Looks like the party is over....

[Gone West]

10 hours ago, marshian said:

Get your curve right

The problem is, who does that? To ensure it is correct would mean educating the masses about WC, who don't want to be educated about 'boring stuff'. As has already been said, finding professionals who can do it is difficult enough.

[JohnMo]

7 minutes ago, Gone West said:

The problem is, who does that? To ensure it is correct would mean educating the masses about WC, who don't want to be educated about 'boring stuff'. As has already been said, finding professionals who can do it is difficult enough.

If the contractor has done his heat loss calculation correctly he knows the what the WC curve will be. So only fine finding is needed.

 

If he was smart he would enable the second set point within the controller, this is normally controlled by a volt free contact. Set the calculated curve and add an additional degree to secondary set point. Add a monitored thermostat. If the secondary set point ever is called for the curve is too low, if house is too hot curve needs trimming back.

 

For the home owner they know no difference when second set point kicks in. House just stays stable.

 

All contractors should be returning to ensure system is working as intended and make any necessary adjustments. But many never do.

 

My old boiler has this ability and so does the heat pump.

[Roger440]

10 hours ago, marshian said:

 

You don't need to understand WC - It's really not hard

 

Houses lose heat

 

As the OAT drops the house heat loss increases

 

You need to put in more heat to maintain the house temp

 

WC just changes the flow temp with ref to the OAT to compensate for the losses based on OAT

 

Get your curve right and there is no change to the internal temp regardless of the OAT

 

Bingo house internal temps don't change because boiler / ASHP flow temps do

 

I understand it fully thanks,

 

You statement makes no sense though, you say there no need to understand it, then go onto explain it. I say again, theres no possibility of the average person understanding what you wrote, even if you could persude them to be interested. Which you wont.

[Roger440]

32 minutes ago, Gone West said:

The problem is, who does that? To ensure it is correct would mean educating the masses about WC, who don't want to be educated about 'boring stuff'. As has already been said, finding professionals who can do it is difficult enough.

 

Exactly. 

 

If its hard to find an installer that understands it, it merely proves that getting the general public to undertand is a lost cause.

 

Imagine how much better things would be if ALL installers actually understood it and set it up properly.

 

[Roger440]

17 minutes ago, JohnMo said:

If the contractor has done his heat loss calculation correctly he knows the what the WC curve will be. So only fine finding is needed.

 

If he was smart he would enable the second set point within the controller, this is normally controlled by a volt free contact. Set the calculated curve and add an additional degree to secondary set point. Add a monitored thermostat. If the secondary set point ever is called for the curve is too low, if house is too hot curve needs trimming back.

 

For the home owner they know no difference when second set point kicks in. House just stays stable.

 

All contractors should be returning to ensure system is working as intended and make any necessary adjustments. But many never do.

 

My old boiler has this ability and so does the heat pump.

 

The perfect world. Lovely.

 

Meanwhile back out in the real world you have the only only body involved essentially mandating over sizing, installers with little technical understanding, heat loss calculations that are entirely theorectical based on "guesses" of the performance of the various elememts of the house, and almost no chance of anyone "coming back" afterwards.

 

The latter is completely unrealistic.

 

This is only going to work when WC sorts itself out. That surely cannot be beyond the wit of man to achieve We can, as you observe, do it manually, so why cant we do it with a bit of software? It never ceases to amaze me how backwards the industry is.  Building generally.

 

 

[Roger440]

11 hours ago, JamesPa said:

They dont need a physics degree to turn a single temperature dial up or down, which is the control on mine.  Not that it needs changing often, just leave it alone and it does its thing.

 

I don't have or need batteries, the business case doesn't stack up for me and there is no environmental benefit so far as I can tell.  There would be a convenience benefit so, when prices come down a bit I may, but not yet.

 

Which is fine, nobody here is trying to sell you a heating system.   

 

Like most things, including boilers, they have some good points and some not so good points.  You obviously recognise the not so good points, all I (and others) are doing is setting out some of the good points so the discussion is better informed.  Sometimes we dont know what we dont know!.  Somehow, however, I get the feeling that you don't want to hear anything good about heat pumps, only the bad.  That's also fine, you are entitled to block out things you don't want to hear.  However blocking things out doesn't change reality.

 

What I know is that mine is more comfortable, much more comfortable.  I also know why, and also why the same is highly likely to apply to many houses and that other people report similar.  I also know that I went as far as I could to make my previous system as comfortable as possible.

 

Sadly, as you often do, you like to acscribe a position to me which i dont take.

 

I was looking at a heat pump under the eco4 scheme as part of a whole house upgrade, whilst being very cautions of the fact its mostly done badly by grant harvesters. But i think ive found a "good one".

 

Sadly for me, but of huge benefit to the taxpayer, it looks like the scheme will be canned by Rachael. 

 

So more than happy to have a heat pump, done properly. Why wouldnt i?

 

But, if i have to pay for it all from my own pockets, its the economics of the madhouse. Whilst im not in poverty, im also not a position to fritter away 5 figure sums on a whim. Ive got a heating system which is fine, only 6 years old, and is as cheap to run as anything else. Only a heatpump supported by solar (and maybe batteries) could be cheaper to run. But the capital cost simply rules it out. If you ignore capital cost, sure, ill have one tommorow, which is of course where i started this post.

 

So, im not against a heat pump, just not prepared to spend big, to replace a system that does the job perfectly. With a bit of TLC i can probably get another 10-15 years out of it at almost no cost beyond oil.

 

The only slight negative being i cannot fit WC to it. But that doesnt change the financial calculation to any extent.

[Oz07]

39 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

 

I understand it fully thanks,

 

You statement makes no sense though, you say there no need to understand it, then go onto explain it. I say again, theres no possibility of the average person understanding what you wrote, even if you could persude them to be interested. Which you wont.

I can just imagine trying to explain it to someone and using the acronym oat and them thinking im talking about porridge 😅 

[Oz07]

1 hour ago, Gone West said:

The problem is, who does that? To ensure it is correct would mean educating the masses about WC, who don't want to be educated about 'boring stuff'. As has already been said, finding professionals who can do it is difficult enough.

Half the plumbers i know wouldn't have a clue about how wc works and curves. One i know refers to wc as basically you tell the boiler what you want it to do and it just ignores you and does what it wants 🤣

[sharpener]

9 minutes ago, Roger440 said:

The only slight negative being i cannot fit WC to it. But that doesnt change the financial calculation to any extent.

 

I don't know if there are any aftermarket WC boxes but there certainly used to be.

 

My introduction to WC was ?late 1990s, we were doing a lot of work converting a house back from 3 flats and somehow I found out about the Danfoss Boiler Energy Manager, perhaps picked up a leaflet in a plumbers' merchant.

 

It monitored the return temp to the boiler and modulated it on and off according to the OAT. No proportional control but even so installing this saved about 1/3 off our gas bill with the original Ideal Mexico.

 

So when we moved to a smaller house in 2008 and then had a loft conversion done (!) I wanted WC but the only small boiler I could find with it was the Vokera Minute. Plumbers were subcontractors of the loft conversion firm and had never even heard of WC.

 

Nor did they think to lag the pipework under the suspended floor.

 

It seems not a lot has changed in the last 15 years...

[JohnMo]

26 minutes ago, Oz07 said:

Half the plumbers i know wouldn't have a clue about how wc works and curves. One i know refers to wc as basically you tell the boiler what you want it to do and it just ignores you and does what it wants

Sad reflection on the piss poor training we give to plumbers. Monkey see - monkey do, I am afraid.  Good at pipe bending though.

[JohnMo]

1 hour ago, Roger440 said:

The perfect world. Lovely.

 

Meanwhile back out in the real world you have the only only body involved essentially mandating over sizing, installers with little technical understanding, heat loss calculations that are entirely theorectical based on "guesses" of the performance of the various elememts of the house, and almost no chance of anyone "coming back" afterwards.

 

The latter is completely unrealistic.

 

This is only going to work when WC sorts itself out. That surely cannot be beyond the wit of man to achieve We can, as you observe, do it manually, so why cant we do it with a bit of software? It never ceases to amaze me how backwards the industry is.  Building generally.

Se my above post

[Beelbeebub]

Thing is, you really don't need to talk about Weather compensation. 

 

You just need a thermostat in the house that says what temp it is and what temp you would like it to be.

 

These days, it wouldn't take much on board machine learning to work out what the heat loss curve is for the building and the optimum flow temp for a given outside temp and requested inside temp. 

 

The only education required is to tell the user to not expect the rads to get scalding hot.  And that's on the installer anyway so as to avoid constant call backs "because my rads aren't heating up" 

[JamesPa]

 

2 hours ago, Roger440 said:

Sadly, as you often do, you like to acscribe a position to me which i dont take.

 

I was looking at a heat pump under the eco4 scheme as part of a whole house upgrade, whilst being very cautions of the fact its mostly done badly by grant harvesters. But i think ive found a "good one".

 

Well perhaps your posts have succeeded in confusing me.  So far as I can tell from what you have said above you see no advantage in having a heat pump, only disadvantage.  Yet you have/are investigating getting one?  I can only apologise for my confusion.

[JamesPa]

1 hour ago, JohnMo said:

Good at pipe bending though.

Not all sadly, far too many just throw in plastic push fit elbows.

[JamesPa]

41 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

Thing is, you really don't need to talk about Weather compensation. 

 

You just need a thermostat in the house that says what temp it is and what temp you would like it to be.

 

These days, it wouldn't take much on board machine learning to work out what the heat loss curve is for the building and the optimum flow temp for a given outside temp and requested inside temp. 

 

I believe Havenwise offers exactly that for £50 per year (other heat pump optimisation services are available).

 

Even without Havenwise, all you have to do on my heat pump to adjust the WC is turn a (digital) dial up if the house is too cold, or down if its too warm.  Not exactly rocket science!  Changing the set room temp actually shifts the WC curve behind the scenes, the user doesn't need to know that if they don't want to so once again, hardly a difficult concept!

Edited 2 hours ago by JamesPa

[sharpener]

45 minutes ago, JamesPa said:

I believe Havenwise offers exactly that for £50 per year (other heat pump optimisation services are available).

 

Even without Havenwise, all you have to do on my heat pump to adjust the WC is turn a (digital) dial up if the house is too cold, or down if its too warm.  Not exactly rocket science!  Changing the set room temp actually shifts the WC curve behind the scenes, the user doesn't need to know that if they don't want to so once again, hardly a difficult concept!

 

I fear it is not as simple as that. Yes with your Vaillant HP you can set the Room Temp Mod to Expanded and the Adaptive Heat Curve to Active then it will over time adapt the WC to the lowest effective value. But these are (a) not the factory defaults and (b) not even in the same part of the menu.

 

This also presupposes that the "thermostat" aka SensoComfort controller is sited somewhere sensible and the installer has configured a whole host of other settings correctly. Some default settings e.g. min OAT shut-off temp are stupid, others like HW offset have no meaning at all for an HP. The dreadful manual assumes a lot of prior knowledge, and is not much better in the original German which I occasionally resort to.

 

Hence the busy Arotherm plus FB forum has a small number of interesting queries but most are from ppl in housing association homes who have had little or no explanation at any level of how HP heating is meant to work or how to control it. And it is clear that HA installation contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder who has no more idea.

 

 

[Beelbeebub]

My worry abiut all these intelligent optimisation services with a subscription is the often (always?) are "in the cloud". 

 

Which not only opens them up to outages and malicious actions but also puts the user at the mercy of subscription hikes (Buy our premium service to have set temps over 16C!) and plain old services shutting down. 

 

Nest thermostats are now crippled because Google decided it couldn't be arsed supporting them and they are only 10 years old. 

 

All that said, it's entirely possible to build a learning thermostat for a HP that is self contained and doesn't need any Internet connection. Which is waht we should be looking for. 

[Dillsue]

3 hours ago, Oz07 said:

Half the plumbers i know wouldn't have a clue about how wc works and curves. One i know refers to wc as basically you tell the boiler what you want it to do and it just ignores you and does what it wants 🤣

That's fine if they are plumbers and only tout themselves as pipe fitters. If they see themselves as heating engineers then they are letting themselves and their industry down

[JohnMo]

32 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

My worry abiut all these intelligent optimisation services with a subscription is the often (always?) are "in the cloud". 

 

Which not only opens them up to outages and malicious actions but also puts the user at the mercy of subscription hikes (Buy our premium service to have set temps over 16C!) and plain old services shutting down. 

 

Nest thermostats are now crippled because Google decided it couldn't be arsed supporting them and they are only 10 years old. 

 

All that said, it's entirely possible to build a learning thermostat for a HP that is self contained and doesn't need any Internet connection. Which is waht we should be looking for. 

Other issue is these companies are all new start companies - will they be around in a few years?

 

A car, you jump in heating is set to 20, system manages this with heating and cooling automatically. So there is nothing complex required to manage a simple curve. House too hot curve is lowered etc.. it should flip automatically between between heat and cool. I think Hitachi heat pumps do this already and have for years.

Edited 25 minutes ago by JohnMo

[Dillsue]

5 hours ago, Gone West said:

The problem is, who does that? To ensure it is correct would mean educating the masses about WC, who don't want to be educated about 'boring stuff'. As has already been said, finding professionals who can do it is difficult enough.

Why educate the masses? It's the installers job to understand and set up WC

[JohnMo]

18 minutes ago, Dillsue said:

Why educate the masses? It's the installers job to understand and set up WC

Or for manufacturers to sort it out so no one needs to mess with it. Atag boilers you just answer questions, and it selects the correct curve for you. So house type, heating type, insulation levels etc. Then you select up or down on the controller if you are not happy after a day or two and the curve is moved. Would say that is suitable for 99% of installs.