Add support for horizontal vane swing operation in climate integrations

[dgwynne]

I have a Mitsubishi Electric air conditioner that has both vertical and horizontal vanes that can be controlled independently. The climate entity already supports handling vertical swing operation. I'm proposing that the existing swing support is copied to allow handling for horizontal swing operation.

There's a pull request that implements this proposal in home-assistant/core#49541. That pull requests also provides an example of using it with the MQTT climate integration to talk to a Mitsubishi Electric air conditioner that's plugged into an esp8266 running Tasmota with the MiElHVAC driver.

Aside from the specific hardware I've implemented support for, this functionality would be useful for the control of several other brands of airconditioner. Going by the IRremoteESP8266 code, at least the aircons from the following vendors support independent setting of horizontal vane operation:

• Daikin
• Electra
• Fujitsu
• Hitachi
• Kelvinator
• Mitsubishi Electric
• Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
• NeoClima
• Panasonic
• TCL
• Voltas

Integrations for this hardware, such as the daikin, esphome, intesishome, knx, melcloud, modbus, etc, could be updated to use the functionality in the base entity and UI controls, and provide integration and automation with everything else that home-assistant provides.

[dgwynne]

I would also like to say that from a code complexity point of view, it's very low risk as it is literally a copy of the existing swing code. If you trust the swing code, then you can trust the horizontal swing code.

[blakadder]

Multiple fans and heaters also have horizontal swing/no swing modes

[khcnz]

Another integration that could make use of this change scottyphillips/echonetlite_homeassistant#17

I wonder if it would be better to implement a SwingH and SwingV mode and leave the existing generic swing mode alone to be a bit more explicit around a general swing mode v horizontal and vertical swing. It would be up to the platform which of the three to implement.

[gjohansson-ST]

Adding on Sensibo as an integration that could benefit from having two swing states e.g. vertical and horizontal independently. As of now the horizontal swing is implemented as a select entity which is not so nice.
The "problem" here is that the current swing supports both vertical and horizontal and an integration can implement it as such.

Proposal

Add a SwingH property as suggested in the PR mentioned in the original post.
That is probably the easiest way to deal with this would also not have any effect on current integrations using the existing Swing property for both vertical and horizontal.

[Aesculapius]

This is also possible with Mitshubitsi SRK airco's in combination with the Absalum-Muc ESP integration in HomeAssistant, see absalom-muc/MHI-AC-Ctrl#77

If it's such a non-breaking easy addition, I'm wondering why the original pull-request has been closed? Or has this been implemented nonetheless? home-assistant/core#49541

[gjohansson-ST]

It went stale and then the bot closed it. Those PR's won't be handled until this discussion has been finalized and approved anyhow.
We can always make a new PR once an approval has been made.

[Aesculapius]

Okay, great. So what is then needed to finalize the discussion here? Not trying to be blunt or disrespecting rules of the road, but trying to understand what would be needed to get this feature to be considered.

[gjohansson-ST]

From what I can understand there are two core integrations that could make use of this (MQTT and Sensibo).
That's a bit think to add this functionality so we should check if more integrations could make use of it.

[jwillemsen]

This would be very useful for the Daikin units, it looks the newer units get more and more swing modes and combining vertical/horizontal in one attribute makes it impossible to provide all freedom to the user.

[codyc1515]

Panasonic AC's also operate similarly.

[Bascht74]

my Mitsubishi devices have both vertical and horizontal vanes as well. Supporting those is very appreciated.
(and adding it to the climate integration of ESPHome).
Right now I am using a select entity, but that is pain in the butt...