Daikin Emura 3 owner's thread

[Radian]

 

I've recently had a couple of these mini-splits (FTXJ35A2V1BW) installed and while I'm blown away by how efficient and effective they are, the UI seems a bit odd to say the least. The Operation Manual doesn't strike me as the best efforts of a professional technical author, which doesn't help.

 

Hopefully this thread will attract other owners (I can't be the only one) and might aid a better understanding all round. Just finding a relevant manual online is a bit of a challenge. The online copy of the paper manual it came with (dated 2021.12) only seems to be available from the daikin.ch website with links elsewhere being dead or leading to earlier versions of Emura. This is the 3rd generation.

 

Quirks

 

Armed with the published info and the Daikin 'wireless remote control' (IR) and the Conecta app on my smartphone, I've been trying to get my head around a few quirks. For starters, the IR remote is one-way so its internal state can differ from the indoor unit if also controlled from the app. This has the potential for a bit of confusion as some functions on the remote control are disabled when it thinks it's in a particular mode, but isn't, due to changes having since been made using the app. At least the app sync's with the remote - albeit with an unpredicatble delay.

 

Speaking of the app, regrettably, the system is entirely cloud based. Previous versions of the WiFi interfaces used by Daikin appear to have had both local and remote access to the settings but this has changed now so everything has to go through the cloud. I'm not entirely happy about this, and neither are the people trying to integrate the latest Daikin models into Home Assistant.

 

Another thing I'm not happy about is the bizarre design decision they made to keep the built-in WiFi Access Point (Daikin originated SSID that's used by the app for onboarding to the customer's LAN) permanently active. In every other smart device I've encountered or developed myself, such AP's only persist for as long as it takes to make a connection and transfer credentials to access the customer's LAN. Time-outs in the order of minutes at most are common to prevent the SSID of AP's loitering and providing visibility to all and sundry in the vicinity. WiFi is not as secure as most people imagine and a permanent but totally unnecessary advertisement that a Daikin A/C is in the vicinity can only serve to add to the attack surface.

 

Other operational quirks exist mostly through necessity - once you understand the inevitable limitations of an ASHP capable of both heating and cooling. The trouble is that much of what goes on has been abstracted away from the UI presumably to make it simpler to operate. An example of this would be the way that selecting comfort mode overrides the fan speed setting - forcing it to auto. On the handheld remote this puts a little cross next to the fan icon but in the app, other fan settings can be selected, only to bounce back to auto a few seconds (or minutes) later. And if the app is used to disable comfort mode, the remote may still think it's selected and bar you from adjusting the fan speed.

 

So that's my opening post on the topic. My next question will be what the small green part of the LED status ring actually signifies. It goes on and off at seemingly random times but the manual only describes it being lit during the on-boarding process (I do hope it isn't related to the AP remaining up, because this might imply a bug rather than a feature).