That seems like you’re just replicating what the AC’s thermostat is doing.

In my experience the thermostats of window units are crappy at regulating room temperature. Even so, did you miss this part of the post?:

Even if the compressor is not running the fan runs 24/7 until it is physically switched off.

The OP is planning on letting the unit run for 10 minutes and then turn it off, a much less effective solution than setting up a remote temperature sensor and power monitoring switch, and much better than having to control room temperature by adjusting knob that’s “labeled from 1 to 8 with 1 being warm and 8 being coldest.”

If I had that setup, I’d use a power monitoring plug with a room temperature sensor. The combination of power monitoring and a temperature sensor would provide an amazing amount of flexibility.

For instance you can monitor when the compressor shuts off (because the current draw will drop significantly) and use the plug to shut off the entire unit, then power it on when the room temperature rises to a set point. I’d change that temperature setting depending on the time of day and possibly add a occupancy sensor or use light switches to enable and disable the AC when someone’s there. It would take some tweaking to get it working properly, but you should be able to make your room more comfortable and save energy with this kind of setup.

HA Supervised running under Debian 12 on a mini laptop with an N200 processor takes about 3% CPU. With the Frigate NVR add-on running 2 security cameras it uses about 10%.

Power loss protection on SSDs is an interesting addition I hadn’t come across before.

We live in a very windy area and power blinks are common. A high endurance MicroSD was in use the first time the Pi wouldn’t boot, but I was in town and it was just annoying. It was a big issue when the Pi wouldn’t boot from the SSD while I was out of the country.

We don’t have high bandwidth demands so any decent OpenWRT router works fine and supports both Adguard Home and Wireguard. What I really like about putting WG in particular on the router is that if the router is up, WG is working, and the routers come back up without fail after every power outage. A 2nd Wireguard instance still runs on my Pi but since switching to WG on the router a year ago there hasn’t been a reason to even connect to it.

My problems with the Pi had me looking for other solutions and I ended up with a mini Dell laptop running Debian. (Can’t easily run WG on it due to some software conflicts.) It alleviates the need for a UPS and runs for 6+ hours if the power goes out, rather the minutes provided by my small UPS.

One of these days I’ll find a bogus reason to talk myself into upgrading the router with more powerful hardware. Mikrotik looks like a great option and I’ll take a look at RouterOS. Thanks for the info.

Besides adding a UPS, how do you deal with power failures? Are you somewhere where they’re not much of a problem?

In my experience mini computers don’t handle power failures nearly as well as purpose-built hardware.

After several power failures the SSD on my Raspberry Pi became so corrupted it wouldn’t boot, and I was 250 miles away at the time and lost access to my home network for weeks. Overlay file systems work but are a PITA to maintain. By contrast my routers have never had a problem even with repeated power failures, so instead of relying on the Pi I’ve moved my DNS and Wireguard servers to my router.

I’ve been using DuckDNS on a multiple platforms for a couple of years and it works great. Never had a problem.