Starting power in my heatpump app?

Applications
1

In the “My Heatpump” app, what is “Starting power” and how do I find out the correct value?

For context, last week I had a Daikin EDLA08E2V3 installed and this evening I’ve added an ESPAltherma along with a EmonTX v3.4 to give me some idea how well it’s doing. Exporting the data from Home Assistant and creating the various feeds was mostly self explanatory but I’m unsure on “Starting power”.

Any insight on how to correctly set/calculate this would be much appreciated.

2

Hi Rob,

“Starting power” is a threshold value, used to infer whether the compressor is running or not:

  • If the electricity consumption is currently below the defined “Starting power” threshold, the heat pump is considered to be in ‘standby’ mode, or ‘not running’ - i.e. the compressor is off
  • If the electricity consumption is currently above the defined “Starting power” threshold, the heat pump is considered to be ‘running’ - i.e. the compressor is on

It’s used in calculating parameters like the COP “When running” (as distinct from “Full window”) and in the code there are counters for the number of compressor starts per hour - derived by counting the number of times the consumption goes above the threshold.

In terms of setting a suitable value:

  • It wants to be higher than the ‘standby’ consumption of the heat pump controller and circulation pump(s)
  • It wants to be lower than the minimum consumption when the compressor is running

If you’re able to determine rough values for those two then I’d recommend setting it halfway between them. 100 (Watts) is probably a good value to start with.

[General Note: As highlighted in another thread, there is scope to improve the documentation for the inputs for the MyHeatpump app - and this is another example.]

2 Likes
3

Perfect, that explains it nicely. The default 150w should be fine for now.

Thank you :slight_smile:

1 Like