We had our CTC ASHP fitted by our housing association contractors and it was a complete nightmare tbh there were several problems and we ended up after 2 years down the line after a load of visits and false info by contractor who basically didn’t know what they were doing reaching out to the manufacturers CTC who were much better and sorted out the system.
In the end they changed our unvented DHW cylinder it was faulty (noisy coils), a faulty incorrectly fitted ESBE valve, the TRV valves on rads were wrong and new ones fitted, the isolation switch outside was full of water and had been disconnected it needed replacement , the heating pump was set incorrectly and pretty much all of the settings on the control unit were wrong. 
The system is now working a lot better but we have no real way of knowing the scop or how economical it is, or what the flow temperature should be (never saw a heat loss survey)and also we were never shown how to work the system by the contractors. We ended claiming around £600 compensation from them for all the energy it used as it drove us into energy debt.

I have to say once we got intouch with CTC they were really good and Gogeothermal came out to resolve all the issues they were really great.

@retrorich It is very worrying that any of this should be necessary though,  having third parties involved to fit and commission heat pumps seems to place an additional barrier between the end user and common sense. When things go wrong (which of course, they never do, do they?!), the enduser finds redress has an additional layer of ‘not me guv’ in the chain to circumnavigate. Good for CTC that they put some effort into sorting it all out eventually - but… NONE OF THIS SHOULD BE NECESSARY IN THE FIRST PLACE! Come on MCS - wake up and do the job you profess to be doing! Regard, Toodles. (Rant over… for now)

I was chatting to a Vaillant engineer last week. He reckoned that about half of his heat pump call outs were due to poor design/ installation. And that’s for a premium brand. Shockingly poor! 

Posted by: @tallmarc

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I was chatting to a Vaillant engineer last week. He reckoned that about half of his heat pump call outs were due to poor design/ installation. And that’s for a premium brand. Shockingly poor! 

Only half!

Hi had  an ECO 4 installation in September last year. Old oil system taken out and heat pump installed complete with new radiators and pipework throughout, and a new DHW tank. Completed in 3 days.  Originally a 2 bedroom dormer bungalow.  14 radiators fitted.  The living room large radiator didn't fit as it would have poked above the windowsill so a smaller one was fitted which had a knock on later.  The system worked fine from commissioning and all seems balanced all radiators getting warm to much the same extent.  The 2 plumbers worked tirelessly and were polite and efficient they both seemed to know there stuff and had installed numerous of these systems.  Due to the grant process I had no choice of contractor so consider myself lucky. So that's the good bits now the not so good.   I had a lot of making good to do where the old radiators had been hanging.  I have no useable airing.cupboard it's full of admittedly neat pipework. The ASHP is a Grant Arona 13kw so much bigger than I was expecting, having seen my son's 6kw one.  I have not had a sight of the heat loss calculation.  The handover was pretty non existent.  Initially the system was running with WC but at a 50°C flow temp at -2°C. It was being controlled by a super sensitive wireless room thermostat, this lead to continual on/off of the ASHP.  At that point I knew nothing about efficient running of ASHP but reading and finally finding this site I 'grew a pair' and went into the installers menu and adjusted the parameters to flow temp between 40°C and 27.5°C  corresponding to -2°C to 20°C.  I have opened all the TRV to maximum and run the ASHP continuous, this has resulted in much longer runs by the ASHP and it ramping down for 3kw to 1kw power usage. I have long kept a close eye on my electricity consumption at the moment, taking out the 30kw per night of the 30 amp AGA, and 7kw background use age the ASHP is consuming 20 to 27kw per day. Is more economical than my oil, well no BUT now the whole house is warm all the time (temps around 20-21°C) all over the house. This was never the case before in fact we were chilly a lot of the time.   January Bill about £300, Dec Bill £225.  The only issue we have had was an inability to keep the living room warm when the temperature outside dropped below freezing.  A re  calculation of the living room heat loss from the installer showed the window size had been incorrectly input (much smaller than actual) plus the smaller radiator playing it's part.  A larger radiator was fitted in December and all fine since.  

We have also had 10 PV panels fitted but they are doing very little at the moment.  More on than as spring goes on I guess. Well that's it generally satisfied but much self learning having to take place little to no instruction given. 

@stopbar thanks for your contribution and I am pleased you are now sorted.

When I read it I immediately thought - this is so typical.  Installers leave giving little or no instruction to householders, and with the system set up to keep them warm, but at a high cost.  I fear that most householders grudgingly accept it and then moan to their friends about the high cost of heat pumps, the more enlightened ones, like you, take the matter into your own hands and do the optimisation that is needed.  How many times have we seen this on the forum?

On one level I don't 'blame' installers.  They know that the way to avoid call outs is to ensure people are warm but not too warm, and they also know that they cant afford to spend days adjusting things to be optimum.  So slapping on TRVs and an external thermostat, turning the weather compensation curve up high, and leaving it whilst telling the householder not to change anything is 'safe'. That is, after all, what they did with boilers, and at least some of us have been paying 10% more for our gas heating than we need to, and suffering lower comfort levels for years as a consequence, so why not also for heat pumps?

Worse still they are faced with customers who, in many cases, either don't or don't want to develop any understanding at all of the product they have purchased and expect everything 'just to work'.

How do we square that circle?  Eventually technology, in the form of interconnected heat pump specific TRVs (perhaps better called flow regulating valves) and self adjusting weather compensation, will come to our rescue.   Adia Thermal are developing just that, other start-ups will doubtless follow, and eventually (perhaps) the 'big boys' (Honeywell, Drayton, Danfoss etc) will cotton on to the fact that their current products are wholly unsuitable and in fact a mis-sell in the heat pump market (maybe someone will sue them at some point, they should.

However its going to be some years before this technology becomes mainstream and we need an interim solution.  Perhaps its a simple 'guide to your new heat pump' brochure designed to inform people and to encourage them to do a bit of self optimisation.  If its not that, what is is? 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The Good:

First of all I am immensely grateful for the ECO4 grant it is going to make a massive impact on our lives. We chose Smart Energy Homes as it seemed that they were based relatively close to us. After our initial enquiry Darren came around and did the initial survey and talked us through the process. Darren was excellent and extremely helpful. The approval process took a very long time for us (nearly a year) due to waiting for medical documents etc, however just before Christmas we got the call confirming we had been given the grant it was all systems go. I have been geeking out about heat pumps for a few years now so have a very good knowledge of the process involved. A very thorough heat loss and solar survey was done within a few days of the confirmation phone call. The surveyors were very professional and seemed to anticipate all my questions so we were confident that the system would be well designed vital for a heat pump system. We had a call the next day to say they would start 06 Jan, so we were delighted (at the time!). Throughout the install all the tradesmen were very polite and worked very hard barely taking a break throughout the day. They also offered heaters to help keep the house warm but we didn’t need them as had a log burner, AGA and our own to keep us warm. After all our issues throughout the install Mike came out and gave the system a finally check and answered all our questions.

The Bad:

Communication has not been great, after the initial flurry of activity we had no further comms until the equipment was delivered on the 06^th of Jan, before any tradesmen had turned up. When the heating engineers turned up they immediately got to work. They stripped out the old heating system on day one. We were told the install would take 5 days and that there was a team that would come around after the install and take away all the rubbish, neither of which happened. The install took nearly two weeks, bearing in mind we no longer had any central heating in January! They left the old boiler connected as it was on the same feed as our Aga, so we had hot water, and the log burner helped heat the house. Even though the install was complete it took over a month to get the final paperwork (warranties, guarantees etc).

The Ugly:

As the installer were definitely not local to us (they were commuting 3 hours in the morning and two hours home at  night) which meant they were only working from 1000-1500 and because of this they were rushing everything about the install. Basic things you would expect to happen didn’t, such as not using heat shields when soldering near skirting leaving scorch marks all over the house. They very helpfully removed all the old copper pipe but left the plastic pipe in place. One of the most unforgivable mistakes was that they didn’t pressure test the system before filling it back up so when they did turn the tap on, we had mains pressure water spewing into our lounge. Apparently, the Friday crew were in a particular rush to get home as they had forgotten to connect one of the rads!

The soak away under the heat pump was drilled 4 inches away from the drain hole of the pump which means we have the river Nile running from it, none of which goes down the soakaway! Even the bodge job of sticking a upvc elbow under it isn’t working properly. When drilling from one room to another they didn’t check the other side and drilled through a bookcase.

When they removed the old tank, they stripped the blue insulation off it and just dumped it in the loft (bizarre).

Finally, they turned the system on and then came the leaks! Even though we had been told they would not use any of the old pipe work as it had been an open system, and the old joints wouldn’t hold up in a pressurised system, guess what! The trail of destruction left behind as they rushed to fix the leaks was something to behold! More making good to be done.

The solar installers didn’t fare much better, they turned up, got to work and fitted everything in a few hours, amazing! However, in their rush to get the job done they reversed the polarity on one of the strings, they were in such a rush to leave the didn’t hand over the system or even let us know they were done. Unfortunately, the SolaX inverter they fitted comes with a dongle and a pretty rubbish app, so the company has decided that they are no longer going to install the dongle as they were getting too many call backs! Problem solved! If you know it is a poor product why stock it. Luckily, I installed the dongle and hardwired it to my network and immediately saw there were faults so had to call them back out to fix it. Any non-technical person would be stuck with a non-functioning potentially fire hazard of a solar system.

Once the installers were finished on the inside and we were all connected with the pump running, it became obvious that the system had not been balanced. Half the TRVs were set to low or completely off and one of the rads lock shield was completely shut off. More faff bleeding the rads daily, topping up the pressure but by morning it was down again, yes you guessed it more leaks, so back out they came.

As our Aga used to heat the hot water, we needed to have the back boiler removed. So, once they were all done our Aga man came out and serviced the Aga. He went to fire it up again only to find that the installers had cut off the oil supply and capped off the pipe even after we expressly told them we were relighting the Aga after they were done. Where they had disconnected the oil boiler, instead of using a pipe cutter to cleanly cut the pipe and cap it off, they just used some pliers to cut the pipe at the wall so we were left with a crimped pipe in a wall that couldn’t be capped off. So, if we did connect the oil, it would be flowing into our hallway! They did reimburse us the cost of our Aga visit and come back to remedy the situation but we really could have done without the extra hassle.

Finally, was the mess outside, all the packaging and rubbish from the install which was supposed to be collected the day after they were done, sat in my driveway for weeks during which we had storms with winds of 70mph. We had to put all the old rads on top of the pile of rubbish to stop it blowing onto the A road next to our house. Even after it was finally removed, we are still finding screws in the gravel on the drive. The scaffolding that was used for just the one day of the solar install was finally removed after a month.

Conclusion:

Are we happy with our heat pump and solar? A resounding yes. Has this been a pain free install? A resounding no! Have the company fixed all the issues caused by the install? Mostly, it is now April and we are still waiting for them to come and fix more leaks.

Ideal HP290 installed by a sub contractor of CB Heating (wholly owned by EDF). Exemplary work ethic and quality of install. Took the initial design supplied by CB Heating and improved on it e.g we were expecting to box in a short run of exposed pipework but these were subsequently positioned under the floorboards. Ditto with the wiring for the heat pump where the installer found a way to route them following some existing underfloor wiring rather than around the outside of the house. All the electrical work by another sub contracted electrician was completed tidily and they cleaned up every night. I had some private work done installing two new towel rails to meet heat loss requirements and actually I don't know how they managed to make the pipework so tidy - they even painted the walls before the rails were hung so I didn't need to redecorate afterwards. Total install took 8.5 days but then the installer worked mainly alone for half the time and our house doesn't lend itself easily to significant change. CB Heating delivered a bespoke design rather than a plug and play approach. So, leap of faith but pleased with the outcome so far and ran the system for the first time last night with radiators and UFH playing nicely. Full handover and explanation. The only downside, and nothing to do with the install or CB Heating, is the remote control provided with the HP290, the Halo lite. Very limited in what you can do it seems and no easy way, as far as I can tell, to determine performance statistics, change water heating times, etc.

Posted by: @davesoa

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remote control provided with the HP290, the Halo lite

The Halo is just a room thermostat, not much else. All the running data is the controller for the heat pump.

So is your heat pump running weather compensation? Or a set flow temperature and the thermostat controlling house temperature?

If you don't have the manual download, easy to find.

@davesoa very good to know... I'll convey this to Clayton Browne (MD and the CB in CB Heating). Thanks for sharing. It's nice to see positive feedback.

Posted by: @johnmo

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Posted by: @davesoa

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remote control provided with the HP290, the Halo lite

The Halo is just a room thermostat, not much else. All the running data is the controller for the heat pump.

So is your heat pump running weather compensation? Or a set flow temperature and the thermostat controlling house temperature?

If you don't have the manual download, easy to find.

Yes the HP is running weather compensation and I’ve left the settings alone for the moment. I have the manual as it was left by the installer 

So your Halo lite should really do nothing, when connected to a heat pump is just an on/off thermostat - on or off based on temperature and or time. I would just set to about 3 or 4 degs above normal temperature 24/7. If you WC curve is set right the thermostat is just functioning as as temperature readout.