Making a Modbus/TCP heat pump work with Emonhub

emonHub
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Ever since getting a heat pump installed in September last year, I have been monitoring it using Home Assistant. However, HA never really felt like the right heat pump monitoring tool so when I recently discovered Emoncms, I simply had to try it out. Unfortunately, it turned out to be somewhat of a struggle to get everything up and running so I figured it would be worthwhile to share my findings.

Background info:

  • Heat pump hardware: NIBE VVM S320 (indoor) + NIBE S2125 (outdoor)
  • Sensors: Internal heat pump sensors
  • Communication protocol: Modbus/TCP (Wi-Fi)
  • Emoncms HW: Raspberry Pi 4 (I initially tried with an old Raspberry Pi 1, but it couldn’t start the Apache server due to an insufficient amount of memory)
  • Location: Silkeborg, Denmark

In short, I had to do the following to get everything up and running:

  1. Fixing a bug in EmonModbusTcpInterfacer.py [1].
  2. Changing EmonModbusTcpInterfacer.py from reading holding registers to reading input registers.
  3. Removing the subtraction by 1 of the register number when reading data (I am not sure why the -1 is there in the first place, but maybe it is needed for some Manufacturers). Alternatively, the specified addresses in the emonhub configuration can also be incremented by 1.
  4. Making sure I did not have too many open connections with the heat pump since it only allows 5 simultaneous connections [2]. It took me a long time to figure out that this was the reason why reading data kept failing, even though I had an open connection.

My impression is that the Modbus/TCP interfacer in Emonhub is not used by a lot of users, but I still hope this information might be useful to some. Now, I look forward to start tracking metrics and optimise the heat pump settings. I also hope that the internal sensors provides reasonable accurate data (I got hope from [3]) so that I do not feel the urge to go invest in some MID certified sensors :wink:

Thanks for making such a great piece of SW open source!

[1] Change Endian.Big to Endian.BIG as per pymodbus change · Issue #213 · openenergymonitor/emonhub · GitHub
[2] See changelog of SW 2.27.5: https://www.nibe.eu/webdav/files/myuplink_changelog/nibe-n.pdf
[3] Search for nibe-onboard-monitoring-accuracy/25598 in this forum (new users can only include two links in a post so I cannot provide a direct link)

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Hello Jesper,

The Modbus specification says “Registers are addressed starting at zero. Therefore input registers numbered 1-16 are addressed as 0-15.”

Register numbers are transmitted as zero based values, but are referred to as one-based values.

As you surmised, not all manufacturers follow this spec.

Ref:

Note: Despite the name MBUS_300, the document referenced above is not a meter bus article.

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Yes, this is a limitation of the implementation. It can do one or the other.

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Hi Bill,

Thanks a lot for the clarification. I guess I have thought of registers and addresses as being the same thing which explains my confusion. When I interpret the numbers NIBE give as addresses, it works fine. To add to the confusion, NIBE refer to them as IDs in their manual [1] :slight_smile:

[1] https://forum.iobroker.net/assets/uploads/files/1694376961026-m12676en.pdf

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Before or after you have made this change?

The easiest way to check what the documentation is giving you is (as Bill said) to see what the first number is. If 0 - it is an address, if 1 it is a Register number.

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Hi Brian,

Sorry for not being completely clear. I have ended up doing the following:

  1. Left the -1 unaltered in EmonModbusTcpInterfacer.py
  2. Interpreted the IDs listed in the NIBE Modbus documentation [1] as addresses which means that the registers entered in the Emonhub configuration must be +1 compared to the NIBE IDs.

[1] https://forum.iobroker.net/assets/uploads/files/1694376961026-m12676en.pdf