Recommended settings for efficient heating and hot water with a heat pump? How to reduce energy use.

Hi @Bev I think we're all still learning. You'll see from the COP thread that we're all currently trying to reduce the number of times the pump turns on and off to increase efficiency, though getting this right may be a bit of trial and error.

Immersion should generally only be being used when it's absolutely needed to raise the temperature more than the ASHP is able to. When you say it's on, is that just the fused switch on the control panel that's on (which is ok) or do you think it's actually operating? Do you have a separate energy read out for the immersion on the consumer unit? My immersion has used 20kWh since May.

If you have cheap overnight electricity I'd set the tank to heat up during this time and then only set it to top up the tank temperature during the day if it falls below a certain temperature. Heating it in one go could be more efficient.

Here's my set up. All switches on!

The illuminated digital display shows the separate use by the immersion and back-up heater.

Hi @Bev 

That COP value isn’t great. I’ve just got back to my installer because I’m not happy. It’s a factor of how efficiently the pump converts the electricity to heat, it should be above 3 on our new systems. It’s really down to the installers to get this sorted, a few of us are tweaking setting on the heat curve but unless you are comfortable doing this it should be left to the installer.

Regarding the smart meter, it won’t affect your FIT payment. My system is the same age as yours, I have a smart meter but my FIT stays the same, they still assume you export 50% even though it’s measured. It’s part of the FIT contract that is remains as agreed for the 25 years. Those who had panels installed after the FIT scheme ended would be using the export functionality of the smart meter. If you currently have the very old style meter with a wheel (you aren’t supposed too, I should have been upgraded when the panels were fitted, but maybe keep 🤫 about it), then the downside to moving to a smart meter is it won’t go backwards when you are exporting to the grid.

My new installer, Reina group, replied very quickly and are coming out to investigate soon. They will know what you are talking about, COP is a fundamental term when it comes to heat pump operation and we have meters fitted as part of the trial so that it can be measured accurately. I don’t know whether OVO, @Jess_OVO, are monitoring the COP variance of the different systems, if they were they’d pick up systems like ours and highlight them for investigation and save us from extortionate winter bills. I’m being a bit unfair though, as I know a number of systems are being revisited after the Northern Gas catastrophe and remedial work is being carried out.

My wording to the installer was along the lines of:

The performance of my pump is fairly poor. COP of 1.9 since installed, 2.45 for the last month. I know you are busy with remedial work but I’d really appreciate you trying to figure out why my system isn’t work as well as it could. Other trialists of the OVO forum are reporting COP values well in excess of 3.0, please can you investigate. 

My original installer, Northern Gas, didn’t care. Reina group do care which provides some reassurance. 

This is mine. Important to have that white box on the left as well

Hi @Bev I also have all the controls in the loft, a right pain ! However, I also have a LAN adapter which is connected to my router via an Ethernet cable, so I can use the Daikin Residential Controller app. If you trawl through the COP thread on here I’ve explained more.

Mine was a £7.50 day yesterday  Radiators came on twice and bath used once.

How’s everyone else doing?

@Jess_OVO sorry I’m quiet at the moment Jess, it’s Christmas and we run our own shop, I’m happy to say we’re manic so this has all taken a bit of a back seat. Will be back soon, especially as I’ve just heard we’ve got a grant to help finance a battery pack which could be fitted as early as January :) Sorry for the radio silence

This topic is now in the public Smart Home category and ready to help anyone interesting in decarbonising their home’s heating with a heat pump. 

Please be advised, some comments in this thread refer to trials that OVO are involved in, with households of a trialist getting an air source heat pump. We have a private forum area for trialists to discuss their heat pump. If you’re a trialist and you want access, let us know here:

Also, @Bev, what about that grant? 

:)

@Tim_OVO  sorry I’ve just realised I never updated as I promised I would! So…

We live above the shop, so our business runs from our building, a house which is over 100 years old. We are situated in the South East of England and were able to secure a business grant of 40% of a battery pack installation through Locase (Low Carbon in the South and East) to enable our business to reduce its carbon footprint but, of course, it helps the house too.

We went ahead and had a 5.8kW AlphaESS Smile battery installation in December. It’s a modular system, so we can add more batteries later if we want, it’s simple to do after the main install is in place and we will probably end up doing that. As I’ll have mentioned before, we’ve had a 3.32kW Solar Panel installation for 9 years. But we had a combi boiler before the heat pump trial (our installation was July last year) so we haven’t been able to have an IBoost before. We’ve now got one of those too. And we’ve just had the MEL Cloud fitted to monitor the Heat Pump, we were struggling because all the gear was in the loft but now we can see exactly what’s going on… or we will once we’ve got our heads around it!

The reason for all this sudden action is because, if I’m honest, the cost of running the heat pump shocked us a bit. Whilst we have to look at our energy costs across the year to really see the difference, the winter costs of running it are very high. So we’d thought about doing all this things, and the heat pump plus the sudden energy price rises focused our minds on getting everything in place.

The battery pack enables us to charge at Economy 7 rates overnight and then use that energy to run the shop and house during the day, which obviously dramatically decreases the heat pump’s running costs. The IBoost will automatically heat the water in the tank when the battery storage is full, rather than exporting that energy to the Grid, so enabling us to store more ‘free’ energy in effect. We are going to try to not use the battery for part of the mornings so the IBoost heats the water after we have showered - obviously the sun will need to be shining for that to work - and see how that goes. Without boring you to tears, there can be issues when you have a battery pack and an IBoost with a conflict over which device gets the solar, but we think we understand how to avoid that problem.

We love the heat pump, it works well for us, the running costs were a bit of a shock but the things we’ve done mean those costs are now dramatically reduced. Obviously we’ve shelled out cash now for all this work, but the energy costs have gone up massively since we started all this and continue to climb in a very scary way with no end in sight.  We should get these investment costs back as the installation costs haven’t (yet) gone up at the same rate as energy costs.

So in short: after 9 years of investing in this technology (plus being lucky enough to get on the heat pump trial of course) we now have solar panels, battery storage, an electric car, a heat pump and an iBoost. So if this environment stuff doesn’t work (as a couple of my friends are still saying): we’re in deep trouble :) Shout if you want to know anything, if I can answer - I’m not so technical, as some of you will already know - I will. 

Hi

sorry I’ve obviously never mentioned the EV before. No idea how, we’ve had EVs for 5 years! We’re on our third Nissan Leaf because they keep taking them back and giving us more updated ones via offers we can’t refuse (the market for second hand EVs seems to be very good at the moment).
We’re not turning the battery on until around 11 in the morning. That’s because we didn’t opt for a large battery to begin with, it’s quite a small installation. So it will last for a limited period at this time of year when lights are used in the morning, in the early evening and we just generally use more energy electricity than we would in the summer. Because our home and our business are all under one roof, we tend to have quite a high usage during business hours. We’re keen for the battery to last as long as possible in the darker evenings, just in case there’s a power outage (our village is quite prone to them and we have an autistic son who hates the dark). However we’ve just got a quote to increase the battery capacity, we knew we would probably do this but the cost of adding on is the price of the battery plus a bit of labour as opposed to the rather larger job of installing the whole system from scratch. And with energy prices going up constantly as they seem to be, being able to charge a larger battery with cheap energy at night means we’ll recoup that cost pretty quickly.  The battery comes with an app so you can control when it exports to the house, when it charges and all that. It’s very cool, you can see what power we’re generating, what power we’re taking from the grid and when we’re exporting to the grid too, I’ll try to submit a screenshot.  We’ve decided to maximise the amount of time the battery exports to the house in the afternoons and evenings until we increase its capacity because, if/when we have a power outage in the evening, we’d like to have lights if nothing else.  

Makes sense to me, thanks for explaining that thought process, @Bev!

It’s a great feature to have the battery in a modular design, where you can add more capacity if and when it’s needed. 

Grid exporting is also a great upside - is that part of the Smart Export Guarantee?

If you haven’t heard already, there’s an online event next week with 3 heat pump guest speakers:

You’d be more than welcome to come along and listen to their insights and advice about life with a heat pump. One of them has heat storage! You can also ask questions on the night or in advance here. 

Hope to see you there!

At the top of that page, there should be an Attend button. If you click that, it’ll register you and give you the URL you’ll need. :)

If you still get stuck, I’m also happy to send you a PM with the details.