted to change a few options at once. As I already mentioned, because of a bug in hOn Home Assistant add-on, the unit was defaulting to settings I didn’t like. To address this, I’ve set an automation, that whenever I turn on the AC, a set of my preferences is applied. This means that I often heard the following sequence:

• Beep (turn on the unit)
• Beep (set up desired temperature)
• Beep (set up desired fan direction)

This isn’t the end of the word. Nevertheless, it was irritating during the nighttime. Also, something I haven’t thought of before: having automations that make sounds, brings a feeling of a schedule: something similar to a school bell. I don’t want my smart home to signal to me that it’s doing something. Just do it.

Disabling the Beep with hOn

As soon as I realized that I’d prefer my AC to be muted, I went to the hOn mobile app settings. To my surprise, there wasn’t any mute settings. I couldn’t find anything in the manual, too, and online forums suggested removing the speaker physically or sealing it with a tape. I didn’t want to do either of it to not lose the warranty, but also this felt kind of… derogatory?

Disabling the Beep with ESPHome

Later in my research, I’ve found haier-esphome⁴ project that looked promising, as in the configuration options one can see a position named:

beeper (Optional, boolean): Can be used to disable beeping on commands from AC. Supported only by hOn protocol.

Although I wasn’t sure about the success of the operation (why would ESPHome enable something that neither the API nor the IR pilot could do?), I decided to give it a try.

ESPHome is a system that allows to configure and manage ESP controllers. It integrates with Home Assistant nicely and, from my recent experience, has an amazing community.

Assembling

Using the documentation and helpful notes from Michał Góral⁵, I’ve ordered necessary items and started to work on assembling the setup. The assistance of my more experienced with soldering friend, Krysztof, was invaluable.

Configuration

After soldering all the wires, I connected the controller to the computer, flashed it with initial settings from ESPHome tab in Home Assistant and prepared a simple configuration based on the documentation⁶.

This is the basic configuration with `external_components` and some extractions to support more ACs with the same options enabled.

	# salon-ac.yaml
	esphome:
	name: salon-ac
	# (…) some default configuration entries
	external_components:
	– source: github://esphome/esphome@dev
	components: [ haier ]
	packages:
	climate: !include
	file: common/ac-climate.yaml
	vars: {
	room: salon
	}
	switch: !include
	file: common/ac-switch.yaml
	vars: {
	room: salon
	}
	# common/ac-climate.yaml
	climate:
	– platform: haier
	id: haier_${room}_ac
	protocol: hon
	name: ${room} AC
	beeper: true
	wifi_signal: true
	supported_swing_modes:
	– 'OFF'
	– VERTICAL
	# common/ac-switch.yaml
	switch:
	– platform: template
	id: ${room}_ac_beeper_switch
	entity_category: config
	name: ${room} AC beeper
	icon: mdi:volume-high
	restore_mode: RESTORE_DEFAULT_ON
	lambda: |-
	return id(haier_${room}_ac).get_beeper_state();
	turn_on_action:
	climate.haier.beeper_on: haier_${room}_ac
	turn_off_action:
	climate.haier.beeper_off: haier_${room}_ac

view raw salon-ac.yaml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Then I disconnected the controller and flashed it via OTA. Then a new device was discovered on Home Assistant with all the expected options and switches.

Testing

After toggling the salon AC beeper switch to off, the moment of truth has come. Will this really disable the Beep?

To my delight, the AC unit stopped emitting sounds whatsoever.

Other improvements

Except of no Beep, I’ve gained a few other improvements after migrating to ESPHome controller:

• Instant response time, compared to a few seconds previously.
• Working temperature sensor. Now, updates are sent every second, so the sensor actually makes sense.
• Safety that my data stays local, and I’m not dependent on Haier’s API availability.

But there are also some setbacks of this change:

• I’m guessing the ESP controller might die some day, as it happened to Michał⁷.
• I don’t have an out-of-box reminder about cleaning the AC unit (the hOn mobile app had it).

But overall, I think the improvements outweigh the risks. I’m glad that I worked on this, as it’s a quality of life improvement that my family can benefit from daily.

1. https://github.com/Andre0512/hon ↩︎
2. https://github.com/Andre0512/hon/issues/211 ↩︎
3. https://github.com/Andre0512/hon/issues/147 ↩︎
4. https://github.com/paveldn/haier-esphome ↩︎
5. https://goral.net.pl/post/replacing-haier-wifi-modules/ ↩︎
6. https://github.com/paveldn/haier-esphome/blob/master/docs/examples/max-hon.yaml ↩︎
7. https://goral.net.pl/changelog/esp8266-died/ ↩︎