The lake place in Muskoka has four LG air conditioners, and I wanted them in Home Assistant with everything else. This should be the boring part of any smart-home writeup: official integration exists, vendor is a household name, units already paired in LG’s own app. Plug in credentials, done.
Not supported country
The integration asked me what country the units were in. I typed the obviously correct answer — Canada — and got back not_supported_country.
Let me restate the situation. Canadian air conditioners. Bought in Canada. Bolted to Canadian walls, cooling Canadian air, in a province that is extremely Canada. Not supported country.
Say US instead
The fix, after some digging: tell it US.
It worked instantly. All four units came in with full control — heat, cool, dry, fan, target temps, even the filter-life sensors — and they update in near-real-time, because the integration subscribes to LG’s cloud push instead of polling.
The account, not the hardware
The explanation is dumber than the bug. LG’s gateway doesn’t care where the hardware lives; it cares where the account was registered. My ThinQ account is a US-region account, so as far as LG’s cloud is concerned, these four air conditioners are Americans abroad. The country field in the setup flow isn’t asking about the machines on the wall. It’s asking about a database row created years ago, and it will fail with a straight face if you answer the question it actually asked instead of the question it appears to ask.
Worth knowing if you go down this road: these units are cloud-only. There’s no local API — Home Assistant talks to LG’s servers, LG’s servers talk to the AC ten feet away from the server. I have opinions about a thermostat command doing an international round trip to travel three metres, but the state updates are push-based and quick, so in practice it feels local even though it’s philosophically offensive.
A note in bold for future me
I filed a note for my future self in the docs, in bold, because I know exactly how this goes otherwise: some future re-setup, two years from now, me confidently typing “CA” like a person who has learned nothing, then twenty minutes of swearing before I find my own warning.
The ACs have been dutifully reporting in ever since, 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, and nobody in the house knows or cares that the air conditioning is running on a small ongoing lie about geography. Honestly, neither do the air conditioners.