Ecodan energy monitor

Hardware Heatpump
1

Hi all

New on here and got a few questions!

I’ve moved into a new home with an Ecodan with FTC6 pre installed. The built in energy monitor has started to give me a report intermittently. I only seem to get a report through MELCloud once every three days. Anyone got any ideas how to check what’s going on?

Also, I’ve downloaded data from MELCloud. The energy consumption just has a list 0 to 4 as integers. Same thing for energy produced… any ideas on what this is? I’ve included a screenshot. Look at column F and G.

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Thanks
Godfrey

2

Welcome, Godfrey, to the OEM forum.

I’m afraid I can’t help you personally, but I’m sure there will be someone here who can. However, weekends are normally very quiet here, so it might be into the start of next week before someone who is able to help you sees your post.

3

Thank you! Looking forward to any help! Mitsubishi don’t seem to want to return any calls from their technical team.

4

You can get the data via the MelCloud API.
In terms of energy consumption and heat energy produced, the estimation done by the PDC are not the best compared to the measures captured by the EmonHP and compared to the overall consumptions captured by the energy provider meter.

Tomorrow I can post some URL as samples.

Cheers,

Ale

5

The data in the spreadsheet looks like there’s no heat meter fitted, so the integers in EnergyConsumed and EnergyProduced columns won’t be any use to you. They should be watt-hours (Wh) for each minute, around to 2 or 3 digits during typical operation, not 0 - 4.
(60 W for 1 minute = 1 Wh)

If you go to the Energy Usage page and select dates for just this month, you should be able to “View Energy Report” for every day of the month. I can’t remember how well Melcloud can estimate energy, but I have this userscript that tricks it into showing a little bit more data.

6

Hi

Thanks for that! Definitely a more useful set of tools. You are correct, I don’t have a separate heat meter, but I’m using the inbuilt one on the FTC6. My biggest problem is that I can’t get regular daily readings out of it and I don’t know why… I’ve attached a screenshot of the energy report I have for the last week:

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As you can see, I am currently only getting readings once every three days. I used to get readings every day until 21stOctober.

Any ideas why it would do this?

7

Hi,

I’m using the pymelcloud to pull out the “current” data from the melcloud every 5 minutes via a python script.

It should be much better compared to what is the melcloud website making available.

Did you try it ?

Cheers,

Ale

8

No idea, sorry. Not something I’ve seen happen before. Maybe it’ll fix itself as mysteriously as it broke? :man_shrugging:

There are daily energy values buried in the data that gets loaded into the browser; but only for today. If you’re allowed to add a guest account to MelCloud, I can probably pull that out for you. If you want to try building your own solution, I can provide some details. Here’s a hint at where to start…

9

Not really sure how to get pymelcloud to work… is it a similar to the other script above?

10

No, it needs to run on a computer with python, not in the browser. And there’s more to it than that. Do you have any programming experience?

11

A little bit. I’m not totally useless… :rofl:. I’m assuming I have to download a python app? Then save a python script somewhere…???

12

Yes, download python and install the pycloud library with pip, then write a python program that uses that library to get the data you need from MelCloud. There may be some example code somewhere you can use to get you started.

(I’ve not used pycloud myself, so I don’t have a more specific guide)

13

I’m giving it a go…

I’ll let you know if I need some help here!

Thanks so far!

14

Right, I’ve not had much luck. I’ve managed to get the script to tell me the name of my unit and kick out some temperature readings for the hot water tank. When I asked for the energy, it just gave me 0.0.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I did any programming and I never coded in Python before so I’m taking it as a win!!!

That said, if anyone has any pointers, that’d be great!

Godfrey

15

Unfortunately, you’ll not be able to get live energy readings from your system, only the cumulative daily amounts:

  • DailyHeatingEnergyConsumed
  • DailyHotWaterEnergyConsumed
  • DailyHeatingEnergyProduced
  • DailyHotWaterEnergyProduced

If you can collect these once a day just before they reset, then you’ll at least be able to get a general idea of performance.

Collecting and recording the temperatures of your system throughout the data can help with diagnosing any potential performance issues. These are probably the most useful ones:

  • OutdoorTemperature
  • FlowTemperature
  • ReturnTemperature
  • RoomTemperatureZone1
  • RoomTemperatureZone2
  • TankWaterTemperature
16

That helps!

Do you have any idea when they reset the energy data?

17

I’d guess around midnight, depending on the timezone, though I recall it happened unreliably.

18

Ah! I’ve just remembered - the daily energy numbers are for yesterday and stay the same all day, only updating the next day. So requesting the data once a day will get the data that MelCloud should be showing in the Energy Report, hopefully.

19

…and there’s no handy functions in pymelcloud to get these, but I think you can request the properties directly from the device:

       await device.update()

       energy_updated = device.get_device_prop("DailyEnergyConsumedDate")

       heating_consumed = device.get_device_prop("DailyHeatingEnergyConsumed")
       heating_produced = device.get_device_prop("DailyHeatingEnergyProduced")

       hotwater_consumed = device.get_device_prop("DailyHotWaterEnergyConsumed")
       hotwater_produced = device.get_device_prop("DailyHotWaterEnergyProduced")

       print(f"Updated {energy_updated}:")
       print(f"Heating {heating_consumed} > {heating_produced} kWh")
       print(f"HotWater {hotwater_consumed} > {hotwater_produced} kWh")

[untested]

Can then easily extend this to calculate total energy usage, and COP (produced / consumed).

HTH

20

Thanks. That works and shows the last set of energy consumed and produced. I’ve changed the date, but the final outputs stay as the most recent energy report. So it seems that the date doesn’t make a difference. Does that sound right? Or am I doing something wrong.

Thanks for the code!!