Automating/Controlling an electric wall heater.

[paulca]

I have a fancy wall heater.  It has a vertical 1 or 2kW fan heater in the back and a glass fronted fake fire effect on the front.  I want to take remote control of it from software.

The heater is "digital", ie, it's all soft switches.  There are two buttons, Flame and Heat.  Flame cycles the flame effect through low, mid high, off.  Heat cycles through Fan, Low, High.  The IR remote also has a "Power off" button. 

When you power it, it beeps, but defaults to the off state.  The press buttons on the side of the fire will accept input but the remote wont until you press the "Power" button the remote.

The options open to me are:

1.
IR Sender to control it.  This has the advantage that I don't need to do anything to the fire.  It has the downside that in order to get the heater into a known state before I start sending IR codes I have to power cycle it with a relay.  It consumes 8A on high and I have a 10A relay.

2.
Open it up.  Tap the push buttons with some wires.  Drill a hole, bring the wires out of the metal case and put a Wifi microcontroller and a few mosfets to "press" the buttons.  I believe I still need to power cycle the heater to get to a known state.  (There is no way to know what state the "Heat" function is in that I can see, so power cycle returns that to a known OFF state).

vvvv