The lake place in Muskoka has four LG air conditioners. I wanted them in Home Assistant with everything else. This part of a smart-home report is usually the boring part. An official integration exists. The vendor is a household name. The units were already paired in the LG app. Enter the credentials, and the work is complete.
Not supported country
The integration asked me for the country of the units. I typed the correct answer: Canada. The reply was not_supported_country.
Let me state the situation again. These are Canadian air conditioners. I bought them in Canada. They are bolted to Canadian walls. They cool Canadian air, in a province that is extremely Canada. Not supported country.
Say US instead
The fix, after some research: tell the integration US.
The connection then operated immediately. All four units came in with full control: heat, cool, dry, fan, target temperatures, and the filter-life sensors. They update in near real time, because the integration subscribes to the cloud push from LG. It does not poll.
The account, not the hardware
The explanation is more stupid than the bug. The LG gateway does not care about the location of the hardware. It cares about the region of the account. My ThinQ account is a US-region account. So, to the LG cloud, these four air conditioners are Americans abroad.
The country field in the setup flow does not ask about the machines on the wall. It asks about a database row from years ago. Answer the question that it appears to ask, and it fails with a straight face.
One more fact for this road: these units are cloud-only. There is no local API. Home Assistant talks to the LG servers, and the LG servers talk to the AC ten feet from the server. A thermostat command makes an international round trip to travel three metres. I have opinions about that. But the state updates are push-based and quick. In practice, the system feels local. In philosophy, it is offensive.
A note in bold for future me
I put a note in the docs for my future self, in bold. I know the alternative sequence. At some new setup, two years from now, I will type “CA” with confidence, like a person who learned nothing. Then I will swear for twenty minutes before I find my own warning.
The ACs report in correctly since then. They are four little climate entities that think they live in the States. The dashboard got a Climate section. The family got voice control later that month. Nobody in the house knows or cares that the air conditioning runs on a small permanent lie about geography. The air conditioners also do not care.