How good is the app support for your heat pump?

Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs)

Last Post by Majordennisbloodnok 9 minutes ago

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Steelbadger

(@steelbadger)

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Topic starter 15/10/2025 9:51 am

I've not been on here long, but one recurring theme seems to be that the apps are often a bit bare bones, and that the energy monitoring information is either limited or untrustworthy. It would be interesting to hear from the owners of different heat pumps about the app support (if it even exists). I have obviously heard about the seeming inaccuracy of the Daikin app's monitoring, and I've also heard a few complaints about the Vaillant app, too, but it would be great to get some more info on what all the different apps actually do.

Our Bosch 5800i 5kW has a ConnectKey installed which, in addition to giving Bosch remote access if needed, allows us to access it using 'HomeCom Easy' which gives the following information and controls:

At a glance see the hot water and controller room temperature as well as local weather.
Access more detailed data like flow-return temperatures, compressor modulation, start-stops and operation hours.
See the daily, monthly, and yearly energy consumption and generation. Data resolution is 0.1kWh with round-to-nearest, but the graph seems to use higher resolution data when it's being built.
See hourly data for the last three days, daily data for the last three months, and monthly data for the last three years. This shows consumption/generation, as well as flow/water/room/outdoor temperature, split between central heating, hot water, and cooling.
I get push notifications for any errors or warnings thrown up by the unit.
I can see and modify the schedule for both hot water and central heating target temperatures.
I can set the quiet mode level (limit maximum compressor power).
I can tell the heat pump I'm away (to turn it to frost protect), and I can schedule up to 8 upcoming holidays which will automatically start/stop the heat pump's holiday mode.
I can also export the energy monitoring data to a CSV file, but it's still limited to a precision of 0.1.

In general, I find the app okay. It's pretty slow, and it's either not caching any of the energy monitoring data, or it's just really, really slow. Allowing remote access to an engineer is a nice QoL thing to have, and the holiday programming is really nice.

I'd love to have access to the full data resolution rather than the rounded numbers as I'm a mathsy guy. I'd also like to have some kind of connection to Home Assistant or other smart home system.

Overall, not bad. The engineer in me wants more data, of course, but the control options are fairly good for a typical home owner. Then again, I don't necessarily know what I don't have.

So it's show and tell time. What does your app look like? How well does it work? What can you do with it, and what do you think is missing?

This topic was modified 3 hours ago by Mars

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Majordennisbloodnok

(@majordennisbloodnok)

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15/10/2025 12:44 pm

Show and tell, eh? OK, here goes.

I've got a Mitsi Ecodan and, as a unit, it works brilliantly; I've no complaints. The app, however, is a totally different story. They call their app Melcloud and strictly speaking that covers both the app you install on the phone, the browser-based web application so you can use it from your PC and all the behind-the-scenes cloud-based stuff that supports it.

The functionality is dated and limited, and the user interface is clunky.
There are areas of the heat pump's configuration that, if set at the console unit, are not communicated to Melcloud and therefore are not visible in the app nor even known about or taken into account by the cloud systems or anything that interacts with them (this would include third party tools like Havenwise, incidentally).
Getting information out based on historical data is limited to a set number of predefined reports, none of which allow you to actually download the displayed or underlying data for your own ad-hoc analysis.
On a plus side, there is an official integration into Home Assistant and, I believe one for OpenHAB. Given the install base of Ecodans, I'd be surprised if there weren't well supported integrations into other home management systems too. On the down side, the integration - at least as provided - has stopped reporting some pretty fundamental info such as energy in/out. As a result, I simply use Excel and call the underlying Melcloud API directly to get that info for analysis - yes, the data's there, just not well exposed.

My installers originally set the unit up to run under weather compensation, so I've had very little inclination to want to "control" it; it works very well with me just leaving it alone and consistently returns a decent SCOP. As a result, I rarely open the app and only look at the Melcloud bits of Home Assistant to check what the heat pump's doing at any given time. The only time I actually need to use the app is when Octopus advertise a saving session, at which point I use the app to schedule in advance a start and end time for putting the heat pump into holiday mode (turn it off 15 mins before the saving session and back on 15 minutes after the session has ended - the number of 90 minute holidays we've taken is rather stretching the idea of "going on a short break").

In short, the app is at least functional but a big corporation like Mitsubishi should be getting pretty embarrassed at how much they've neglected keeping it up with modern requirements.

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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