Posted by: @drei

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Every winter go there, then come back, no need for a central heating system at all:

That was actually very popular with pensioners for a while.  Are you a pensioner?  Birds and other animals do of course migrate, but many humans consider nomads (also called travellers) somehow wrong.  Are they?

@temperature_gradient 

And then there's the running costs, where the benefit of the heat-pump's hugely better efficiency is entirely absorbed by the higher cost of electricity in Britain.

That's not necessarily true at all. 

I have now owned my Daikin 6kw for almost a year. It was installed (very well) by Octopus Energy. I have no solar nor batteries. My insulation is patchy.  My tariff is now a fixed rate deal with Fuse for 0.21 per Kwh + standing charge. 

I have spent less on whole house energy bills - electric only - than the year before - gas & electricity. I like a warm house, I work from home, I run it on weather comp without a thermostat to keep my house @ 22° during the day. It's super efficient. 

So even with my region's lairy standing charge & our stupidly high electric costs, it's a better deal.

But.... I concede, with the help of people in this forum, I geeked out on heat pumps before it was fitted, made sure I had good radiator acreage and struck lucky with an amazing team of Octopus fitters. These things help. 

@jamespa Others work such that you can only program setbacks  (or set forwards) by bouncing off an on/off sensor/thermostat the rest of the time, or using some home grown kludge.

There's a world of difference between using thermostats and dumping them. I prefer the latter - then there's no conflict between the heat pump and some bossy piece of thermostat kit on a wall somewhere.  Thus no 'bouncing', never any on/offs, just a heat pump with very clever internal design running things. 

The Daikin has very good controls in its MMI controller. The app is crap. If I run my Daikin via Leaving Water Temp control (pure weather compensation) there's no on/offs ever. It just ticks along 24/7. 

If I want to vary the leaving water temp via the curve I can just programme +/- the overshoot by 1° and it tweaks the curve accordingly for those specific hours but you wouldn't know - it's silent nothing goes on or off.  There's no 'home grown kludge' as you call it. No third party kit at all. 

It's impressive how those little algorithms quietly do their thing. 

Posted by: @lucia

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@jamespa Others work such that you can only program setbacks  (or set forwards) by bouncing off an on/off sensor/thermostat the rest of the time, or using some home grown kludge.

There's a world of difference between using thermostats and dumping them. I prefer the latter - then there's no conflict between the heat pump and some bossy piece of thermostat kit on a wall somewhere.  Thus no 'bouncing', never any on/offs, just a heat pump with very clever internal design running things. 

The Daikin has very good controls in its MMI controller. The app is crap. If I run my Daikin via Leaving Water Temp control (pure weather compensation) there's no on/offs ever. It just ticks along 24/7. 

If I want to vary the leaving water temp via the curve I can just programme +/- the overshoot by 1° and it tweaks the curve accordingly for those specific hours but you wouldn't know - it's silent nothing goes on or off.  There's no 'home grown kludge' as you call it. No third party kit at all. 

It's impressive how those little algorithms quietly do their thing. 

I completely agree. 

The extent to which heat pump controllers allow you to do this and at the same time do things like set back/set forward seems to vary quite significantly.  Daikin, as you say, and also Vaillant which I have, (doubtless there are others) being in the more flexible group, and others being less flexible. 

I had a discussion with the Samsung rep at the last installer show (Samsung appears to have one of the crudest UIs in this regard and I told the rep so!).  He was proudly demonstrating the latest colour UI and I asked him is it possible yet to program a set back/set forward without bouncing off the thermostat.  After some attempt to side step the question, he had to admit it wasn't.  His colleague then told me that the underlying logic to the UI hadn't changed, its just that the graphics were more fancy.  Some progress!

@drei Based on your recent posts, I am wondering what your original motivation was for a heat pump.  I do understand you have had a poor experience (which hopefully will get fixed), but setting this aside why did you go down the route in the first place?

This isn't a trick question, its a serious one because either you were mis-sold (which helps frame the situation) or it should be possible to achieve whatever objective you set out to achieve and thus make you happier.

Perhaps you could cast your mind back and let us know?