BenY

This is what i was most concerned about. Thanks I think that's a good idea, something made out of wood would certainly look better unless I can find something in matt black plastic to tie in with the heat pump design. Hopefully eventually the plants will be bigger than the heat pump so It won't really matter. The exhaust and the intake are on opposite sides so I don't think that will be an issue. I watched the video, yes very strange result they got. Here's the link in case anyone interested. Thanks everyone for the replies. I think I will get on with finding something to fit or making something myself.

Vaillant don’t appear to make a deflector.

Yes the pic is an example from the manufacturer of the deflector. Not my garden.

The location of my ASHP was a bit of a nightmare and places it could be put were very limited. I live in a terraced house where the entirety of the rear at ground level is a sliding door and there was nowhere it could go on the front either. As a result it ended up in the garden a few metres away from the house against the side wall with a flower bed all around it. The idea being we would plant around it and hide it from view. This looks like it will work quite well but some of the plants have been killed over winter by the artic breeze from the exhaust fan. Do we have any thoughts on fitting a deflector to the exhaust fan to direct the air away from the plants? e.g. something like this: Ideally the air would be diverted up but given how cold it is compared to the outside air, it might just come straight back down again anyway? The diverter may restrict the flow of air in some way due to the change of direction that damages the heat pump and cause a warranty issue?

I have now managed to DIY my solar installation on the roof. In the end I managed to squeeze 8 panels on my flat roof in an East West configuration, 3.3kWp, using Enphase microinverters. The shading isn't as bad as it looks on the picture although I could have done without the satellite dish being right there. The Enphase install was very simple as both the DC cables from the panels and the AC cable they provide simply click into the microinverters. I might need to add some pigeon protection before they start nesting under the panels. Everything is working very nicely and I have had my G98 application approved by UK power Networks but they are now asking for commissioning documentation. My understanding is there is a G98 commissioning form to fill in and I need to provide them with an electrical diagram. Will this diagram suffice, I've seen examples and this seems ok? Also has anyone actually done this application with UK Power Networks specifically? They have an online portal for the application and I think you don't need to fill in a commissioning form as it's been replaced by their website. They haven't been clear in their communications exactly what they are asking for. Finally anything else I might have missed? Thanks

All my pipes are lagged yes and I have drainage on the fan coils. When I ran it at 8 degrees once there was a load of condensation in places especially the manifolds so I keep the temp higher now. I probably don't need the dew point monitoring I agree.

I'm using the vaillant dew point monitoring at the moment as well to ensure the flow temp isn't too cold

Not too complex at the moment. I'm just cooling a few rooms using the standard loxone intelligent room controller. I've set the temp it's trying to maintain at 24 degrees and loxone does the rest. I have fan coils for some rooms and i'm just using them. I haven't started cooling the slab yet.

A little update on cooling. I now have cooling working with external control on my vaillant. I'm using ebusd, loxberry ebus plugin and loxone to do this. Cooling can be controlled and the cooling target temperature set. I have some more experimenting to do with the settings but basically all good.

Thanks I've made an appointment with them to talk about it. I think once I've spoken to the DNO this is hopefully where I will end up. Great thanks I'll have a look at that.

Ok so based on this I could install the inverter a few metres further away just outside my bathroom windows which will make access simpler and put a canopy on it. I think I'd still prefer to go for a microinverter solution if I can. I'll try and get more information about the power rating. Yes that's fine they will be indoors. OK that's great I can just treat them as two different systems and then hopefully make them work harmoniously with Loxone. OK so if I have 2 inverters one for then panels and one for the batteries, I could in theory export 7.2kW and hence I need to get permission to add this to the grid. Hmmm that's a pain and I don't imagine there is anyway to wire everything up to ensure the batteries cannot export?

Dear Forum. I'm looking to do a new solar install and add some battery storage as well. Some background. I live in a mid terrace house which is four storeys high with a flat roof. I've just completed a complete retrofit on the house with a 5kW ASHP, lots of insulation, good airtightness etc. I kind of half planned a solar install at the beginning of the project (January 2020) but didn't put much effort into it. I realise this was a big mistake and I've left myself with a heap of unknowns that I can't seem to find answers to. Hopefully the forum can help. I got my electrician to install a thickish cable (6mm2 cores) from the roof to the consumer unit in the basement telling him it'd need to cope with 5kW max @ 240v and the cable runs around 10m distance. I had a quote from pluginsolar which suggested using microinverters so this cable seemed to be the right decision for my install. I can only fit 7 large (2.3m x 1.3m max) panels on my roof and the realistic max output was ~3kW. 7x445W panels. In addition some of the panels would be closer to my roof parapet walls (<1m high) than is ideal so would suffer from shading at different times of day/year again pointing to microinverters being ideal. What I didn't take into account even back then was my roof buildup might be a problem. I have a compact roof design, insulated below the roof deck (between the joists) with wool and above the deck with PIR panels (150kPa compressive strength). As part of the calculations for the roof design, it was recommended not to install a wooden layer over the top of the PIR panels and just to glue the EPDM roof covering direct to the insulation which we have done. I also didn't at the time consider a battery solution as I didn't really see the need, in summer I could use any excess power from the PV to run the ashp in cooling mode and in winter I'm fairly sure there will never be any excess power. This was of course before the price of electricity went through the roof. I now don't have a place to install a normal inverter or for that matter any place to put the batteries except for in my utility room which is in the basement. Inconveniently this is not near the consumer unit (or the roof either) but at least is close to the main electricity supply, meter and isolator for the house. I've spoken to a couple of suppliers but I'm not getting any good answers on what system design I could have and my knowledge is still pretty limited. So this all raises a number of questions for me. 1. Firstly is it worth having batteries installed at all? I'm not really concerned about power cuts, my electricity service is buried and I can't remember an unplanned power cut in 15 years. I don't really have any historic power consumption data for the house btw, since we only moved in this June. If I switch to Octopus Go with 10kWh of batteries installed I'd save ~10 x £0.25 = £2.40 per day on my current electricity rate (£0.12 vs £0.36) by charging the batteries at night but given I'm using ~30kWh a day currently, the other 20kWh (@ £0.44) would cost me an extra £1.60 each day. A saving on a cold day of £0.80. In the summer, using PV to charge the batteries best case I could get and use 10kWh of free electricity from the batteries or £3.60 a day saving. Average this out (not very scientific I know) at £2.20 a day and you save £800 per annum. Cost of 10kWh battery install~ £5,000 (2 x 5kWh batteries + inverter + electrician) = 6 years payback. Not awful but I could be making bad assumptions anywhere in this calc? 2. The solar panels I can get have got more powerful/bigger and ITS recommended a 545W JA Solar panel which appears too powerful for any of the Enphase microinverters which top out at 460Wp (what is the lower case "p"? panel?) so would I need a normal inverter vs microinverters? Am I misreading the microinverter specs? https://enphase.com/en-gb/installers/microinverters/comparison 3. If I need a normal string inverter are there any waterproof ones I can install on the roof or could I install it 10m of cable away next to the consumer unit? If the inverter was in a cupboard would you hear it? Are they noisy enough to hear if you were sleeping next to the cupboard? My consumer unit is in a cupboard in the room we use when guests stay. 4. It's possible I'd need a second inverter for the batteries as cabling from the consumer unit location to the battery location might not be possible. Are there any manufactures who are set up for this double inverter scenario and if so who is best? 5. I have a loxone system so in theory I can control disparate systems easily enough as long as I can talk to them. Anyone got any experience in this area? 6. Will the strength of my roof be enough to support the solar panels which will need weighting down as there is nothing to fix the fames too without puncturing the waterproof roof and through 120mm of insulation to the ply. I've done a mounting report on the Van Der Valk calculator and it says the overall system would weight 600Kg but maximum point load would be 40kPa (vs 150kPa compressive strength of the roof insulation) so I'm pretty sure the roof would be ok? Thanks in advance for any comments.

I was looking around at various manufacturers and their methodology regards managing Delta T and optimisation of ASHP. This video from RED is very informative about their approach and how they control all the circulation pumps individually to ensure the perfect Delta T across the whole system and hence deliver maximum efficiency. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DSxhgVEuFs 19 Minutes in for the section on control. Also they have been invested in/purchased by octopus energy which to me is a good sign. https://octopus.energy/press/octopus-energy-invests-in-northern-irish-heat-pump-experts-to-build-thousands-of-heat-pumps-a-month/ https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/octopus-energy-acquires-heat-pump-manufacturer-red-in-move-to-create-model-t-moment-for-sector It looks to me ( a bit of a novice) that if you want a system that is planned and executed really well this might be a good option. Too late for me, I have a Vaillant with it's completely opaque and difficult to understand system

I've got both my ashp installer and my loxone installer to try but really there is little to no progress on either an update to their eebus integration or using modbus. They are probably talking to the wrong people but I also got feedback that there is a disconnect between Germany and the UK anyway so it's hard to make progress from the uk. I'm mailing jens.wichtermann@vaillant-group.com who's email is listed on the eebus announcment from a few years ago but I doubt it will help lol.

Oh I see, bad assumption on my part that you had used ebus. I really want to get some detailed info out of the vaillant but there seems to be no way to do that at the moment. All the ebus interfaces are out of stock. I'm currently doing the same for the heating. I think the vaillant eeBus implementation is terrible. So little data is provided it's almost pointless. It also occasionally ignores commands from my loxone system so I've had to configure an alerting system for when it gets out of sync! I've looked through the github repo for the ebusd templates and someone appears to have found the cooling commands necessary (https://github.com/john30/ebusd-configuration/pull/191) although they are not on the main code branch yet. (https://github.com/john30/ebusd-configuration/blob/master/ebusd-2.1.x/en/vaillant/15.700.csv) Given I might have to wait for another year to get ebus to work I've not looked into it any further but it does give me hope for an all singing all dancing ebus system in the future. p.s. New to the forum, I forgot to follow this topic so I didn't see your reply until just now.