Help me keep the faith with my air source heat pump installation

AdamK · 2025-03-29T13:05:20Z

i knew when setting out on this road it would be a challenge i just didnt know how much of one it would be. after having many quotes some i couldnt fathom why they were so high i thought id sorted an installer. problem is they are 72miles away so first issue was doing a remote heat loss which has been back and forth several times to get it more or less correct, but still have one room thats 2m2 smaller than what i measured. anyway the next issue was getting the 28mm primaries in before the new kitchen ceiling goes in. they sent a plumber that proceeded to bugger the job up as the wall sleeve kit hadnt been supplied to him. so sent him on his way. was promised the sleeve kit the next day and i said my plumber could fit it to save them sending an engineer. next day no kit. add to this all the mods im having to do to pipe work to maximise efficiency and im seeing why the take up is tiny in the UK. im not naming the company as they are a recommended one and have apparently done good work else where but maybe thats in there local area. i know living in Boston creates its own issues being miles from any proper trades so if someone asked me would i recommend getting a heat pump in my area id have to say no. theres just not enough skilled trades where i live.

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Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs)

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dr_dongle

(@dr_dongle)

Trusted Member Member

Joined: 2 years ago

Posts: 30

08/01/2026 10:42 am

@agentgeorge Fortunately the one thing that you *won't* need to worry about is the wiring because there is hardly any! The eBus board has a socket on it and comes with a detachable plug that takes two wires (+/-) - you attach that to your eBus, plug in the board and you're good to go. + and - should be marked and the documentation claims that getting it wrong won't fry anything but I've not put that to the test. The board then broadcasts its own little WiFi network (SSID), you attach to that and a Web page should come up (if not then the IP address is in the documentation) and you can set parameters, the main one of which is to give it an IP address on your home network (static or DHCP). The firmware should be perfectly good enough to kick off with and once you have done that then once rebooted it'll be broadcasting eBus packets to your network till you unplug it.

What follows assumes that you are running HomeAssistant (HA). Unless you bought a pre-installed and configured HA box then, again, you'll have at least passing familiarity with Linux.

At this point you can telnet to the eBus card on its IP and port and all being well you'll see a load of digital junk coming back at you.

You next need to download and install an eBus daemon (software that runs permanently listening for stuff) called ebusd within the HA machine and tell it the IP address of the eBus card. This then catches the eBus traffic from the board, tidies it up a bit and looks for somewhere to send it within HA. A common way of handling that is to install an MQTT daemon in HA, another piece of software that runs permanently and is part of the MQTT integration for HA and handles messages from other software. Here, MQTT knows how to deal with ebus packets (I'd need to check where it got told this, possibly when the ebusd daemon was installed) but a collection of ebus devices and entities should then appear in HA which can be built into cards and histories.

Most integrations are installed in HA simply by selecting them from a table. The more experimental and niche ones are made available in collections like GitHub and appear in a separate HA collection called HACS.

I think my main problem with the documentation was that it gave you lots of detail but omitted the one thing that was so blindingly obvious to the writers and readers that they didn't mention it and without which nothing else made any sense. A lot of the time after extensive research I would come back to the original documentation and think. "Oh, so *that's* what they meant".

I am *not* going to claim to be an expert in this august company 🙂 and anything I have said may have been overtaken by newer and easier ways of doing it but I can help avoid some blind alleys.

There is or was a separate way into the Vaillant data via an integration called MyVaillant or MyPyllant. This, though interrogates the Vaillant servers and needs to be used with caution since it can flood them at which point you'll be suspended for an hour or two before it replies to further data requests.

Hope this helps and is mostly accurate!

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SimonF

(@simonf)

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Joined: 1 month ago

Posts: 3

08/01/2026 7:11 pm

Posted by: @agentgeorge

↑

@simonf no sensor is accurate unless calibrated, I ran the calibration cell in the test laboratory at Gaydon Proving Grounds for a few years; everything had to be +\- 0.1C at 20C stabilised for 1h with the test engineer in the cell, as entering the cell affects the calibration as the human acts as a heat source.

It makes me smile when I read posts on here with stats of room temperatures as 21.5C, without a tolerance and calibration certificate its meaningless and is just a random number.

I agree and that’s why I don’t believe a lot of the high COPs that get reported on Vaillant units.

It’s a shame Vaillant don’t calibrate the sensors. When I had them out to replace mine the Vaillant engineer had to go through 3 different sensors to try and get a pair which matched. They had no process for testing or calibration.

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