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Home Alone with Home Assistant (previously A Beginner's Guide to ASHP Monitoring)

cathodeRay · 2023-01-08T14:45:53Z

An even more Important Note: as this thread amply demonstrates, the original notion of a Beginner's Guide got lost in the complexities that appeared as I attempted the development of a simple monitoring system that any interested lay person could implement at reasonable cost and with sensible effort. The two main problems that emerged are (1) the difficulties of communicating with a heat pump over a network and (2) what software to use to do the monitoring. I decided to run with Home Assistant, a decision I consider based on my experience to have been a mistake. The fundamental problem is that it is too complex, and the ensuing chaos is a bit like trying to use a Met Office super-computer to work out the cost of your weekly grocery shop. What could possibly go wrong? I am now well on the way towards having established a viable wired connection, using much simpler software and hopefully will post details in a new thread, A Beginner's Guide to Heat Pump Monitoring v2, before too long. In the meantime, this thread will remain available, partly because it contains some material that is still relevant even when using a wired connection, and partly because, well, it is a record of a journey down a long long road with many a winding turn that leads to who knows where...or you could say it is one home owner's experience of being home alone with Home Assistant. Part 1: Introduction Important note, especially for newcomers to heat pumps: all of this, everything in this thread is voluntary, you absolutely do not need to do it, so don't let this thread put you off heat pumps, because they are just 'too complicated'. That said, unlike fossil fuel boilers, heat pumps are not a 'fit, fire and forget' solution, you do need to have some understanding of things like COPs (coefficients of performance), to get the best out of them, and avoid spending £££ that you don't need to spend. In most if not all cases, the manufacturers' own inbuilt displays will have all the necessary data, but not necessarily in an easy to read and assimilate form. Voluntarily adding your own monitoring will give you access to data that is both more comprehensive and better presented. But you don't have to do it, only do it if you want to do it. I'm starting this thread to provide what it says in the title: a beginner's guide to air source heat pump monitoring. I am just such a beginner, and frustrated by the limited questionable and ephemeral data provided by the heat pump's standard installation and 'app', I wanted a way of getting more accurate real time data that ended up being logged on my PC so that I could see what was really going on both in real time and over time. I am not a complete airhead when it comes to technical stuff, but every time I started googling how to set up such a monitoring system, I ended up with 30 tabs open in the browser, only to collapse under the weight of baffling jargon, multiple options and the sheer mass of either impenetrable or badly written posts that contradict each other. I was also rather put off by the fact that the top search results for most search queries I used tended to be full of 'my widget doesn't work with my gizmo, what can I do to make it work' threads, with rarely any actual solution provided. It all looks like a technology not yet ready for prime time. But I kept on coming back to it. Surely it can't be that complicated? The system is already sending heat pump data to the manufacturer's servers, which is then downloaded into the app. I've decided I am going to give it one last try. I'm setting a time limit: if I haven't got a working monitoring system by 1st April 2023 (choice of 1st April is deliberate), then the effort becomes history. This thread will document my progress, or lack of it, plus any other, hopefully many, other's input on the practical ways to get local monitoring working. My heat pump is a Midea M-Thermal mono block 14kw unit, but I am hoping some of what I learn will be useful to owners of other brands of heat pumps. In this first post, I am going to set out what I want. In summary: a simple, minimally invasive, affordable (preferably tens not hundreds of pounds) and reliable (both in operation and data quality) setup a locally based system, because I don't like sending my data to a commercial corporation, and then having to retrieve it from them. Put more bluntly, my data is my data, and I should have access to it real time and historical (ie logged) data that ends up on my PC that I can view with a browser based interface/dashboard access to the underlying data (ie it is stored in an easy to read format such as csv, xls or a simple sql based system eg sqlite) so I can check it, and if I want to, manipulate it minimum data set: energy in (kWh), energy out (kWh), flow and return temps (I have a plate heat exchange, need to decide whether I want both circuits monitored or just one and if so which one?), room temps from important rooms, and lastly outside ambient tem...

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Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs)

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

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Joined: 5 years ago

Posts: 1943

30/06/2026 12:11 pm

That's excellent news, @bontwoody.

So now it's worth a quick recap to ensure I understand correctly about what you can and cannot do within Home Assistant.

You can see the state of charge of your battery and actively tell it to charge from grid, discharge to grid or revert to being charged from solar.
You can see the current, previous and next Octopus unit prices for both import and export.
You can see what your EV and connected wall box are doing.
You can see the weather and solar forecast.
You can see the outside temperature, internal room temperature and generally what your heat pump is doing.

Is that correct?

105 m2 bungalow in South East England
Mitsubishi Ecodan 8.5 kW air source heat pump
18 x 360W solar panels
1 x 6 kW GroWatt battery and SPH5000 inverter
1 x Myenergi Zappi
1 x VW ID3
Raised beds for home-grown veg and chickens for eggs

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"

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bontwoody

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Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 1044

30/06/2026 12:22 pm

@majordennisbloodnok Not quite, I havent done anything with the EV and charger yet.

I got the script to work using the actions tab in the developer tools, I need to cement my understanding now on how to include that in an automation or yaml file. Still, its a positive move forward 🙂

House-3 bed partial stone bungalow, 5kW Samsung Gen 6 ASHP (Self install)
6.9 kWp of PV
10kWh DC coupled battery
Blog: https://thegreeningofrosecottage.weebly.com/
Heatpump Stats: http://heatpumpmonitor.org/system/view?id=60

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

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Posts: 1943

30/06/2026 1:13 pm

Absolutely agree, @bontwoody. Well worth continuing with a bit of experimenting to get familiar with the control you now have.

That said, it's now also worth making a more detailed list of things you want to achieve. By "detailed", I also mean including enough explanation to deal with any gotchas you can see.

For instance, one gotcha with the EV charging is that it will be regarded by the inverter as load just the same as the fridge or heat pump. However, you don't want to be charging one battery (your car) from another battery (your Luna), so it's well worth putting in place an automation or two to deal with that. For me, that means one automation to say "if the EV is charging, set the home battery's minimum SOC to 90%" and another saying "if the EV is not charging, set the home battery's minimum SOC to 10%".

As a result, you can come up with a list of IFTTT (If this then that) statements that describe what you want to put in place. It helps a lot in knowing how to structure your automations. I can happily share what I have, although you'd have to remember I am on Octopus Agile so they might not be entirely suitable for you.

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"

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bontwoody

(@bontwoody)

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Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 1044

30/06/2026 1:20 pm

@majordennisbloodnok Absolutely, I already know that I have an issue with EV charging outside of the IOG window that drains my home battery. FYI im a reasonable programer used to python and vb its just getting used to HA that takes a bit of time. 🙂

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

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Joined: 5 years ago

Posts: 1943

30/06/2026 1:52 pm

My apologies, @bontwoody. Completely misread your familiarity.

In that case, I suspect you've quite enough already to be able to fill in the gaps easily. Happy for you to shout if you need anything more, and in that case I won't go quite so basic in the explanation.

"Semper in excretia; sumus solum profundum variat"

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bontwoody

(@bontwoody)

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Joined: 4 years ago

Posts: 1044

30/06/2026 2:09 pm

@majordennisbloodnok No problem. I was glad of the help :-). Will just try and get my head around the syntax

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