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.