Comfee Gusto Inverter 1PK running through the community HA integration on HACS. Setup is fine, climate entity works, but the built-in temp sensor sits at the top of the indoor unit near the ceiling, and it reads about 1.5 to 2 degrees warmer than the Aqara Zigbee sensor sitting on my desk. Room is 12 square meters, closed door most of the day, so the ceiling area reads higher because heat rises. Physical placement issue, not a sensor calibration thing.
What this means in practice. If I set the climate to 25, the AC's own sensor thinks the room needs cooling until the ceiling area gets to 25, meanwhile my desk is already at 23. I end up dropping the setpoint to 26 or 27 manually to compensate, which works but feels dumb because I am overriding a sensor with human math.
What I actually want. Feed the desk-level Aqara reading into the AC's control loop as the source of truth, so the compressor cycles based on where I actually am, not where the heat sits.
Approaches I have looked at:
Generic thermostat template in HA, wraps the climate entity and uses the Aqara as the temperature source. Cycles by turning the AC on and off. Problem is this defeats the inverter's whole reason for existing, since it kills variable frequency modulation and turns the unit back into a bang bang controller.
Setting the AC to a low fixed temp like 20 and using a template to swap it between two setpoints (20 and 27) based on the Aqara reading crossing thresholds. Still defeats inverter modulation, just with fewer switches per hour.
Some kind of feedback offset that adjusts the AC setpoint dynamically based on the delta between the AC sensor and the Aqara reading. This one I have not built yet because I am not sure the AC setpoint changes are fast enough for a closed loop tweak like that. The HACS integration has enough lag on setpoint sync that tight loops feel risky.
The clean answer would be if the HACS integration exposed the internal temp reading as writable, so I could spoof it with the Aqara value. It exposes it as a read only sensor entity though, and I have not seen anyone in older threads figure out a way to write back to it.
Where I am stuck. Every workaround either defeats the inverter modulation or introduces enough lag that I do not trust the loop. If anyone else running this integration has solved this cleanly for their setup I would take the pointer, otherwise I am starting to think the honest answer is that variable frequency inverter units and external sensor overrides just do not play nice without an ESPhome dongle sitting between the AC and the network.