Anyone monitoring a Clausius GSHP?

Last year we had GSHP heating installed in our 250 year old cottage as the final step in our 8 year long renovation. The house has been stripped of it’s cement render and rendered inside and out with lime (after several years bare and drying out the walls. All doors and windows replaced so it’s as draught proof as I can make it and it’s heavily insulated in the loft.

We were heating with two wood stoves (one with back boiler for hot water) and gradually removing the old storage heaters. Now we heat with radiators and the heat pump, which uses the same energy as two storage heaters, so it’s really doing the job. Sadly, the back boiler stove had to be replaced as they won’t give you RHI payments if the wood stove is connected and it was the difference between being able to afford the system or not.

I’m about to install an Iotawatt 14channel energy monitor feeding into emoncms to monitor electrical energy use, solar production (we have 6kw PV on the roof and an Eddi diverter) and the charge/discharge from the battery system we’re about to install along with monitoring of several circuits and the heat pump.

I’m looking to start monitoring the heat pump so that I can better understand what it’s doing and how I might improve on it’s energy use after reading through this forum. The heat pump seems to measure all the things I want to monitor and show them on it’s lcd screen but it’s a case of how to I get those readings into emoncms?

Apparently there’s an online monitoring option but just the interface for that costs £800 (CREL pCOWeb) and I don’t know if that’s able to export to emoncms or if it would be a proprietary web interface.

Does anyone know if the data can be pulled directly from the heat pump as I believe it will output modbus data though I’m unsure how. I guess the alternative would be adding a heat meter but that seems redundant if I could get the data from the machine itself. Alternatively, I could run an EmonTX or similar and just monitor the inlet/outlet temps of the ground loop and heating pipes along with electrical energy use but again, all these are already done by the machine so I’m trying to figure out how best I might use what it’s already doing.

Any suggestions gratefully received.

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Hello @SafetyThird Welcome to the forum! Sounds like a great project, all of the work that you have done removing the cement and switching to lime, heat pump installation and everything!

I don’t have any experience with the Clausius GSHP unfortunately or what might be involved with reading from it’s modbus interface, see my reply here on a similar question of using modbus, it’s a bit complicated in that you need to work out the registers and request the data in the right way, im not sure if what we have in emonhub will be compatible with other equipment other than what we’ve used it with so far Modbus rtu - #2 by TrystanLea

Thanks Trystan, I have some reading and research ahead of me by the look of it :slight_smile:

Looking on their website, they do mention BMS support, so if that is the case, I would imagine they would provide a memory / register map for the pCOWeb card so you can then siphon off the data and use it as you wish. Stock pCOWeb supports things like Modbus over TCPIP, but always check with the heat pump manufacturer what they support!

The manufacturer I work for uses Carel based controllers extensively, but the memory / register map is custom to the in-house software and as a result, is no use to you, alas!

That’s great, thanks very much, I’ll do some more research and contact Clausius.

I’m looking at doing the same to take data off the modbus as I also have the same GSHP, did you make any progress with this?

Hi Greg, sorry for late reply, I’ve not dropped in here lately. I’m afraid I’ve not made any progress in this. I was told it would take an expensive board to do so. I don’t have the skills to develop anything myself but if you go forward with it I’d be happy to help with testing if you need another setup to test with. Do you have an idea of what you’d need to do hardware wise to get at the data?
Justin.