Power your heat pump for less with Heat Pump Plus + Vaillant

@dr_dongle I think this was the announcement Tim was talking about.

Hi Tim, not sure if you have already covered this elsewhere in the forum but (separate to my continuing interest in CT meters and 200A multi supplies) I have a Vaillant Ground Source Heat Pump too that is connected to single phase supply with a SMETS2 smart meter and the announcement of HeatPump Plus has caught my eye but I have a question about eligibility requirements.  

My Vaillant ground source heat pump is a flexotherm 5kW, it was new in 2021, and (according to Vaillant website) it can have can have a myVAILLANT connect internet gateway connected to it (although it doesn’t have this at the moment).  However the eligibility requirements for HeatPumpPlus seem restricted to a single type of Vaillant air source heat pumps only, is there any possibility that my flexotherm Ground Source HP could be eligible if I had the gateway installed? 

I’ll ask internally @ruralCTsupply and get back to you 🙂

thanks v much Emmanuelle, I have also contacted Vaillant myself as well as I am interested to hear from them if there is a technical difference (apart from the obvious) between their aroTherm air source HPs and their flexoTherm ground source HPs that makes this possible with the aroTherms but not the flexoTherms

Hey @ruralCTsupply,

The response from the team:

I believe it’s a question about Ground source heat pumps. We are currently focused on monobloc air source heat pumps at the moment but we will review any compatibility options regularly to ensure that we’re serving as many customers as possible

@Tim_OvO After a lengthy period away from this group I can say that as of yesterday I have my heat pump system going.

To summarise: It is a retrofit to a 4 bedroom 1970-1990 single storey house off-grid for gas which was formerly heated with a 23 yr old 50-70 kW oil boiler. This generated about 10 tonnes of CO2 per annum which I felt I needed to do something about.

Because of the size of the house and difficulty in insulating it past the obvious measures the new system is a hybrid - a Vaillant 12 kW ASHP as the main source but with a much smaller condensing oil boiler to provide additional heat during really cold snaps. A number of radiators were replaced with three-panel ‘K3’ radiators which are the same height, width and pipe location as the old ones but are deeper.

Of necessity I also got my supplier (OvO) to install a smart meter and my next job is to explore their variable tariff and how to use it to best effect. There is also a lot to learn about the new system which is controlled on a very different principle than the old one.

The old system was controlled by a Hive controller which I’ve left on but just to provide convenient access to some smart TRVs. in the new system these don’t have a lot to do but it does mean we can have individual room scheduling and they deal with a quirk in the old system which I’ll not bore you with. 

As of today the new system seems to be working - I don’t remotely understand it all but that will come. The pipework is a sight to behold - those of you who remember the pipes at the start of the Monty Python episodes will get the general idea.

Part of the issue was that the installers needed to bring the 1970+ pipework up to date and quite a lot has changed since then.

Anyway, I’m off on the Great Green Heating Adventure and happy to chat about it and what I’ve learned if anyone’s interested.

@dr_dongle sounds like a great system.  Where are you and who were your installers ? Have you done this through the Heat Geek arrangement with OVO ? 
It would be good to see some photos of it all !!

I don’t know much about the Hive controls but I’ve read that scheduling individual rooms lowers the efficiency.

@juliamc If this is the best forum then some photos are a must - it is actually very simple - for heating the ASHP feeds a buffer tank from one side and the oil boiler from the other and then the heat pump heats the water by itself but by the time the pipes have crawled over each other the result is a sight to behold.  I’m in the countryside near Kinross. The heat pump side was done by IMS in Perth and the oil boiler was done by a good local plumber so I have continuity. Not Heat Geek but IMS have been doing heat pumps for I think they said 18 years. For all that, I think I’m a very early adopter for this sort of system and everyone is interested and learning a lot. 

The room scheduling is really just the main bedroom - we prefer it cool at night but warmer to get up to. That’s easy with the smart TRV and one room shouldn’t affect the system too much.

The hybrid system is complicated and expensive but there was really no other way of guaranteeing heat all year round - two heat pumps or a much bigger one could have needed a three phase supply. There are advantages in redundancy and if power cuts became a problem (we do get them) then the oil system could in theory be run off a generator.

@juliamc 

As promised! The ASHP is behind the wall to the right. The hot water tank and the house proper is off to the left. The tub is the buffer tank. The boxes on the wall are (L-R) an electricity meter, the main heat control and a wiring centre. At bottom is a pump taking boiler condensate into the house grey-water pipes. Yet to go in is the pipe insulation and the Internet interface.

@dr_dongle Thats tremendous. Great to see all that pipework and totally Monty Pythonesque - I can almost see a giant foot coming through the ceiling…

Does the Vaillant give you a figure for COP on the controller screen ?