Heat Pump Experimentation App - Release News

Today’s improvements include…

Fixed CoP smoothing and display

We wanted to stop the CoP display being confusing so we have changed from this:

to this:

Hopefully this looks much more reasonable now @Bramco :slight_smile:

Allow a much wider display for reviewing experiments

As this isn’t a kiosk app, we want to allow the app to take up the full width of the screen to make analysis easier.

Give a sneak peek into when a feed was last updated

We’re using the title to show when one of the “current status” values were last updated.

Resizing is now smoother

Flot’s resize plugin handles this pretty well from what I’ve been able to test with.

Notably it does the redraw at sensible times, for example, when you pop open the Developer Tools in Firefox. It saves us from debacles like this:

1 Like

:+1:

Simon

1 Like

Nice work @MyForest

Testing the latest here, I’m seeing th following error:

relating to lines:

// If no output then don't declare a CoP
if (outputFeedHistory[index][1] == 0) return null

Thanks for reporting that @TrystanLea, it’s fixed now.

Unfortunately I have all the feeds defined so I’m not stressing those branches of the code enough at the moment. Sorry.

Rather than having you keep finding these hiccups @TrystanLea, I created a somewhat amusing way of seeing what happens when everything is in disarray :slight_smile:

BTW if you are finding this app isn’t to your liking, the one built by Trystan and John Cantor might appeal. Trystan recently made a video about it too:

Looks lovely. How can I install this, please? There doesn’t seem to be any installation instructions in the readme.md and I didn’t find an install.md or an obvious way to tell App > + New to use a git repo.

You’re quite right @mjr

I see you are possibly a software dev. I just tried setting it up but realised I’m quite a long way from a normal setup so I’ll show you what I did and if it makes sense then do that, otherwise let me know and I’ll dig into it a bit more to remind myself what I should have already written.

If you clone the repo you’ll have a mmspheatpump folder.

The something along these lines to put it into what I believe are the right places:

FROM openenergymonitor/emoncms

WORKDIR /var/www/emoncms/Modules

COPY mmspheatpump/device/mmsp.json device/data/MyForest/devices/heatpump/

COPY mmspheatpump app/apps/MyForest

WORKDIR /var/www/emoncms/

It looks roughly right, but I can’t test it without twisting a lot of things around here at the moment.

HTH.

2 Likes

Well, I have installed it and it displays something, but there is a "# EmonCMS 10.x # EmonCMS 11.x " at the top which puzzles me and the mmsp.json makes me think that I need to collect more data than I have been, including WaterPump4Status. I’m not sure if more configuration is needed to get it the feeds as it wants or if that mmsp.json sets them up?

mmsp.json will set them up in EmonCMS but you would need to POST the values after gathering them from MELCloud. As you can imagine, there’s far less useful data in MELCloud these days. The app will run with whatever you can give it. Of course if you want to setup the feeds manually that’s fine too, I just created mmsp.json to help get a solid setup.

The bit you see at the top is funny. It’s me falling foul of using too may languages, you can see the Python-style comments in the HTML here:

It’s fixed now if you pull again:

Sorry for any excitement :slight_smile:

That has got rid of the hash lines. Thanks.

I have updated my script to gather the values now but how do I use mmsp.json to set up the remaining feeds? And is my node name of melcloud OK?
Scrub that. I restarted apache (I guess something was cached somewhere) and then could edit my melcloud device to be of the MyForest/MMSP ASHP type. It offered to create the feeds it did not yet have.

Two hiccups: the wrench on the web interface does nothing when clicked and the config/application-configuration.json only seems to use some Rate1 values, not the Rate2 as well. I also added RoomTemperatureZone1 to the heating chart: I know you don’t use it, but I think it’s nice to see what it does.

1 Like

Makes sense to me. I suppose some people do care about the room temp and the humans :slight_smile:

@mjr If you want to go crazy and send a PR for your changes I’ll see if it makes sense to merge them in, notably the RoomTemperatureZone1 change is probably useful for sensible people who have room thermostats or who benefit from the Ecodan one.

1 Like

I’m not sure this is worth splitting out into a pull-request. The RoomTemperatureZone1 one is just the following added to config/application-configuration.js after TargetHCTemperatureZone1:

    "RoomTemperatureZone1": {
        "displayOptions": {
            "label": "Inside",
            "color": "purple"
        },
        "type": "feed",
        "autoname": "RoomTemperatureZone1",
        "engine": 5,
        "optional": true,
        "description": "The room temperature in Zone1 in degrees Celsius (°C)"
    },

Purple?!

I was hoping for something more optimistic :slight_smile:

This currently has x60 in the input processing. How confident are you about that? It seems to be almost exactly double the amount consumed in the next report.

I treat the HeatPumpFrequency to be a percentage of the rated input power, i.e. between 0 and 100.
So, my 11.2 kW unit has a max input of 3.73 kW, so I multiply the frequency by 3.73 * 1000 / 100 to get the current power consumption in watts. It seems to track actual consumption reasonably well, better than the unit’s own estimate.

The factor for a smaller heat pump would be around 30, which is about half of 60 :wink:

1 Like

I think it used to be something like Watt-hour in the next minute so multiplying by 60 gives you Watts. I know it made my head hurt.

However, these days it seems to be misleading so I’ve actually filtered it out in my “Post to EmonCMS” script.

For example, the heat pump is running, other stats are changing, but it’s still showing the value it was when we rolled over the hour (which was 52 minutes ago).

I just noticed that:

“DemandPercentage”: 100,

is in the device.json but it’s at 100 even when the heat pump is off so that’s not looking at all helpful either.

@mjr do we need to alter something in the system to keep you working with the news from you and @Timbones about it being a percentage?

I did a few tweaks to get the Inside looking the way I imagine you want it @mjr

Would you mind taking a look at this PR to see if you’d like it done a different way?