Compared to NetHome Plus

Compared to NetHome Plus

NetHome Plus is the vendor app that came with your air conditioner — or one of its many rebadges: Midea Air, SmartHome, Comfee, Toshiba Home AC Control, and others that are the same app with a different logo.

This page is about what changes if you run Breeze Core instead, honestly in both directions.

The one difference that matters

Where the command goes.

NetHome Plus sends it to a vendor server, which sends it to your air conditioner. Your phone, on your sofa, three metres from the unit, talks to a datacentre and back.

Breeze Core sends it straight to the unit over your LAN. Nothing leaves the house.

Everything below follows from that.

	NetHome Plus	Breeze Core
the path a command takes	phone → vendor cloud → unit	client → unit
works with the internet down	no	yes
works if the vendor shuts the service off	no	yes
latency	seconds, variable	~1–2 s, and it is the unit's own speed
who can see your usage	the vendor	you
accounts	one, with the vendor	none
your data	their servers	four files on your machine

What you give up

Stated first, because a comparison page that only lists wins is an advertisement.

• You have to run a server. A Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, a NAS, a router — it needs about 3 MB of disk and 2.5 MB of memory, so almost anything does. But it is a thing you maintain, and if it is off, nothing works.
• Away-from-home access is your problem. NetHome Plus works from anywhere by default, because everything goes via the cloud anyway. Here you need a VPN or a reverse proxy — see Exposing it safely.
• Setup is longer. Discovering units, pairing clients, editing a configuration file. Call it twenty minutes rather than five.
• No vendor support. If it breaks, you read Troubleshooting.
• You still need the vendor app once, for some units. V3 units need a token and key that only the vendor cloud issues. Breeze Core can fetch them for you during pairing, but they originate there.
• Voice assistants and vendor integrations stop working, because those go through the vendor's account. There is a REST API instead, which is more capable and more work.

What you get

• It keeps working. No account to be suspended, no service to be discontinued, no app update that drops your model. The protocol is implemented locally and cannot be switched off remotely.
• Every unit on one screen. The vendor app is built around one unit at a time; the panel shows all of them, and GET /api/units/state returns the lot in one request.
• Server-side scheduling that does not need a phone. Schedules, curves and timers run in the server. NetHome Plus timers depend on the app and the cloud being reachable when they fire.
• Temperature curves, which the vendor app has no concept of: a setpoint that follows the time of day, interpolated. See Programs, schedules and curves.
• A real API. Anything you can script, you can automate. No cloud API keys, no rate limits, no terms of service.
• Per-client credentials you can revoke. Each phone and browser has its own, revocable individually. There is no shared password.
• It runs on the hardware you have. Six Linux architectures, three BSDs, Windows, OPNsense, OpenWrt, containers.
• No telemetry, and nothing to opt out of.

Can I use both?

Yes, mostly — and it is worth knowing the one catch.

Midea firmware accepts one control connection at a time. So the vendor app in the foreground on a phone can lock Breeze Core out, and the other way round. The symptom is a 503 from the API, or the vendor app saying the unit is offline. Close the other one and it clears.

Keeping the vendor app installed is sensible anyway: it is how you re-pair a V3 unit if you ever lose config.json.

What Breeze Core does not do

• It does not control anything but Midea-protocol air conditioners. Not lights, not heat pumps, not other brands. It is one appliance family, done properly.
• It is not a Home Assistant integration. No dependency on it, and no intention. If you already run Home Assistant, its own Midea integrations may suit you better; this is for people who want the appliance and not the platform.
• It does not touch the vendor cloud after pairing. Which means it cannot do anything that only exists there.

Is my unit supported?

If NetHome Plus (or a rebadge) controls it over Wi-Fi, very probably. The protocol is the same across V1, V2 and V3 units, and all three are handled.

The test costs nothing:

sudo breeze-core pair

It broadcasts and lists what answers. If your unit appears, it works. If something answers but cannot be decoded, pair says so explicitly rather than staying silent — that report is useful, so please open an issue with it.

Getting started

First run and pairing, which assumes nothing.