Hi,
I am quite new to home automation and one of the things I want to do is to control my air condition/heater unit using HE rules/sensors. I have mainly looked at Sensibo and Broadlink. My understanding from this forum is that neither Sensibo nor Broadlink are supported officially by Hubitat, but that there are custom integrations for these devices.
So which way is best to go in your opinion?
There are potentially reasons to prefer either.
Personally, I wouldn’t invest in Sensibo if I didn’t have to, since it’s cloud dependent, and something as basic as HVAC shouldn’t be at the mercy of a cloud connection.
Broadlink can function entirely locally with hubitat, which is a huge plus. However, the integration that was most popular and functional was withdrawn by the dev earlier this year for unclear reasons.
I believe there’s other ways to integrate broadlink devices though, search through the forum and pay particular attention to how recent the threads are.
Edit: I know @Angus_M uses Sensibo. And I think it’s @rob121 that actively supports a Broadlink integration.
Yeah I have loads of Sensibo. They aren't cheap but what I like about them is they just work. The app is cool. So many AC machines are supported. And using HE with Sensibo is easy and gives you full access to all the features of your AC controller via Custom Actions. Whereas with the Broadlink (I have an RM3 which I have played with a little, but granted am no expert) I think it's more difficult. Best to check on that in the forums. Sensibo does need Internet to work so certainly that's a factor to be considered. As a suggestion, since they are so cheap, maybe start with Broadlink RM3 device and see how you get on first. RM4 also works but there used to be a caveat with initial setup that I believe is now resolved.
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