| Naw. It's not quite that weird. It's actually pretty simple. :) The compressor can be turned off at any time. It doesn't matter where in the compression cycle it is when it becomes unpowered; it just doesn't care. It's probably ultimately going to come to rest on a compression stroke no matter what, anyway (Newton's 3rd law, etc). While the compressor is off, the high pressure side leaks down. That's good. (Sometimes, that's a noisy process: We've probably all heard aircons and fridges and such hiss and/or gurgle a bit after they've been turned completely off in an otherwise-quiet room; that's the sound of the high and low pressure sides approaching equilibrium.) The only trick is to wait a bit for the pressure to leak down before restarting it again; a minute or two is almost certainly more than plenty with a small loop. That wait is just to make the compressor's job of restarting a bit easier than it could be otherwise. The risk of restarting too soon is that it's harder on things than it could be. It might be hard enough on things that the compressor stalls. Stalled compressors are bad because they use a lot of current and make a lot of heat, but there's safety cutouts present that are designed to prevent them from becoming fire just for these instances. And anyway, it's all completely avoidable in this scenario: Set the smart plug to default to off (for when recovering from a real power outage), program a reliable restart delay into whatever the control system is (Home Assistant or whatever), and call it a day. This is functionally exactly what my Nest thermostat does. (Some aircons already have a delay at fresh power-up as an unavoidable built-in feature, and these don't need any special handling at all.) |