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ck2

it took me a month to notice my Midea A/C was absolutely hammering my router

I didn't even know it had wifi capability but it was trying to connect

I use mac whitelist so it wasn't even getting in but that didn't stop it from trying every seond

Fortunately it was just a usb dongle so yanked it out

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Most Midea units can be swapped for an ESPhome USB dongle if you ever wish to have remote control on your own terms — note various countries’ shop links, and the various wiki and other outlines for DIY etc: https://smlight.tech/product/slwf-01

Ooo. I have a Midea dehumidifier. When it powers up it displays the WiFi symbol. I wonder if it is hammering away at my access point. Might it be better to bring it on line and then just block all traffic?

And I wonder how I would even tell if it was trying to associate with my WiFi.

I have a Midea dehumidifier too. It moves around 200kB/hour which seems to be cloud polling about once a minute, so no big deal traffic-wise.

it’s checking to see if they discovered a new type of water

https://xkcd.com/3109/

I actually have two dehumidifiers, one is the Midea and the second is a totally dumb Aliexpress one that cost a few tens of dollars. It's switched on and off by Home Assistant via a modbus-controlled relay and drains into a sealed water canister with a modbus water-level sensor in it. Zero-maintenance and smarter than any multi-hundred-dollar "smart" dehumidifier.

I have two of them, and I just checked and both are quiet. Mine don't connect to WiFi unless you go through an entire process first with an android phone and Matter.

It's great having them on WiFi - you can turn on the AC before getting home to pre-cool, without having to leave it on all day.

Boy: So, how it get this bad grandpa?

Man: Well, before you couldn't turn on the AC before you got home

Realistically people would just leave their AC on. So this saves energy, rather than changing comfort.

Realistically ACs have timers, so you're really only optimizing for days where you go off-schedule.

I have a friend who diy'ed a button on single webpage that he presses on his phone while at work in order to open the gate to the building that he lives so delivery people can get in. I also think Bret Victor diy'ed the AC as mentioned while he was a student quarter century or more ago[0]

I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.

But I would literally rather buy a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.

[0] https://worrydream.com/Electronics/

You can (and should) just segregate your network to have separate paths for IoT/"smart devices" and normal personal/family devices. Makes it all worry free and transparently observable.

I have my IoT on a separate VLAN and I can observe communications for any given device at any given time.. this seems like a much saner solution than outright not buying any IoT devices, though that is also a respectable decision!

Really? And then complain about the energy cost? People are nutz. Like it's so unbearable to come home, open windows to get peak hot air out, then turn on AC and get cool. Energy is too cheap it seems. Also even very old AC remotes show there is usually the option to set up times etc.

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