Adding a heatpump - how does it work?

[stefan-juergens]

Hi,
i am using HomeAssistant and the normal "load" works well, but I want to configure a heatpump. I have the "load" sensor for the heatpump also in HomeAssistant.
Is there a way to configure it, so EOS-addon can understand and use it as a heatpump?
As I know EOS can also get some configurations for a heatpump - not only the load.

Thanks and Greetings
Stefan

[nanoBit93]

I've tried a few things to make it work, but haven't found a really optimal way yet. It's also quite difficult since EOS cannot know in which hours the heat pump is going to run (not even the heat pump knows since it's dependent on the thermostats and much more). So relying on historical data doesn't work really well, but there's no other way.

For me the way that somewhat works is to just count the heat pump consumption into the overall consumption I let EOS optimize for, so not using the "load 1" stuff at all. It's not able to actually propose good time slots to run the heat pump but at least it optimizes for the more or less correct overall energy consumption. It requires still quite close manual monitoring and intervention though as it's agnostic of outside temperatures (leading to less or increased consumption) and the rule to calculate the load based off the past 2 weeks... hence if there's a temperature (and therefore load) change it'll only notice a week later.

I think I've read that EOS is actually capable of it (not super sure though) but EOS Connect is not as far as I'm aware.

EDIT It also depends what you use the heat pump for. Water heating can be forecasted and shifted around the day pretty well in my opinion - that should also be doable with the "load 1"-settings. However, most people probably use it for heating as well (like me) and then it get really tricky. Good but sad news is the issue is so complex that not even commercial systems are really good at optimizing heating :)

[Maergsche]

I also have a heat pump for heating and hot water. And I didn't specify a value in ‘load 1’ either, as otherwise the demand would deviate significantly from the forecast. (At least in winter.)
To calculate it more accurately, you would have to determine how much electricity the heat pump is likely to consume based on the temperature forecast.

[nanoBit93]

Exactly.... but it's not only dependent on the outside temperature. Also on

• heating target temperature
• building isolation

and if you want to optimize heating in a more advanced way also if you're willing to sacrifice compressor cycles for lower energy cost (e.g. running higher temperatures in low-cost hours) and how well you tolerate volatile temperatures in your rooms. There are dozens of variables... that's why a predictive way probably doesn't work. Maybe with a bunch of data and some machine learning algorithm one could generate a high level function to get the consumption. But then the problem still persists that EOS could never forecast WHEN the HP is going to run. Hence you'd just need to add an average to each hour of the day, so you'd still face suboptimal intra-hour decisions by the model.

[Maergsche]

Well, the building insulation doesn't change for me and I don't change the target heating temperature either, or rather it only changes when the price is cheap or expensive. And because I have a variable electricity tariff (not a dynamic one), it's always at the same time. The heat pump does that by itself.

I think it's fair to say that on average x KW is used by the heat pump at an outside temperature of x.

Ultimately, it's all just a forecast. Even EOS can't know when family members have birthdays and we're baking cakes :-)