GREE Electric, branded as GREE, is a Chinese home appliances manufacturer headquartered in Zhuhai, Guangdong province. It is the world's largest residential air-conditioner manufacturer. The company offers two types of air conditioners: household air conditioners and commercial air conditioners. The company also produces electric fans, water dispensers, heaters, rice cookers, air purifiers, water kettles, humidifiers and induction cookers, among other products.
| Basic information | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1991 |
| Legal Structure | Private |
| Industry | Home appliances |
| Also known as | |
| Official website | https://gree.com |
Consumer-impact summary
GREE Devices with Wi-Fi connection are heavily dependent on their cloud connection, and refuse to function properly with third-party local network integrations like Home Assistant.
By blocking all internet traffic from the device, it automatically disconnects from the network within 30 seconds and breaks all integrations for next 5 minutes, after which the loop begins again. This is by design, making it hard to use local network control without the cloud. We can also conclude that the device's local access will also become unusable at some point, when the servers are shut down.
Proposed solution for this problem is to host a dummy server and pointing all gree.com DNS records towards the dummy server, which fools the unit to think it has active cloud connection and stop it from disconnecting. However, with newer firmware versions, GREE has switched its communication, rendering dummy server as-it-is currently, useless.[1]
Products
- GREE Mini series
- GREE Vireo series
See also