AirTouch5 owners thread

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amanzi

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#306158 1-Jul-2023 20:00

We got a Fujitsu ducted heat pump system installed recently, and it came with an AirTouch5 system as part of the bundle. Mostly happy with it, but have some questions and comments that I'd be keen to discuss with others who are also running the AirTouch5. Keen to hear others' experience with their systems so we can compare notes.

I have it integrated with HomeAssistant and after creating some custom entities, I now get some nice graphing in Grafana too.

cheers - stuart.

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#3098468 1-Jul-2023 20:19

I have the Airtouch4, integrated with Home Assistant. I imagine it's fairly similar. I have heaps of automations for it, which control temperatures and also damper positions. I have a custom dashboard that works well on my PC and phone, not much to look at but very functional. For example, I can override the damper AirTouch decides to use with one click, which is quite helpful if I want to give a room a quick boost. I also built a module using AppDaemon that lets me use a slider to turn the Airtouch (or any device really) off in x minutes, which includes optionally changing it to fan mode for a couple of minutes before turning it off - I don't like just turning it straight off I figure there's still a lot of heat in the system. I use this custom integration.

Curious to hear how much your system cost, with heat pump size (kw) and how many zones you have. From memory I paid about $14K a few years ago for four zones and it's a 10-11kw Daikin. I suspect I got a fairly good deal and prices have gone up.

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#3098910 3-Jul-2023 11:03

@timmmay do you ever find that there appears to be a disconnect between your AirTouch and your heatpump. This doesn't happen often, but sometimes I'm not convinced that the AirTouch is sending the right signals to the heatpump. For example, the other night I was testing something and I cranked up the temperature to 28 in the lounge on heat only mode and high fan. I would expect the heatpump to start going nuts to heat the room up, but it didn't appear to change much and an hour later the room was just 2 degrees warmer. I've also had a case where the AirTouch didn't turn on the heatpump at all - I ended up rebooting everything (airtouch, controller, heatpump) and then it came right eventually.

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#3098912 3-Jul-2023 11:12

I've found the Airtouch to heat pump connection to be reliable. It has a dedicated hardware interface that's brand specific, the tablet talks to that hardware, the hardware talks to the heat pump. It's probably not perfect, but with my Daikin it works ok.

What I did have problems with is the Home Assistant to Airtouch connection. The original tablet I had didn't have very reliable WiFi. Looking in the HA logs I could see frequent disconnects and errors. Polyaire (the manufacturer) upgraded me to a newer version of the tablet, one that is usually used for the Airtouch5, and since then it's been reliable. Even though I have the Airtouch5 tablet I still have the Airtouch 4, the logic is in the hardware box in the ceiling, the tablet is just the user interface running an Android app.

If you have the Fujitsu remote anywhere you can check that to see if the commands made it to the heat pump. I asked the installers to fit the Daikin remote. It's up in the ceiling so not very convenient, but it's there. It's useful for a few brand specific things, like setting night mode - which is actually very involved because (from memory of what I was told) the installer has to set the Daikin remote to primary, set up night mode, then set Airtouch back to primary which is non-trivial. Another thing they did with that remote was turn off the constantly circulating air when the system was up to heat as the breeze made the house feel cold.

If you're having problems I suggest you give your installer a call. Airtouch is a fairly complex solution, they can talk to Polyair and I think Polyair can remote in to look at it.

Dingbatt

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#3098923 3-Jul-2023 11:46

@amanzi Which part of the country are you in?

I’m in Auckland and have been looking to get wireless control of my Fujitsu ducted system. Have found a Fujitsu controller that is compatible but the original installer is not being very helpful. The other option is to go with Airtouch so I’m looking for a reliable installer to give me a quote to retrofit.

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#3098957 3-Jul-2023 12:32

@timmmay

Interesting you mention the WiFi issues - I had lots of Wifi issues initially and had to tweak my home WiFi settings until I've managed to get it mostly stable. For some reason the tablet is much more stable on the 5GHz band.

I don't have any additional control over the heatpump apart from what the AirTouch gives me - I think this is my main complaint. If I had a direct connection to the heatpump, I'd probably have a bit more confidence in the system.

I don't have too much faith in my installers to troubleshoot the AirTouch - this was their first AirTouch system they installed and they weren't sure how it worked with the 8 zone ducted system that we've got. I did email Polyaire once for support but got no response.

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#3098958 3-Jul-2023 12:33

Dingbatt:

@amanzi Which part of the country are you in?

I’m in Auckland and have been looking to get wireless control of my Fujitsu ducted system. Have found a Fujitsu controller that is compatible but the original installer is not being very helpful. The other option is to go with Airtouch so I’m looking for a reliable installer to give me a quote to retrofit.

I'm in Wellington. Even if you were here I don't think I would recommend my installer for an Airtouch system - they were pretty much learning how it worked on the job. Apart from that, they were good.

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#3099028 3-Jul-2023 13:11

I also found 5GHz more stable, maybe it's the hardware, maybe it's congestion.

You shouldn't need another controller. If Airtouch isn't working properly get the installer back, if they can't work it out they can talk to Polyaire who are the experts. Airtouch does directly interface with the heat pump.

There's all kinds of settings in the back end. Ask for the installer password and have a look around, but don't change anything you don't fully understand. For example, there's an economy setting in the back somewhere that turns the heating off when the airtouch says all the zones are up to heat, rather than waiting for both the airtouch and the fujitsu to both say it's up to heat, which prevented an overheat problem we had.

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amanzi

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#3099032 3-Jul-2023 13:17

I spend a lot of time in the installer part of the settings - I've read through the installer and user manuals for the system and based on this I probably know more about the AirTouch5 system than my installers. Before getting them back in, I was keen to hear from other AirTouch5 owners to see what other issues people have with their systems.

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#3099164 3-Jul-2023 18:27

Also have the Airtouch 4 for a Fujitsu system and have it integrated with Home Assistant - my biggest issue with it, is it through Home Assistant it frequently reports errors when trying to turn zones on/off or change the temperature - nothing that a reload of the integration (standard integration AirTouch 4 - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)) doesn't solve, but its been getting more and more on my nerves lately.

Now I've just seen the HACS integration from timmmay I can see some more work on the horizon... 😂

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#3099477 4-Jul-2023 10:15

amanzi:

I'm in Wellington. Even if you were here I don't think I would recommend my installer for an Airtouch system - they were pretty much learning how it worked on the job. Apart from that, they were good.

I am in Wellington with Airtouch4 and have no issues over last 2 years
It was underfloor heatpump installed by Temperature Solutions.

I have installed good ubiquity Wifi at home and I also have a wall mounted touch screen. I think it has a wired connection to the under house unit??

Psilan

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#3127812 14-Sep-2023 15:55

Interesting to see how others implement their HA integration.

Here's mine. I use both HACS AT4 and AT4 integrations to give myself more options to control.

E.g. I have a button for Office. turns zone on/off.

Temperature icon enables (service call) ITC control, then a temp adjuster pops up.

Fan icon enables fan control, then a slider for fan % pops up.

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bigreddog

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#3128021 15-Sep-2023 08:33

Here's mine. I use a double tap on the zone to swap between thermostat and damper control and the controls change accordingly:

Psilan

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#3128024 15-Sep-2023 08:38

That’s awesome. I was heading that way with conditional cards, but this was an easy way out for me.
Share the code? Love to try that.

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amanzi

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#3128036 15-Sep-2023 09:21

I mostly just use the HA integration to monitor and report on the heat pump states and the temperature in each of the 8 zones. I end up with a bunch of Grafana charts like this - the green line is the temperature as reported by the ITC and the yellow line indicates the state of the heat pump.

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#3128057 15-Sep-2023 10:12

Psilan: That’s awesome. I was heading that way with conditional cards, but this was an easy way out for me.
Share the code? Love to try that.

Needs custom card stack-in-card, mushroom cards, card-mod (only if you want the animated icons)

Airtouch Dashboard Github

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