Mitsubishi shows the problem of cloud-based home automation

Mitsubishi, the world leader in heat pumps, is better at hardware than software, at least one can hope. MELCloud, its remote control service for heat pumps, has been down worldwide since April 18, or even the 16th for some according to witnesses, and has not yet been restored as of Monday morning. It is not possible to control the heating or air conditioning remotely, which also means that control through home automation is also not possible.

After community survey, the problem comes from DNS, a great classic. While you wait for Mitsubishi to fix it, you can regain access to your connected heat pump by associating the domain name production.receiver.melcloud.com by IP address 52.215.226.151. However, this requires its own internal DNS server, for example through PiHole. Or wait until Mitsubishi fixes this global problem, which shouldn’t take too long, we hope.

While this bug may just be a bad memory, it clearly shows the problem with cloud-based home automation. All it takes is a bug in the manufacturer’s server infrastructure for all connected devices that depend on it to stop working normally. In the case of Mitsubishi, this is still not too difficult, as you can still control the units with remote controls and other control panels present on the site. Despite everything, it is always better to rely on a local connection, which does not depend on any remote server.

MELCloud is an old infrastructure in any case, as evidenced by its remaining software in the pre-iOS 7 version should prepare a major update, which probably explains the current bug. Let’s hope that the Japanese manufacturer has also planned the internal control of its heat pumps.