I’ve been thinking about how to publish heat pump data for a while, since this topic about public heatpump dashboards. I did set up a public instance of My Heatpump app on my own instance, thought it’s only accessible to a whitelist of IPs (more to protect against bots than for privacy).
I had wanted to build something from scratch along similar lines as pvoutput.org, but only got as far as designing the database before getting stuck on user management. There is something to be said for leveraging the technology the emoncms already provides, amirite?
What pvoutput is really good at, and I was hoping to emulate, is aggregating daily data into longer periods, i.e. weeks, months and years. This helps smooth out the day-to-day variances, and show typical usage patterns. I have my own graphs set up for these, but it would be nice to have some standardized views that everyone uses.
Being able to cumulate running costs while taking into account TOU tariffs would be useful (again, like pvoutput does), along with RHI calulations, comparisons to typical oil and gas boilers, etc.
It would also be nice to see some high-level analyses of heat pump performance, such as average power consumption vs. hour of day [example], or flow temp vs. outside temp, or monthly running times [example].
Another nice-to-have that would be useful in conversations is to be able to link to specific day and time period of the heat-pump chart, so show off specific situations, though maybe edited/ annotated screenshots are more useful here.
I’m not too worried about the privacy of my own ASHP data, as long as the identity and location is sufficiently fuzzy.
The “live” view of heatpump data (i.e. throughout the day) is perhaps only really useful to the owner, because of how contextual it is. pvoutput has this, but I don’t use it myself and I only upload daily data. I had planned to focus on daily data first, mainly to minimise the data storage.
On the other hand, solar PV is a static system that is wholey dependent on the sunshine, unlike a heatpump. Collecting detailed power and temperature data allows for much more sophisticated analysis.
And another thing; it’s worth remembering that this data isn’t so much about the performance of the heatpump itself, but of the whole heating system: radiators, underfloor, pipes, tanks, buffers, insulation, etc. It might be worth capturing that somewhere if this data is to be used for any wider research…