Varimax H Series, H4-12 ASHP

[Barney12]

Hi All

 

Does anyone have any expedience of this particular model ASHP? Its sold by Earth Save Products (ESP) but I assume it will simply be a re-badged unit from someone.

Price and performance seems to stack up but I'm a bit wary of paying good  money for a product which would only be warranted by a small company. At least with Samsung, Mitsubishi et all you've got some reassurance of warranty cover.

 

http://www.earthsaveproducts.com/product/varimax-4-12-inverter/

 

https://www.greenworks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Varimax-Brochure-V4.pdf

 

Edited June 18, 2017 by Barney12

[Jeremy Harris]

It's almost certainly Chinese, or been made from mainly Chinese sub-assemblies, I suspect, so getting hard info from anywhere other than ESP may well be difficult.  I've found that searching around on the Chinese sales sites, like Aliexpress, for images of units will often show whether something may originate from China, as there often seem to be a large number of different outlets for the same looking product.

 

The control board is made by Carel Electronic (Suzhou) Co Ltd, in Suzhou, China, for example, which is a good clue.

 

It may well be fine, but I suspect you'd be relying on a single source of support, spares etc, as support from the Chinese OEM may well be challenging.

Edited June 18, 2017 by JSHarris

[Barney12]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

It's almost certainly Chinese, or been made from mainly Chinese sub-assemblies, I suspect, so getting hard info from anywhere other than ESP may well be difficult.  I've found that searching around on the Chinese sales sites, like Aliexpress, for images of units will often show whether something may originate from China, as there often seem to be a large number of different outlets for the same looking product.

 

The control board is made by Carel Electronic (Suzhou) Co Ltd, in Suzhou, China, for example, which is a good clue.

 

It may well be fine, but I suspect you'd be relying on a single source of support, spares etc, as support from the Chinese OEM may well be challenging.

 

Thanks that confirms what I expected. Not having a main brand warranty for service and parts is a big turn off for me. 

[Jeremy Harris]

It would be for me, too.  I did take a risk when buying our Glowworm ASHP, because Glowworm seemed to have pulled out of the market, but the price was good and I looked upon it as an acceptable risk, thinking that a well-established company like Glowworm would almost certainly be able to provide legacy product support. 

 

As it turned out, the risk was justified, as the unit is really just a badge-engineered Carrier, and Carrier are the inventors of these things, have been in business for a century or so, and still make the same base model, so spares are not going to be a problem for the foreseeable future, I think.

Edited June 18, 2017 by JSHarris

[Alexphd1]

I do not think I would chance it either unless it was a steal! There is a few good ones just now on ebay.

[dogman]

I have its baby brother( or sister) and have no problems with it or the ongoing service. I know a few others on here have kit from them and are happy. Yes as @JSHarris states they are made partially made in China like a lot of other manufacturers. I have an advantage in that i live a few miles from them so can go and see them at their warehouse. They used to have a stand at Swindon where you can see their products.

I am likely to use this model myself as it is good value. (not ebay value though). I know they swap out a lot of the service parts for uk/eu spec items. If i have time i will take a photo of mine with the lid off. 

[Jeremy Harris]

I agree that they are a competent company; I had a long conversation about trying to find a way to integrate an Ecocent into our house when I was still at the early design stage, and chatted to them at Swindon about it as well.  I also looked at the ASHP unit they had running outside, and it seemed OK.

 

One issue I did have was that their documentation was not great.  Some had elements that had been copied from other manufacturers installation manuals (Genvex for example) and there were a lot of figures that were hard to put into any form that allowed a comparison with other products. 

 

Certainly some other manufacturers have manufacturing plants in China, a great deal of Apple products are made there, for example.  However, controlling quality when importing from Chinese manufacturers that are not under the direct control of a big multinational company is damned difficult.  I've a friend who makes custom bicycles, and most of the components are made in Taiwan or sometimes China, and he is constantly fighting a battle with suppliers over quality.  He agrees a specification and price, then finds that the manufacturer changes the specification and offers a reduced price, after shipping the goods.  In China this is considered to be good business practice - price matters more than sticking to a specification, and a supplier gains face by offering a lower price than agreed.  To try and overcome the problem, he now employs, part time, an ex-pat American living over there to inspect every batch of parts before they are shipped, just to be sure they are the right specification.

 

I'm sure that ESP try their best to control quality, but they are a relatively small company, and I suspect they are dealing with the same sort of issues as my friend who makes bikes.  It's a manageable problem, but there is still that long term support concern.  When the Chinese OEM decides to change the design, because one of their big customers demands it, then there is a very good chance that support for the previous design will just disappear.  This happened to me with a Chinese lathe I bought from a UK supplier, who badges it as his own product.  The Chinese company changed the design of the cross slide, without telling him.  I ordered a replacement from the UK supplier and it was completely different.  The UK supplier then opened up several crates in his warehouse and found that all were to a different design.  At that point we had a bit of a falling out, and the only way I managed to get my lathe fixed was to find the Chinese company (called Weiss, not very Chinese sounding!) and ask them to help.  They managed to find an old stock cross slide and ship to to me, but it was a lot of hassle and the lathe was out of action for several months.

 

As long as people are comfortable with the trade off between price and possible long term support issues, then there's no problem.  I regularly buy stuff from China, and accept that there may be little or no effective long term support; I'm happy to just bin anything that breaks or attempt to repair it myself.  One advantage is that you can buy just about any spare you want from China, if you can track down the OEM, and are prepared for the delay and a bit of hassle.

[dogman]

There is an advantage with companies like Earthsave. They do not lock down their software or hide features. You have access to all the settings in the controller and they are more than happy to talk you through any set-up issues individual to your installation.

My Carel controller has one button to switch it to cooling mode. I do have to agree their installation manuals are a bit Chinglish. (is that how you spell it)

[Jeremy Harris]

Leaving firmware wide open seems commonplace on Chinese products, I think, and stems from the way that Chinese companies freely copy each others products - the concept of intellectual property rights in China is pretty loose. 

 

I recently bought a cheap (£12) Chinese WT3020F minirouter, and found that there was a hard coded admin account with a well-known password, that allowed Telnet access to the device firmware.  It took a few minutes to flash it with OpenWRT and customise it for what I wanted.  The Chinese manufacturer in this case has made most of the information to do this readily available, as they had copied it from another manufacturer, anyway. 

 

The same goes for the Chinese wireless IP camera I was playing with yesterday.  It uses a standard SoC board, that has a µSD card slot on it.  There was no information at all on the camera, and nothing to suggest that it had an internal recording capability. Half an hour of poking around revealed that it was dead easy to add a µSD card inside the unit and enable motion recording.  The system firmware is Linux-based, and you can pretty much configure it as you wish, but there's no mention of any of this from either the supplier or manufacturer.

Edited June 19, 2017 by JSHarris

[PeterW]

1 hour ago, dogman said:

There is an advantage with companies like Earthsave. They do not lock down their software or hide features. You have access to all the settings in the controller and they are more than happy to talk you through any set-up issues individual to your installation.

My Carel controller has one button to switch it to cooling mode. I do have to agree their installation manuals are a bit Chinglish. (is that how you spell it)

 

I'd partially disagree with that !!

 

The reason that a lot of manufacturers lock out admin functions is that they use the same systems in multiple regions - for example, the defrost and temp curve for Scandinavia will be different to that for Japan. If you let a customer "play" with the settings then you can potentially cause an issue with the system that could result in a warranty claim.

 

This is even more important where a system is being used for RHI payments as if you lock out the ability for cooling for example which is not part of the RHI, you then also void the RHI agreement. 

 

On the whole I would say less than 0.01% of consumers fully understand the functions of their own boiler controls, let alone the detailed settings !! You wouldn't access the admin settings on a gas boiler, so why would you want to on an ASHP..?

[dogman]

5 hours ago, PeterW said:

 

On the whole I would say less than 0.01% of consumers fully understand the functions of their own boiler controls, let alone the detailed settings !! 

Fully agree Peter. I am in that group so my pump is as set by Earthsave when it was commissioned

 

However i think most of us on here are looking to use ASHP to cool and need that access unless its simple such as mine. long press switches to cooling mode