Posted by: @cathoderay

↑

Edit: I should have said central southern UK, maybe elsewhere it is warm and sunny!

Warm (10C) and sunny in mid Wales! 

Posted by: @editor

↑

Warm (10C) and sunny in mid Wales! 

Lucky them! It's the endless grey days that do me in! 

Posted by: @cathoderay

↑

Posted by: @xristostsilis

↑

So here in Greece due to some days having great weather many people choose to turn heat pump off and let clean air through the house. I mean today we had 18-19 degrees outside 

Fair enough. Here in the UK we can only dream about great weather most of the time. Here it is another grey soggy nine degrees outside today. 

Edit: I should have said central southern UK, maybe elsewhere it is warm and sunny!

yeah it seems that in the uk running the heat pump all the time is the best choice. I will probably try and setup a HA communication for my own heat pump and see how that goes. 

Posted by: @xristostsilis

↑

I will probably try and setup a HA communication for my own heat pump and see how that goes. 

Good luck. If you run into any problems, feel free to come back and ask questions. Or even better, if you get it to work, come back and tell us how you did it!

Posted by: @xristostsilis

↑

…

however lately I installed 2 new heat pumps on 2 different homes (different WiFi) and both customers call me back to let me know that the WiFi has disconnected from the app. I tried to stop band steering changed AP, forced 2,4ghz channel and many more

…

I could do with a bit of clarification from you Midea users. Does this particular app communicate directly with the heat pump (or controller) or does it communicate with Midea’s cloud systems?

My reason for asking is that most installations with most brands have a wifi adapter that allows the heat pump’s controller to talk to the manufacturer’s cloud and then the official app that’s installed on various phones and tablets also goes out to the Internet to connect to the same cloud. If Midea works in the same way, any changes to the heat pump’s wifi frequency, channel hopping and so forth would have no effect at all on the ability for the app to connect to the Internet.

If we can understand the topology better, all the HA stuff may be unnecessary, but I obviously can’t be sure at the moment.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

↑

Posted by: @xristostsilis

↑

…

however lately I installed 2 new heat pumps on 2 different homes (different WiFi) and both customers call me back to let me know that the WiFi has disconnected from the app. I tried to stop band steering changed AP, forced 2,4ghz channel and many more

…

I could do with a bit of clarification from you Midea users. Does this particular app communicate directly with the heat pump (or controller) or does it communicate with Midea’s cloud systems?

My reason for asking is that most installations with most brands have a wifi adapter that allows the heat pump’s controller to talk to the manufacturer’s cloud and then the official app that’s installed on various phones and tablets also goes out to the Internet to connect to the same cloud. If Midea works in the same way, any changes to the heat pump’s wifi frequency, channel hopping and so forth would have no effect at all on the ability for the app to connect to the Internet.

If we can understand the topology better, all the HA stuff may be unnecessary, but I obviously can’t be sure at the moment.

 

MIDEA heat pumps talk to the cloud and the app fetches data from there. With this in mind, on both of my clients we can connect to the heat pump via the app (it says online) but when entering it says 0 degrees and clicking on or off does nothing. Cycling the HP does the trick. The WiFi module on the midea is inside the display. 

Oh now I come to think, before cycling the HP I tried to reset WiFi etc but resetting does nothing. Intergrated wifi won’t broadcast even after reset and AP mode on. It needs to cycle. 

OK, that’s clearer.

Assuming the wifi is provided by the customer’s router, I’d say the next step is to see what the router thinks is the situation when the heat pump isn’t connecting to the cloud. In other words, is the heat pump unable to connect to the router via wifi at all or is it connecting OK but failing to pick up an IP address and/or other network settings via DHCP.

Understandably, I don’t know your comfort level, @xristostsilis, with networking but given your mention about wifi bands and channels I’m assuming you’re not flying totally blind.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

↑

OK, that’s clearer.

Assuming the wifi is provided by the customer’s router, I’d say the next step is to see what the router thinks is the situation when the heat pump isn’t connecting to the cloud. In other words, is the heat pump unable to connect to the router via wifi at all or is it connecting OK but failing to pick up an IP address and/or other network settings via DHCP.

Understandably, I don’t know your comfort level, @xristostsilis, with networking but given your mention about wifi bands and channels I’m assuming you’re not flying totally blind.

I need to check if the HP gets an ip address. That's a good idea. On HP display it has wifi full bars which means "it's connected". Due to this being on a clients home I can't mess too much with wifi settings and stuff. I wish mine had this problem so I could get to the bottom of it. Hmmm. I could install a display from "newer" HP to mine and see if it does this. I also could investigate the PCB between mine and the newer ones. Mine has software from 2021 but from the outside it's the same display. Maybe I should sent an email to Midea back in China and see if they know something about this.. I dont know if I have the time to dig deep into this matter. 

I now see that the display/controller of the heat pump has a micro usb port. so this should support updates. problem is that Midea is no transparent about updates so we have no knowledge on this matter. anyone has an email I could sent to Midea about this?

Posted by: @xristostsilis

↑

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

↑

OK, that’s clearer.

Assuming the wifi is provided by the customer’s router, I’d say the next step is to see what the router thinks is the situation when the heat pump isn’t connecting to the cloud. In other words, is the heat pump unable to connect to the router via wifi at all or is it connecting OK but failing to pick up an IP address and/or other network settings via DHCP.

Understandably, I don’t know your comfort level, @xristostsilis, with networking but given your mention about wifi bands and channels I’m assuming you’re not flying totally blind.

I need to check if the HP gets an ip address. That's a good idea. On HP display it has wifi full bars which means "it's connected". Due to this being on a clients home I can't mess too much with wifi settings and stuff. I wish mine had this problem so I could get to the bottom of it. Hmmm. I could install a display from "newer" HP to mine and see if it does this. I also could investigate the PCB between mine and the newer ones. Mine has software from 2021 but from the outside it's the same display. Maybe I should sent an email to Midea back in China and see if they know something about this.. I dont know if I have the time to dig deep into this matter. 

I'm not suggesting any changes to the client's router, but most routers will be able to provide information about connection status. You're right that if you can check whether the heat pump is getting an IP address that'll help, but even better if (assuming it did pick up an address) you can also check when and compare with the lease expiry on the DHCP server (presumably the router).

Eventually, you have a chain of events, all of which have to succeed for the heat pump to talk to the Internet.

• The heat pump's wifi interface has to get a reasonable signal from the access point
• The heat pump's wifi interface has to be configured with the appropriate SSID (network name) and password to physically connect.
• The heat pump's wifi interface has to find a DHCP server and pick up an IP address, a gateway address and a DNS server address.
• Using the wifi interface, the heat pump has to shout out to its cloud server via its host name, so the DNS server it's told to use needs to convert that name to a network address, the heat pump has to find the gateway and the gateway has to route that request outbound to that address.

I'm sure you're well aware of all this, but this is just to remind you that there are multiple things that can go wrong with the chain. Troubleshooting by breaking down into manageable parts is just as important network-wise as it is with the heat pump's other operations - and that's not intended to sound condescending.