Continuing the discussion from Vaillant eBUS hardware adapter (ebusd software) Thread:
Yes, exactly. We have tried over the years to update the documentation to try and explain this concept to new users, so if you have any feedback on this, it would be useful. Emoncms Core Concepts — OpenEnergyMonitor 0.0.1 documentation.
A worked example for setting up monitoring heat pumps would be nice. I read “inputs, keys, nodes, feeds, input processing, and devices” and that’s pretty impenetrable. I’ll try following the guides but when you’re trying to set up something very different to what the guide is walking you through, it’s hard to use it to set up the other thing when you understand very little!
I see there are guides for ‘home energy’ and ‘PV’ monitoring, one for heat pump monitoring would be good
@TrystanLea @glyn.hudson @Zarch @Timbones - a bit of feedback. I’m unable to help on the HP side 
What would help here? Now you have got a bit further, do you have a better description as a new user?
The difficulty is that once you know, it is difficult to understand where the help is insufficient.
Our current documentation for Heat Pump monitoring focusses on the use of one of the emonHP hardware bundles and hence a ‘local’ emonCMS installation on an emonPi - optionally forwarding data to emoncms.org for heatpumpmonitor.org
For the scenario where there’s no local emon-specific hardware - because all the data is coming from other sources (such as Vaillant eBUS or NIBE’s myUplink API) - there’s no clear starting point in the current documentation, because that’s hardware-centric.
A complication is that those “other sources” are highly variable but putting that aside for now, we could document the scenario where someone is just pushing data to emoncms.org and wants to know how to configure the Inputs and Feeds etc. for heatpumpmonitor.org
One option would be to consider that an additional Configuration in the Heat Pump Monitoring guide. I keep meaning to have a go at improving the documentation for the MyHeatpump App so maybe this could be included as part of that.
I am thinking that is what may be required.
I wonder if this could be separated out to the Integrations section of the Documentation?
Yes I would say that’s the stage I am at now! I have feeds taking in data, but now I don’t know how to get them to HPM – see attached screenshots.
I would be tempted not to mention all of them unless it’s relevant to the user – I’m not sure they’re going to be for me… Inputs and feeds make sense, but the keys and nodes bit don’t. Not sure about processing yet…
The ‘glue’ between the Feeds and HPM is provided by the MyHeatpump ‘App’ which is a Heatpump-specific data dashboard, so you’ll need to set up one of those in your emoncms.org account (assuming you haven’t done that already).
The “Apps” menu (top left; between “Setup” and “Dashboards”) will let you add an instance of the MyHeatpump App, where you select from your Feeds to populate the various parameters the app wants.
Maybe… That section is pretty sparse right now, only listing EmonEVSE (which again is a hardware device).
Someone not familiar with any of the “emon” terminology won’t know they need to feed data to emonCMS but they’ll know they want to monitor a Heat Pump, so a pointer from the documentation under: Applications > Heat Pump would be useful - but that could point off to the Integrations section.
Would we title that something like: Integrations > Third-Party Heat Pump Data Sources ?
That could then document a fairly ‘generic’ data flow and also accommodate manufacturer-specific guidances notes.
Ah, I didn’t know that 
Looking over the docs, it is a bit confused as Heat Pump under Applications covers both the bundles available and the HeatPump App, but equally seems to assume this only relates to the use of the HP Bundles.
As I don’t use it, I don’t really understand it
So I think I’ve set up the app – see screenshot below. What happens now? When I click on OctopusAgile or UKGrid (which I also added) a chart opens, but when I click Myheatpump I always see this screen, no charts.
I’ve tried selecting “disable” and pressing ok for each of the boxes I don’t have a feed for, but still nothing happens. The bottom of the page looks like 
. I mention that as the other two apps have a spanner icon top right which opens a config screen with the same layout, and at the bottom of the screen is a “launch app” button. Not so in Myheatpump.
Hmmm. I get the “Launch App” button for the MyHeatpump app too - which is how you get to see the graphs…
I wonder if it’s not happy about some of the entries you’ve specified (or disabled). Someone who understands the app better than me will need to advise if there are ‘mandatory’ fields that would prevent the “Launch App” button from showing.
OK so I deleted that first attempt at setting up the myheatpump app and created a new one. Again no joy – until I selected a random feed for ‘heatpump_elec_kwh’, not having the right feed for it. Then the launch app button appeared. So I think to get real data to heatpump_elec_kwh I need to use the ‘power_to_kwh input processor’. I found and followed the instructions here although they’re not quite correct. Launch app and… no data. However a few minutes the graph started populating.
I’ve also added a heatpump_heat_kwh using the same processor. Maybe maybe it’s working?!
(I also bought credits for emoncms .org from the store and added them to my account – felt good to finally give OEM some money!)
Went back to HPM and deleted my old attempt at adding a system. Added a new system again, and it seems to be working! 
Excellent. So it seems that ‘heatpump_elec_kwh’ is a mandatory input and you did exactly the right thing using the input processor to derive that from your real-time power values.
(Those are all things we should include in the documentation.)
Nice work! I’ve now approved the system on the site. It’s now live here: https://heatpumpmonitor.org/system/view?id=927
The SCOP figure will appear once there’s a days worth of data
Agreed. The other documentation sections under Applications (Home Energy and Solar PV) are broadly similar in structure (to Heat Pump) - though they have less of a hardware focus and refer out to the Hardware section for (most of) the hardware setup, leaving them with more of a focus on the setup of the software.
There are also now many more entries available under the Apps menu (I counted 20) and in my view those should have some coverage in the documentation - or at least an obvious place where such coverage should be located, and under the Applications documentation heading seems the obvious place.
The hardware-oriented content in the Applications > Heat Pump document is good but we could argue it would fit better under the Hardware heading; maybe in a new section (emonHP ?) there.
One thing that is very clear to me is that the MyHeatpump app should be better documented somewhere. I’ve fielded a range of questions about the meaning of the different parameters recently so those definitely need better descriptions and guidance. I’ll volunteer to draft some documentation for MyHeatpump over the next couple of weeks. It will be easier to take a view on where such content should be slotted into the documentation structure once there’s something to look at.
OK so let’s go through it step by step; getting from having data being uploaded to emoncms.org to it appearing on heatpumpmonitor.org. My starting point was having data being delivered to emoncms.org by Gemini’s python code from here.
I’d set up my emoncms account and found the read & write API key under ‘My account’ and put it into the python code. As a result, in emoncms – setup – inputs I saw the list of parameters being delivered by main.py. They were already grouped under the node ‘vaillant’ but I didn’t need to know about that (Gemini had set that up in main.py).
I next need to create feeds for each parameter, so historical data can be stored. To do that I need to click the spanner icon at the right of each parameter row, then beneath the ‘add process’ header leave everything as it is except change the ‘10s’ in the last box to 30s to match the upload interval of main.py. Then I press ‘add’ at the end of the row, then ‘changed, press to save’ at bottom right, then ‘close’.
Additionally I need to add second feeds for elec_power and heat_output. This time, I need to change the first dropdown under the ‘add process’ header to ‘power to kWh’, add _kWh to the end of the feed name (third box after ‘Feed’), change the 10s to 30s again, and press ‘add’ then ‘changed, press to save’. (The are ‘input processors’ but I don’t need to know that.)
At that point I should go to ‘My account’ in emoncms.org and scroll down to ‘Emoncms.org billing’, and follow the instructions to buy the appropriate number of credits from the OEM online store.
I now need to add an ‘app’, the MyHeatpump app. I go to Apps, +New, select MyHeatpump. On the right I need to select the dropdown in each little box and choose the appropriate feed for the title of the box e.g. for ‘heatpump_elec’ and choose ‘elec_power’. After filling in as many as I can, a ‘launch app’ button should have appeared beneath the column of boxes. Click that, and I should – after a minute or two – see a lovely emoncms chart of the parameters my heat pump is reporting.
Next, I go the heatpumpmonitor.org. I log in with my emoncms.org username and password, click my profile pic, then My systems. I click the ‘Add new system’ button and under the ‘Select Emoncms.org dashboard’ header I choose ‘[my username]:[the name of the app I just made]’. I go down the page filling in all the details I can, including the read-only API key from emoncms. If the page won’t let me save I better just add some best guesses into the fields it’s not letting me leave blank. Then, when I press save, I should have a heat pump system system listed as a row on the screen, with the label ‘awaiting review’. If I click the graph icon I can see the emoncms chart and stats on heatpumpmonitor.org but no-one else can until the nice Mr. Hudson approves my system .
And with that, all should be working!
