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Question about Ecodan's Room Autoadapt mode

afarmery · 2024-03-30T17:26:19Z

Hi, I’m after some advice from anyone with experience and knowledge of the Ecodan ‘Room Autoadapt’ function.I have an Ecodan 5kW ASHP and UFH in an old granite farmhouse. We did our best to internally insulate the ground floor walls, but I imagine it’s still a bit leaky. The installer fitted 3rd party (Heatmiser) stats and commissioned it to run according to the stat setting. I didn’t like this, and wanted to avoid the stop-start and high flow temperatures, so I set the stats to 21C as a temperature limiter, and slowly calibrated the weather compensation curve. We’re in far west Cornwall where it almost never freezes, and I ended-up setting the curve at 32C flow temp @ 0C outside) and 21C flow temp @ 15C outside. This maintained the internal temperature at between 19 and 20C (in Jan Feb and March), and if the energy monitoring on the FTC6 can be believed, the COP was over 6, which I was vey pleased with. I wanted to be able to control the Ecodan remotely, and have the option of adjusting the curve so that the house was at say 15C when unoccupied, and adjusting it back up a few days before going down there. I thought that I might be able to do this with Melcloud, but disappointingly the curve cannot be adjusted with Melcloud. The only option was to use the Room Autoadapt mode, which can be adjusted remotely via Melcloud. I understand that this control system automatically adjusts the curve to supply a weather appropriate flow temperature in order to achieve the set room temperature.I duly set this up (it involved me having to buy and fit a remote temp sensor and receiver, and a Wifi adapter, which to my astonishment I manged to do!). Autoadapt seems to work as advertised, i.e. it fixes the room temp at the value I set it to be (19.5C, as before) but I am puzzled to note that the flow temperatures are now between 30 and 35C (when outside temp is about 9C), way higher than when I was running on the ‘manual curve’. In my manual curve, the pump ran low and slow, and for much of the time. Now, it seems ot run hotter and for shorter periods (we’ve had a lot of solar gain recently which has shut it off). This doesn’t sound like a very efficient way to run it, and I doubt I’ll be getting a COP of >6 like before. Should I abandon Autoadapt and go back to manual curve, or is this normal and acceptable? Thanks for any advice,

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Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs)

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Gary

(@gary)

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Joined: 3 years ago

Posts: 350

05/04/2024 11:40 pm

Just an fyi not saying it won’t work but auto adapt was specifically designed to work with rads, Mitsubishi do not recommend it to be used with UFH due to the long reaction times that ufh requires.

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afarmery

(@afarmery)

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Topic starter 06/04/2024 6:52 am

Thanks HarriUp.

The COP figure of 6 was calculated from Energy out/Energy in, as displayed of the FTC6, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. May be optimistic. The low weather curve did seem to work over a range of AOTs. I switched to AA simply to control everything remotely when I'm not there, and to raise the temp a few days before arriving there. It's a shame one can't edit the WC in the app, in which case I'd have one curve for when away and another for when occupied. However, I'll persevere with tweaking the latency and flow temp limits in AA, and give it some time to adapt. Thanks for the suggestion about holiday mode, which I'll now explore. I think I'm slowly getting there!

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SUNandAIR

(@sunandair)

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07/04/2024 1:59 pm

@afarmery We are currently using weather compensation and have just returned after a 2 week setback set back to 10c.

What we did was to turn up the room stat 24 hours before we got home and the house was 19c when we arrived.

Our room stat works with MELCloud so has an entirely adjustable temperature which is done remotely using my phone.

We don’t have a third party thermostat we just have one wireless thermostat which ‘talks’ to the ftc6 controller.

if you are getting a CoP of 6 using WC and underfloor heating it might be better sticking with WC. We have found Auto Adapt especially struggles with large temperature rises such as after a long holiday setback. It seems to best cope with only a low rise of say 3degC. We noticed AA also started to learn high output recovery and then it never forgot high output even when it wasn’t needed. So in our experience with AA it’s best not allowing it to learn “bad habits”.

Here is our output during a long setback and recovery last week. As stated, after 24 hours operating at what would be our normal Weather Compensation Curve the room temp had recovered from 12c to 19c but having said that it has been fairly mild while we were away. We are operation radiators so perhaps your UFH might be a bit slower at recovery but the Mitsubishi wireless controller/thermostat allows you to remotely adjust the room temperature any time.

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afarmery

(@afarmery)

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Topic starter 07/04/2024 2:48 pm

👍 Thanks SUNandAIR.

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HCas

(@hcas)

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08/04/2024 12:50 pm

@afarmery Hello afarmery!
Yes agree, annoying you cannot adjust the curve remotely... I've come across this as well and started building a work around solution. It now has weather compensation, but also remote control without too large flow temperature swings, optimal use of variable electricity tariffs (that is optional, although beneficial in most cases), and a few other features. Sounds like that is what you need as well?

Btw, congrats on your COP - that's impressive!

CEO and co-founder at HavenWise

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afarmery

(@afarmery)

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Topic starter 28/04/2024 5:48 pm

Derek et al, Sorry for resurrecting this slightly old thread, but I'm now back at the property in question after a time away.
When I attempt to access "Operation Settings" which should give me access to the menu where I can alter the time-constant and the temps for Room Auto Adapt mode, I get a screen saying "System shut down?" rather than getting access to the sub-menus I'm looking for. Please could I ask your advice? Does this mean the option isn't open to me? If I say 'yes' to System Shut Down, would that enable it, or just get me into a deeper tangle? THANKS. A