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

Hi @dr_dongle, 

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I’m enjoying the discussion on the thread and think anyone interested in investing in a heat pump system is going to benefit from seeing your journey and decision process! @juliamc has also made some fantastic contributions, which leads to some fascinating comparisons between how you can set this up in a way to benefit you.

@ChristopherS_OVO lol it’s a journey all right and for the time being this is quite enough green technology to be going on with.

First off the SensoNET VR921 was a red herring since it is unsupported and using it will probably drive my ASHP into a state of deep depression and trigger plagues of locusts.

The electricity meter in the installation appears to be a wall ornament. It doesn’t connect to anything else and my electricity supplier will talk to the heat pump controller and not it.  I think it is there as a validated check on the figures provided by the heat pump controller in the event of a dispute. 

The system has been working in hybrid mode. There is a parameter - the bivalent point - which is the outside temperature below which the ASHP reckons that it can’t heat the house by itself. By setting this a bit high we forced the little oil boiler to cut in. I’d quite like to be able to monitor when that happens but there’s no obvious way except DIY - I’ve strapped a WiFi thermometer to the boiler flow pipe and I can log that.

Right now I’m still battling the myVaillant app or the MyVaillant gateway, take your pick. 

To recap: Vaillant provide a wall unit to control basic functions such as the desired temperature and heat curve and display some key parameters. They also provide a WiFi Internet gateway and a phone app. This does everything the wall unit does but also displays useful performance figures and graphs over time.  Except that my app doesn’t. It should, but it and the gateway aren’t talking properly (which is why I thought the app was dumb). My worry is that if they aren’t talking properly then what chance does OvO have of talking to the system?  The issues may be unrelated but if not then I could be in for a very frustrating 4-way discussion between OvO, Vaillant, the installer (potentially) and myself. Until then I just have to put with the Electricity Bills From Hell.

That’s it for now I think. Let’s see if I can get OvO’s Heat Pump Plus sales team’s attention.

@ChristopherS_OVO This is for anyone setting up a Vaillant ASHP app from Android. I think I found what caused me a frustrating couple of days.

When it is flashing blue the gateway broadcasts a temporary network. During setup the app connects to that, initialises the gateway then connects back to the house network.
The gateway then drops the temporary network and connects to the house network itself. The app prompts you to make the necessary changes *but* at the same time Android puts up dialogue boxes saying “Connect”. Those dialogue boxes should be IGNORED and instead the network changes should be made via WiFi Setup within Android.

My setup looks more hopeful now.
 

It sounds like you’re getting quite good at investigating these issues, @dr_dongle. I’m thrilled to hear you made progress and got to the bottom of what was causing it. 

I imagine the controller doesn’t have Bluetooth capability, so instead, it creates a temporary network to establish new connections. Your device prompts you to join this network, but this should be done through the system settings, as the prompts aren’t familiar with the connection type and are hitting a dead end. That’s handy information for anyone on Android who is going through the setup for themselves. 

Let us know how this impacts your setup and what improvements you find.

@ChristopherS_OVO lol I wish. Vaillant app support have come back with a little more detail about the process but reckon that if I gave the app the correct permissions (which I thought I had) it should have been seamless. This sort of thing can depend on all kinds of factors so it could go either way for others. Apparently iPhones manage it better.

OvO tell me they are sorting some technical details about Heat Pump Plus but hope to take me forward very soon.

@ChristopherS_OVO Well a week on and not much to report - the heat pump system is churning away, the electricity meter is whirring away happily and I am having to admit to a total defeat.

I have given up on the app - right now it is showing no information at all and there are no working controls. There is something very wrong with this app, my configuration, my hardware or some combination of all of those. Even if it is still trying to load data then (design suggestion) the fields and screens should still be there but greyed out, not just random permutations of screens, links and data that appear and disappear. I still don't know what a working system should look like and this has taken up way too much of my time.  I'll use HomeAssistant for some of this and the wall unit for the rest.

The good news is that I am assured that my system is responding correctly to everything except the app so I await OvO connecting customers to the new tariff with anticipation.

@ChristopherS_OVO It started working! At about 4:15 pm today the app suddenly started displaying energy graphs, the stuck features unstuck themselves, things like the number of hours are now going up and a few extra information fields appeared.

Someone obviously fixed something for which congratulations and thanks.

Next I need to try and understand the data ...

I thought this was worth posting - the system is set to a desired temperature of 20C between 07:00 and 21:30 then setback to 15 C. You can clearly see it doing that and just ticking over overnight.  The lounge dropped from 19.6 to 17.8 C over the setback period. (this is from HomeAssistant).

@ChristopherS_OVO Just an update for no particular reason … ASHP has been in for 6 weeks now, seems much longer. Teething problems seem (touchwood) to have resolved themselves, With the warmer weather heat pump is barely ticking over - between 3 and 8 kWh/day for heating and hot water and a heating COP between 5 and 7. I won’t have a proper indication of performance till the autumn. Unfortunately the first two weeks we were running (a cold April) coincided with having no energy data except the meter reading but there is a suggestion there that the electricity demand will go up sharply when the temperatures go down.

OvO send me periodic bulletins - they’re still sorting technical issues with Vaillant but expect to go live with the heat pump tariff very soon.

In terms of how the house feels we run it from about 7:00 till 9:00 then on setback overnight.  The house feels different because the temperature range from warmest to coolest is less than with the conventional central heating and we quite like it.  As I say though, time will tell when it gets cold.

@ChristopherS_OVO Another random update .. principal events to report are that the teething troubles with the app and data collection seem to have been sorted and that we are now seeing heat pump credits on our electricity bills. Just now they’re not huge because the system is hardly on but come the winter that will change with a vengeance. Thank you to everyone at OvO and Vaillant for their efforts here - this is exactly what is needed to encourage people to adopt this technology.