Smart thermostat goes offline: Not Cool

“I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” – HAL 9000

Back in 2021, we had an American Standard Platinum 18 air conditioner installed, with the accompanying Nexia 850 smart thermostat. We can control the thermostat locally, via their mobile app, via Home Assistant or its mobile app.

Early in the evening of November 24th I reached for my phone. I wanted to adjust the thermostat. On this particular occasion, the American Standard app on my phone reported a connectivity failure.

Not easily dissuaded, I used my computer to access the Home Assistant dashboard. HA reported the thermostat was offline.

Finally, I tried to log into the company’s web portal at www.asairhome.com. It returned an obvious failure message, pictured below.

To address the immediate reality, I strode over to the thermostat on the wall and made the adjustment locally. Like a cave man.

Then I called the telephone number on the web portal’s error page. After a simple IVR, I was told to, “…call back during office hours.”

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” – The Captain, Cool Hand Luke

This situation is a great illustration of why local control is critically important. It would be vastly better if companies like American Standard allowed local API access. This is an often overlooked part of the core Home Assistant philosophy. Home Assistant integrations are always noted as requiring “cloud” access or not. Local API control is always preferable. It eliminates reliance on internet access and a vendor provided server.

Hereabouts, I abandoned Amazon smart outlets in favor of TP-Link specifically because Home Assistant can control the TP-Link outlets via a wholly local path.

Back in 2021, we bought that A/S air conditioner and the accompanying Nexia thermostat. The tech who set it all up told me that “…you don’t control Nexia, Nexia controls everything.” That was patently untrue, since Home Assistant controlled Nexia from the outset. The specifics of home automation is simply beyond a lot of AC technicians.

Nabu Casa provides secure, off-site remote access to Home Assistant. I would rather have the Home Assistant server leverage local API access to the Nexia thermostat, then use HA remote access for off-site remote control. I have more faith in the HA & Nabu Casa team, who are open source advocates.

By 8:30pm the A/S app was admitting to the back-end issue and reporting that their engineers were working on the trouble. By 10pm the problem appeared to be resolved.