Hello,
I’m very new to Open Energy Monitor. A few weeks ago I installed an emonPI to monitor whole house + PV energy, and in the utility room we have an emonTX which I’m setting up to monitor our heat pump.
I haven’t managed to get everything working as i want yet but am making progress.
Our heat pump is an ASHP, Nibe F2040, with a SMO20 controller.
I’m wondering what possibilities there might be for connecting the OEM hardware directly to the SMO20 heat pump controller.
The installation manual for the SMO20 is here:
Down on page 23 in Chapter 5 there are some instructions of how to connect external devices to the SMO20. One of the options is to turn on ‘luxury hot water mode’ based on an external signal.
I’m wondering if it would be possible to get the OEM system to trigger the ‘luxury’ mode when we have excess solar energy production. I wonder if this would better than buying a solar diverter which would use the immersion element rather than the heat pump, so may be less efficient.
I can’t find anyone who has done this with a Nibe SMO20 on the forum, but perhaps there is someone who has done something similar with another heat pump.
Hi Trystan,
MAny thanks for this. Looks like i need to do a bit of background reading on Node Red and HA. I’m not really familiar with either.
At the moment, my plan is to monitor energy production and usage for 6 - 12 months to see how much surplus electricity our PVs are producing. Once I know that I can see if it will be useful to try to figure how to use it by heating up our watertank, either by third party solar diverter or the ASHP itself.
I have the same setup, am using the NIBE Uplink to send data to HomeAssistant, and then looking to send EmonPi to HomeAssistant too but haven’t quite managed that yet. I too am wanting to look in to monitoring the power used by my heat pump. There is a HomeAssistant plug in to get the data directly from the Nibe.
Hi, revisiting as we now have panels and battery and pleased to report that using HomeAssistant we are using excess solar (once battery 100%) to provide free hot water!
Our next project is to make the ASHP as efficient as possible and battling with the Tado system which seems intent on destroying any progress we make.
hi nick,
Sounds like you’ve made great progress with it.
I got Home Assistant running and linked our Nibe, Solar Edge inverter, and the EmonCMS to it. The data is coming in, but it’s a bit messy and i need to spend time setting it up properly - which i haven’t done!
In the mean time I have put together a solar diverter box (‘mk2router’), built from a kit supplied by Robin Emley. Robin was fantastic and helped me correct several mistakes I made.
The diverter is working great, and is diverting excess solar energy directly to the hot water tank immersion heater. Today we dumped 6 kwh into the water tank.
I may come back to HA at some point in the future but for now I just use the EmonCMS to monitor everything.
Yes, HomeAssistant integrations for Nibe and a custom solution for the Solis inverter made it all possible.
I curse the days I send electricity to the grid now, and have even been known to fire up the dishwasher/washing machine/steam cleaner if it looks like the excess solar might go to waste!