100% it is gas boiler thinking. We’ve been round in a few circles; initially it was setup to run all the time by Octopus, but the house wasn’t getting warm. During that colder snap in November, the house wasn’t getting above 14C no matter what we did or how long the HP was on - cue angry wife - so Octopus came out and changed it to the “boiler mode” we have now. I think they must have adjusted the WDC too. I think that the low pump speed setting (which was commented on as “strange” by another Octopus engineer) was actually the real culprit there, as I mentioned in another thread on here. Doing the maths on that 7L/min gave me ~2.6kw heat output when it ought to be much, much more when the outdoor temp was low.
Yesterday evening, thanks to help on here, I modified various parameters and I now have the house set to 19C all the time, but I may need to use TRVs to lower bedroom & other rooms heat. This morning, the upstairs bathroom was very toasty (too toasty!) but other rooms a little colder than we’d like. I’ll see how it goes.
As I type this, the house is at 19C and the HP is pulling 2.9kw. I suspect it’ll do this all day long, electric bill be damned…
Again, this kind of stuff should be transparent to the user - it is too complex and time consuming. Gas boilers are great from a user point of view, because as you say, they dump heat into a space quickly - so why can’t a HP work out what time it needs to come on and at what temp to keep to a desired set point? Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me…! It is literally a handful of parameters that need setting and monitoring.