Posted by: @Anonymous

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Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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This is important since you were trying to suggest Havenwise might have changed a setting that stopped the heat pump from communicating with the Internet.

No I am not

I am and was only speaking about the change in operation of the circulation pump. If Havenwise made a change to 2093 option. As you say if that option is available via the internet, it could have been moved from set point to another and not back again.  If the home owner had the function previously to boost room temp, either Havenwise made the change or the owner. I do not know which would be correct - or the boost function never worked prior to to having Havenwise?

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And we come back full circle.

If it was just a problem of Havenwise making a change and then not resetting it, they could still use the API to reverse the change once the customer got in touch. The issue isn't what settings are changed or not, it's that Havenwise couldn't make contact with the heat pump to make any changes.

Their remedial action seems to have been to ask the customer to make a manual change that they themselves would have made through the API so the customer wasn't inconvenienced. In other words, they called on Plan B.

Posted by: @Anonymous

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Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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No. It doesn't have control; it has (shared) access to use the control. A fine distinction but important since it, like a homeowner, can only make changes the control system allows. Not all settings are exposed to the app or, indeed, Havenwise. It's the same as buying from Amazon; I don't control Amazon; I merely use its interface to influence its operation.

Sorry that just playing with words, the home owner has no control either then, they is just sharing access with the controller as well - sorry that is just bull.  If you can make a change to a running parameter you have control and influence of how the heat pump operates. If Havenheat does not have control how does it save you money by making changes to how it operates.

Just because you don't agree doesn't make an assertion "bull".

In this case, control follows a hierarchy.

1. The heat pump is controlled by a system integrated into the physical box and someone in the house can change pretty much all settings via the in-house display unit. There may also be some dip switches as well but the point is that control is local.
2. The manufacturer, in this case Samsung, has built in an extension to that - a remote control, if you like - that has the heat pump checking the manufacturer's web services regularly to see if any config changes are requested (or, of course, if any request is made for data to be read). Under normal circumstances it will fulfil those requests but, unless badly designed, it should still reject any requests that could result in conflicts - settings which should never exist together at the same time, for instance. In this case it's easy to see the actual control is separate from the requests being made.
3. The requests being made remotely are also wrapped up in security; the manufacturer's account will have access to a wider range of settings than an installer who in turn is likely to be able to change more than an end user. This is important since it demonstrates Havenwise doesn't have "control"; it's only working within the confines of the account they're given to work with.

You're thinking of control as binary - either you've got it or you haven't. That's not accurate. Instead, it's the case of varying levels of access to settings and that's different. You're a user on this site and can post stuff, but that doesn't mean you have control of this site. Only @editor has that, and even then there are things that can be done to the site's configuration that can't be achieved within the software itself. None of this is just playing with words; those words matter.

The wider general public are going to face very similar issues if they sign up to the Demand Side Response (DSR) remote control over home appliances which DESNZ are busy building.

They will initially target DSR at heat-pumps - turning them off during times of high demand.

In practice the off/on commands will be sent by a licensed agent, rather than the Government of course.
A company such as Havenwise might well wish to apply for a licence.

The consumer's account with their Energy Supplier will be credited for having taken part in a demand-reduction period.

But there's a lot of protocols which need to be considered.

• What should happen if the consumer manually re-starts their heat-pump partway through the off-period which the Agent had intended?
• What happens if a fault prevents the Agent from sending the 'Switch back on' command at the end of the period?
• How does an Agent stagger the 'Switch back on' commands in an area, so that there isn't a demand-surge on the local grid?

What @broadsman  has shared here today provides an insight to the complexity of operations which each Agent will need to develop.

The Plan-B solution from Havenwise was to send a WhatsApp message.
Each Agent will need to build an IT system which copes with system-faults, reverts to sensible defaults, and makes allowances for households with vulnerable occupants.

Alternatively, the general public might decide not to take up the DSR option.

It may not take many 'failures' being reported in the press to swing public opinion against the scheme.

Thank you for tagging me @editor ! And thank you for the kind words @broadsman !

Last night we received an automatic alert in our systems that @broadsman initiated a heating boost in the Havenwise app, but the heat pump wasn't activating like we would expect within the first 10 minutes. There was no connection issue at any point. We continued to receive data throughout, which is how our systems picked up the anomaly.   

We reached out to check-in and identify what might be the cause. We believe it was due to FSV2093 being set to 1 which caused a conflict where the Samsung logic prevented the compressor from starting. We asked @broadsman to update the setting, which allowed the compressor to start and operations resumed normally. 

Some excellent points raised earlier on the thread. It's correct that some settings can only be changed locally on the Samsung controller, as the manufacturer put some guardrails on what they deem safe to be remotely controlled. FSV2093 is one of them. 

It's fantastic to see the kind words of @broadsman ! We're very proud of this example which shows that the Havenwise app allows easy control by the user (in this case a heating boost) and the customer support that backs it all up at any time of day. 

Fun fact: I started Havenwise some time ago together with a guy named Alex. It was Alex himself who reached out yesterday evening to @broadsman and got everything sorted in 10 minutes. 

@hcas Excellent service, I have 2 clients about to engage your software for their systems and it is going on my new home system late this summer all connected to Ecodan's. (I am interested if mine can be connected to my solar and batteries as well to control the whole systems together?)

Also where credit is due I would like to say that a response in 10 mins is about 48hrs faster than most installation companies and thats if they respond at all if you follow a lot of topics on here. 

Following on from other posts here, perhaps additional interface controls such as Havenwise are not for everyone but in my opinion as a so called expert in ASHP's given the complex standard of manufactures controls, I think it is a very good option for a large part of the market. Most clients don't want to know, learn or change their controls, they just want it to work and with Havenwise keeping an eye what else would they need? 

Posted by: @ashp-bobba

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@hcas Excellent service, I have 2 clients about to engage your software for their systems and it is going on my new home system late this summer all connected to Ecodan's. (I am interested if mine can be connected to my solar and batteries as well to control the whole systems together?)

I'd be interested to understand this further too, as Havenwise is something that I'm considering subscribing to after my forthcoming heat pump installation.

We're on an EV tariff with a 7p rate between 23:30 and 5:30 overnight, during which we fully charge the batteries and, for most months of the year, can run from the stored batteries and the top-ups generated through the day from solar.  Is the Havenwise solution capable of identifying when the heat pump will be running from stored battery power, rather than the grid, during the peak hours, as the effective cost of generation of these is different at any point in time?

If not, would it require a workaround to create an artificial tariff to simulate this? (e.g. create a tariff of 7p from 23:30 to, say, 18:00 to estimate the drain of the battery on a particular day)

@sheriff-fatman 

Good post. I am also considering Havenwise for the same reasons as you, although without the EV.

@sheriff-fatman and @morgan : Very good question. At the moment, you cannot control your battery in the Havenwise app (yet). Havenwise does have 2 modes, which we built specifically for people with battery and solar PV.
One mode is where Havenwise "ignores" the tariff for heating. This is perfect for days when the battery and solar PV can cover the consumption of the house and heat pump between cheap tariff periods. The heat pump will run "low and slow" with perfect weather compensation and use battery-stored electricity or electricity from the solar PV.
And one mode where Havenwise does account for the electricity tariff for heating. So while your battery is charging with cheap grid power, your heat pump will run a bit harder as well to minimize heat pump electricity consumption outside of the cheap periods ("loadshifting"). This is great for days when heat pump consumption is relatively larger, i.e., when it's colder outside, because it ensures electricity from your battery and solar PV can now last throughout the day.    

What we see a lot of users do is switch to mode 1 in the shoulder months, and switch to mode 2 in the cold winter. Users can make that switch themselves in the app.

Btw, the hot water will always take into account the tariff because it just makes sense. And the 2 modes are available to any user, not only the ones with battery and solar PV.

Hope that helps!

@hcas Thank you for the clarification.  The current inability to 'see' the battery usage is no surprise, as I've encountered a similar issue with our EV charger, in terms of its ability to natively distinguish between excess solar generation and stored battery power, for which a workaround has to be applied.

The settings that you have outlined do seem reasonable, pending any ability to integrate this into a future iteration of the software.  I look forward to using Havenwise once I've had the heat pump installed, as it does seem to offer a cost-effective solution to maximising heat-pump efficiency.

Posted by: @hcas

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while your battery is charging with cheap grid power, your heat pump will run a bit harder [...]    ("loadshifting")

... a mode of operation which increases losses due to phase imbalance at the local substation

... and thermal stress in underground cables because of high current in the neutral. 🤨 

I don't want to lay the blame at the door of Havenwise and just leave it there.

Their App is based on price, rather than joules.
That's what makes it attractive to consumers looking to save money.

No one would want an App which

• uses more electricity when there's excess supply locally
• spreads demand across as wide a timeframe as possible in order to avoid voltage drop on the 11kV network
• avoids using electricity when gas-turbine plants undercut the green energy generators to keep their systems working in combined-cycle mode

All of those strategies are based on sound science, and would help to combat climate change.

But the tariffs for which energy suppliers seek Ofgem approval aren't based on energy efficiency, but on cold hard cash.

@hcas and Alex are trying to cope with a tariff architecture which doesn't achieve what we need it to.

Ethics doesn't feature very highly in the energy sector.

@transparent You make some interesting points. I don't agree with all of them though.

Are the smart tariffs from suppliers perfect? No.
But they go a long way because inherently they contain information about supply / demand of electricity. So if there is abundant renewable electricity, prices are low and therefore households are incentivised to soak up that electricity. Good for households, and good for the energy system.
Tariffs also contain information about grid congestion because grid charges also vary throughout the day. Grid charges are highest between 4-7pm, reflecting the load and stress that grids are under. So tariffs incentivise less use during the peak period. Good for households, good for the energy system.   

With respect to Havenwise, Havenwise exists to make heat pumps easier and cheaper for homeowners, and save time for installers. We can't solve the whole energy system at once, and losses at substations and thermal stress in underground cables is not what we directly optimise for. Tariffs are what homeowners are exposed to, and what determines their bill. That's what people care about and rightly so. That being said, we fundamentally believe that Havenwise actually reduces the stress on grids and substations.   

Lastly, users have the choice to enable or disable the optimisation for tariff. A lot of users choose to make the most of their tariffs with Havenwise. But there are also plenty who choose the "low and slow" operation of the heat pump. That can be for various reasons. Some users are on flat tariffs like OVO Heat Pump Plus, some have large batteries and solar PV, some just prefer a continuous input of heat in the home. The point is that users are in control.

Posted by: @hcas

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You make some interesting points.

Oh good!

I was wondering when/if you might pick them up! 😊

Posted by: @hcas

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Are the smart tariffs [...] go a long way because inherently they contain information about supply / demand of electricity.

They only do so as an average across GB.

As we deploy more electricity from renewable sources, there is greater divergence between those national statistics and what's happening 'on the ground'.

I live close to the border between Devon & Cornwall, so I've been seeing a lot of this problem developing.
It can be blowing a gale on the north coast, but the tariff remains stubbornly high because it reflects the average across all consumers.
As a result, residents in the West Country don't use the available generation, and it gets 'rejected' by NGED through Active Network Management (ANM).

ANM Plots are no longer published,
but here's one from about 5-years ago from the Grid Supply Point just west of Exmoor.

The darker the colour, the less electricity can be exported from the generation site which was being proposed.

Posted by: @hcas

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Grid charges are highest between 4-7pm [...]

tariffs incentivise less use during the peak period.

That's still true for the majority of the population, who live in towns and cities.

The early evening demand-peak is characterised by a decrease in line-voltage (corresponding to the higher current being drawn).

This graph shows the 3-phase current drawn on one Feed from a local substation in a small town with a population below 20,000

But the vast majority of the grid isn't in towns and cities.
It's out in the countryside...
... which is where most of the renewable generation is also located.

Here's a line-voltage plot from a month ago (April'25).
It shows no correlation to the theoretical early-evening peak.

Ignore purple and red. Those are reference plots.

Brown, Grey and Peach are LV Monitors placed on local substations, each supplied by different 11kV lines from the same Primary Transformer.

Yes I agree with the strategy taken by you and Alex regarding the Havenwise App.

It's exactly what's needed by heat-pump households to minimise their electricity bills.
It's very much to your credit that the software provides a number of options for consumers, rather than imposing a "we know what's best for you" solution.

But you'll now see that I have real data to tell me what's happening.

The decreasing correlation between price and demand is a major problem.

The present solution is to massively upgrade the grid to allow greater capacity.
That's reflected in the rise in Standing Charges since April'22

We can't keep living like that.

The 11kV level of the Distribution Grid is the one to watch.
It accounts for 90% of the cable-length in GB.

Upgrading it would be cripplingly expensive...
... and a political disaster. Think HS2 on steroids!

It is absolutely essential to change the approach to tariffs.

@transparent Agree the local situation can be quite different from the national average.

There are other mechanisms that complement tariffs at the local level, such as the local flexibility markets run by DNOs. Anecdotally I heard that less than 10% of the local grid currently uses some form of local flexibility. And quite often it's to deal with planned works / outages rather than a fundamental lack of capacity. One can only assume that local grid constraints will become more prevalent going forward, but I was surprised that the problem today isn't as big as I thought. Again here, different areas might be impacted more than others.

And I could see a future where tariffs contain some local specificity as well. Some people in the industry are very enthusiastic about zonal pricing.   

Anyways, this discussion is taking us quite far from the topic of the thread so perhaps we pick this up elsewhere!