How could I adjust my Air Source Heat Pump settings in order to reduce my electricity bill?

Yes one of us can help but we need to know more from you first. For starters what make of heat pump is it? Please post photos of your outdoor unit and the controls you have indoors, and your hot water cylinder.

Thank you for your response.  Here is a snip of the settings.  We have turned it down to these settings this week.

It is Daikin Altherma ASHP EPGA160V 

There isn’t a hot water cylinder as it is all in the boiler casing.

Hey ​@gailrobinson 

One of our community members, juliamc, has left some really helpful questions here in order for the community to better help suggest what you can do to change the settings to make the most out of your system.

If you could provide some more information, that’d be really helpful.😊

We’ve also got lots of other helpful topics across the Forum on heat pumps, including other user experiences that may be helpful here too:

My apologies, ​@gailrobinson 

Hopefully ​@juliamc and the community might have a few suggestions now based on this.

The info is a little sparse unfortunately .. the graphic tends to show current conditions rather than settings.

Heres our graphic as of today 

Your hot water needs to be set higher than 43 degrees otherwise you might have problems (it might be set higher but 43 is a current temperature).

The two areas underneath will be looking at flow temperatures. You normally need to set up a weather compensation curve which then sets your flow temperatures depending on outside temperature.

Your scheduled settings will also impact your system efficiency. Heat pumps need to maintain temperature rather than be on/off like a gas boiler. Our schedule is set at 20 deg during the day (4 am to 10:30pm) and 19 degrees overnight. This means that the heat pump never has to significantly raise the temperature of the house fabric when outside temperatures require that to happen. It seems counterintuitive if you’ve not run a heat pump before but it’s important for efficiency and will result in lower bills.

We're almost at the end of our first year with a heat pump and have been pleasantly surprised by the higher temperatures overall (throughout the home) and lower bills compared to the previous year - even with increases in energy charges (our unit is also a Daikin)

The symbols on your screen don’t show a controller ​@gailrobinson ? I’m not familiar with that ! BP’s and mine both have the Madoka “room sensor” which you can see displayed on BP’s screen with that symbol alongside the current room temperature of 21 degrees. I can see your system is set up with two zones, both being underfloor heating. Is the heating reaching a comfortable temperature that you’re happy with, and do you know how it’s controlled ? Is it using a Weather Dependant curve ? Are you running the heating to a schedule and when do you heat the hot water ?

Is this a new system just installed or have you inherited it with the house ? How long have you been using it for ?

We don’t have any thermostat controllers in any rooms and it has been set up with flow and return temperatures on a curve dependent upon the outside temperature.  However we don’t know whether we have a reduced temperature at night or not.  We can’t seem to find out.  It was installed when we converted a stone barn 4 years ago.   The hot water refreshes itself every Wednesday morning.  

Do you have the WiFi adapter installed ​@gailrobinson ? If you do, you can set and control a schedule with the Daikin ONECTA app.

If not, you should still be able to look at your settings via the controller you pictured earlier.

It will be difficult to help much further without more information on settings/schedules etc

Taking a slighly different tack, with an average outside temperature of about 8C my detached house with reasonably good insulation needs 48kWh of heating a day. With a COP of 3 that is 16kWh of electricity which is about 670 watts continuous.

Over the heating season I would use about 10,000kWh heat, 3,333kWh electricity costing about £850. Are those figures anything like yours?

Peter

Our energy use for January was 1858.636 kwh at 23.87p, 903,427 kwh at 25.17p = £671.05 plus standing charge of £15.80 totalling £686.85 plus £34.34 VAT = £721.19.  It was a  cold month, but you can see why I want to get the cost down.  We only have electricity, no gas in our property.

For my house with a total floor area of 130 sq m my January cost was £175. That is £1.34 per sq metre. What does your equivalent cost work out to be? 

It might be your high costs are related to the size of the building and the insulation values of the walls in which case your system may be working ok but there may be a way to make it work a bit better.

Peter 

Sorry. A few more questions:

Where are you ? What tariff are you on ? 

Would you say the house was too warm ? Are your two zones actually upstairs (33 deg flow) and downstairs (29 deg flow) ? Maybe your bedrooms are downstairs ? You could reduce the flow temperatures a little, bedrooms are usually targeted at 18 deg room temp and living rooms at 21 deg room temp.

What temperature are you heating the hot water to ? Do you have it on Schedule only, Schedule and reheat, or Reheat only ? Do you ever run out of hot water ? Reheat only is often reckoned to be the more expensive option. If scheduled what time is that set for ?

I presume you mean the Wednesday refresh of the hot water is the disinfection cycle - you could switch that off*. That would save you something on the bill. We haven’t run a disinfectant cycle for a few years now.

*You need to be in installer mode to get to that setting: password 5678 and it’s in the Tank menu.

(Sorry to end sentences with a preposition ​@Firedog )

I am sorry I can’t answer these questions, but think we need to get an engineer out to it, give it a service and sort the settings out.  No we don’t ever run out of hot water.    Does anyone know a Daikin engineer that can cover the Disley, Stockport, Cheshire area?  Thank you all for your help, I will let you know how we get on.

Just going by the fact that you say it’s a converted barn it sounds a lot bigger than my house so your costs will be proportionately higher, however, a visit from an engineer might not go amis.

You could try looking here from the Daikin web page. Hope that goes well.

https://www.daikin.co.uk/en_gb/residential/inspiration/articles/let-daikin-find-a-heat-pump-installer-near-you.html

Peter

Have I ever remarked on anything of the sort? I’d be just as likely to write “That is the sort of language up with which I will not put.”

Or to quote my ten-year-older sister complaining about toddler Firedog’s choice of bedtime story, “What did you pick that book to be read to out of for?” (Incidentally, she was instrumental in getting me to read for myself long before my fourth birthday.)
  

[ETA just for fun]

The ‘Firedog’ epithet didn’t become a thing until half a century or so later, and that’s a story for another time. At this earlier stage in my curriculum vitæ, my sister usually called me ‘Boyling’ and referred to me as ‘the boyling foul’ - the only example of a triple metaphor I can think of at the moment.

If the heat pump has been in a while an engineer to visit would help alongside hopefully being able to show you more of the controls.

One other thing looking at the information you’ve given relates to your tariff. There are companies who offer tariffs targeted at heat pumps .. not sure what OVO offer these days. You may well find something better for your specific situation.

Have you looked at the Daikin Altherma Facebook group? Most of these specific groups have some very knowledgeable members who like to help, even if it's just to suggest a nearby engineer. The Heat Geek Facebook group is worth a look as well, a general ASHP group, lots of helpful members but they're also linked to approved heat geek installers and service engineers based all over the UK. There's many similar stories to yours on the heat geek group where  owners are frustrated at bills of a similar level over the last couple of months.