Posted by: @grahamh-energy-donkey

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if you have a midea the warranty will be with Midea i guess, 

As I said before, it is all rather opaque. The actual warranty document has both Midea and FHP letterhead/logos on it, and is 'signed' by Freedom Heat Pumps Ltd. On page 2 it says "Warranty Support: If you take care of the Midea products and something goes wrong, we aim to provide excellent customer service and the simplest, fastest and most economical means of repair in the industry" where 'we' presumably means Freedom Heat Pumps Ltd, as they 'signed' the document. The claims procedure says the claims are dealt with, at least in the first instance, by FHP: "Warranty Claim Procedure i) Contact made with Freedom Heat Pumps to diagnose fault / issue". Reading between the lines, the warranty may be underwritten by Midea UK (whoever and wherever they are), but any claims are dealt with by FHP, who may or may not exist if and when any claim is made. 

Posted by: @grahamh-energy-donkey

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ref the planet devices comment, you need to look at what it actually does,

So far as I can see, it is a very over-priced wifi modbus connection plus some sort of cloud thingy which will no doubt be used to hoover up customer data for 'commercial purposes' as well as providing jazzy dashboards for installers engineers and owners. Since Midea publish the modbus register addresses for their M Thermal Monoblock heat pumps, we can already see exactly what a modbus connection can and can't do with a Midea heat pump, and my guess is the same will apply to most if not all heat pump brands that Planet Devices can connect to.      

Posted by: @grahamh-energy-donkey

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Posted by: @grahamh-energy-donkey

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ref the planet devices comment, you need to look at what it actually does,

 

So far as I can see, it is a very over-priced wifi modbus connection plus some sort of cloud thingy which will no doubt be used to hoover up customer data for 'commercial purposes' as well as providing jazzy dashboards for installers engineers and owners. Since Midea publish the modbus register addresses for their M Thermal Monoblock heat pumps, we can already see exactly what a modbus connection can and can't do with a Midea heat pump, and my guess is the same will apply to most if not all heat pump brands that Planet Devices can connect to.      

Unless Midea have made modifications to their heat pump interfaces, any third party solution will be using what's already known about and well documented. Any third party solution can only work with the data the heat pump provides through that interface, which is no more nor less than what's available locally.

As for what any third party solution does, that's a different story. Some may be useful, some not. Some may be good value, some not. We can only judge on what information is available. I would suggest we don't continue with any conjecture about any product that hasn't launched yet and for which no information is publicly available. Let's not forget advertising (unless paid) is not allowed on this site and this forum is most certainly not a pre-launch hype platform. If any new product or service does indeed get launched we can discuss it then - within the confines of the forum rules, of course.

@cathoderay The modbus protocol is known, you can spy on what the application does easily enough. Spying on the app is a bit trickier but not impossible and there are tools to do it. Many Android apps are quite eye opening in their complete disregard for privacy and laws though and nobody seems to care.

Posted by: @etchedpixels

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Spying on the app is a bit trickier but not impossible and there are tools to do it. Many Android apps are quite eye opening in their complete disregard for privacy and laws though and nobody seems to care.

Never a truer word....

Posted by: @etchedpixels

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Spying on the app is a bit trickier but not impossible and there are tools to do it. Many Android apps are quite eye opening in their complete disregard for privacy and laws though and nobody seems to care.

The Midea app only collects very limited data, but it can be spied on ie accessed eg by using the midea_ac_lan addon for Home Assistant. The way to get full access is over modbus, that way your have full read and where it applies write access to all the registers. This is no doubt what the commercial operators who produce expensive products that claim to achieve miracles in monitoring and control do. You and I can do the same thing for free using python albeit after spending a few bob on the necessary hardware. Here's what my heat pump was doing on April Fool's Day this year, the 1300 to 1400 spike is the domestic hot water:

and once you have dragged the data out the unit then what? 

so you can tell me the temperatures and the flow rate etc, but what are you going to do with this information?

its what you do with the data that is the value. 

Posted by: @grahamh-energy-donkey

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and once you have dragged the data out the unit then what? 

so you can tell me the temperatures and the flow rate etc, but what are you going to do with this information?

its what you do with the data that is the value. 

Absolutely. Totally agree. @cathoderay and I, amongst others, have posted extensively about not just how to get the data out but also how to use it. We have also posted extensively about the limitations third party solutions frequently have.

The most important limitations have proven to be:

• Third party solutions are still services provided by someone else. Great whilst that someone is still in business and sticking to the commercial agreement you signed up for. If the someone goes out of business, your helpful service evaporates. If the someone decides to put their prices up, you're faced with a stark choice of accepting the hike or stopping using the service.
• Third party solutions almost exclusively don't know about other related kit that may impact the optimisation they're trying to do. How can you optimise use of a time of use tariff if you don't know there's a battery that might be able to provide free leccy instead of cheap leccy? Or perhaps what you do with the EV is more important than what you do with the heat pump. Or perhaps the forecast sunny spell tomorrow will influence what you do with the heat pump now.

As you say, what you do with the data is where the value is and several members on this forum are generating far more value from their data than anything commercially available.

I think there are two separate debates running together here.

The first is technical. Extracting data from a heat pump is not especially novel in itself. The machine already knows its temperatures, operating states, compressor behaviour and, depending on the installation, perhaps flow and electrical consumption. The interesting part is what happens after that data has been collected.

Most homeowners do not need another screen full of numbers. They need interpretation. Is the system behaving normally, is something drifting, is the heating curve sensible, is performance deteriorating, is a fault developing and is there anything worth changing? A platform that can turn raw data into reliable, useful guidance may have genuine value, even if the underlying information originates from familiar registers. I'll be honest here, I've been working on a side project for a couple of months that kinda does some of this, but is reliant on homeowner input. More on that another time.

The second debate is about ownership and dependency. This thread exists because FHP Cloud disappeared. That should make us cautious about replacing one closed platform with another, however good the dashboard may be. I would want any replacement service to make clear who owns the data, whether it can be exported, what happens if the subscription ends and whether the hardware remains useful if the company or cloud service disappears. Look at Givenergy.

I also think there is a difference between monitoring and improving a system. A platform can be excellent at displaying what a heat pump is doing without necessarily proving that it lowers consumption, improves comfort or identifies faults earlier. The stronger proposition would be one that can demonstrate those outcomes rather than simply presenting the same information more attractively. None of that means a commercial platform is inherently a bad thing. Good interpretation, benchmarking and support cost money to develop and maintain. But the value needs to sit in the analysis and service, not in locking homeowners away from their own data.

Posted by: @editor

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I also think there is a difference between monitoring and improving a system. A platform can be excellent at displaying what a heat pump is doing without necessarily proving that it lowers consumption, improves comfort or identifies faults earlier. The stronger proposition would be one that can demonstrate those outcomes rather than simply presenting the same information more attractively. None of that means a commercial platform is inherently a bad thing. Good interpretation, benchmarking and support cost money to develop and maintain. But the value needs to sit in the analysis and service, not in locking homeowners away from their own data.

That's a very good point.

Homely has pitched itself as an optimisation service, and has received significant criticism for potentially obfuscating facts and keeping customers away from their own data.

In contrast, Melpump (a Mitsubishi Melcloud alternative) has generally produced fairly positive feedback for simply showing what Mitsubishi show but doing it better.

That's not to say I endorse or reject either of these solutions but as @editor says the value does indeed sit in the analysis and service.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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In contrast, Melpump (a Mitsubishi Melcloud alternative) has generally produced fairly positive feedback for simply showing what Mitsubishi show but doing it better.

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I should also remind people that Melcloud only provides a fairly basic subset of the heat pump data. Melpump's solution to this has been to team up with a forum member here (@f1p) who wrote some open source ESP32 firmware to talk with the heat pump locally. In practice, this means that either you can run your own local solution in parallel with Melpump or, if Melpump were to choose to impose a price hike on a captive audience (not that I expect that to happen, I might add) the customer would still have a local communication module that could continue to provide value. Whilst I might not go so far as to actually endorse Melpump's product (I don't know enough about it) there is a lot to be said for the collaborative and open way they've gone about implementing it.

Posted by: @etchedpixels

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you can spy on what the application does easily enough.

Don't underestimate the time it takes, reverse engineering protocols with limited documentation requires a data, analysis and a methodical approach.

Modbus might be a bit easier but there is still a common requirement to make a reliable, dependable framework for onward connection.

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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open source ESP32 firmware

The melpump variation really only differs by streamlining the pairing process in creating the integration into melpump automatically, therefore simplifying the configuration required and removing any unnecessary components.

I think this leads on to the other quote;

Posted by: @majordennisbloodnok

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there is a lot to be said for the collaborative and open way they've gone about implementing it

As really only a branch of the open source version it does work very well for user flexibility.

One of the biggest challenges for corporations is the matter of liability - but if the mobile phone manufacturers were able to overcome this with open source Android then hopefully some learnings can be applied to other industries 

Having reverse engineered plenty of stuff I don't. Nor the ability of the vendor to randomly break the protocol with an update. I had my Ecoflow river doing automations that Ecoflow most definitely didn't intend to be available in that product range (they basically chose to make the river not support automations as a marketing segmentation), and mysteriously and silently the protocol changed a bit and it broke, twice in fact 8)