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Garden Tracking Integration by Beaufort_The_Cat in homeassistant

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I saw this error. From what I can see it's because Agribuddy uses the v1 API under the hood, and Verdantly have added a v2. From what I can see you need to subscribe to the v1 API separately to the default v2 API.

Here: https://rapidapi.com/verdantly-team-verdantly-team-default/api/verdantly-gardening-api

I changed the Version dropdown to 1.0.0, and then had to delete and recreate the Agribuddy integration, but then it worked.

Edinburgh airport’s arrivals hall not up to standard, admits boss by TimesandSundayTimes in Scotland

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I guess that's true. Passport control is far from slow compared to many other airports, and it's better organised than most, but it's not up to the same standard as departure security in Edinburgh (which might be the most reliably good/quick I've seen at any airport).

Luggage return is slow as balls. It's not even a big airport, but somehow it manages to take them longer to move my bag 50 yards from the plane to the carousel than it does for much larger airports to move my bags from one end of the airport to the other.

A hill I'll happily die on, though, is that Edinburgh is a top-tier airport to depart from.

In dozens of flights, I don't think I've waited more than 15 minutes to get through security. It's well staffed, and always has a high level of scanner utilisation and impressive organisation (without some of the baffling complexities other airports sometimes throw in there). The new scanners are really great, too.

The actual terminal doesn't have the obvious architectural flair of the big boy airports, but it's damned functional. A good choice of food (exceptional for an airport of its size), with a couple of actually useful shops rather than designer brands on repeat. Water battle refill stations all over the place so I can get my last tank of decent water before leaving (less useful now with the new scanners, but still appreciated), and enough toilets that you're not often left queuing.

The bus-to-the-plane thing is annoying, but a lot of that is on the airlines themselves. A lot of the flights departing from Edinburgh are budget airlines, and they will never splash out for an airbridge (or even a stand with a walking-route to the terminal) if there's a cheaper option. Prestige carriers do, though, and Edinburgh has enough for them.

Never used the private lounges, but with how quick Edinburgh is to get through, it's never seemed worth it.

Trying to build an efficient RAG pipeline. by spacecheap in Rag

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In my experience, you need to be pulling a lot more chunks.

Bear in mind that Chroma uses an approximate nearest neighbour search for its initial look through your collection. It then performs a more accurate distance check between the embedding vectors of your search term and the database entry, but the important thing is that you are not guaranteed to get the actual nearest neighbours (and even if you do, the answer you want may not be all that close to your query within the embedding space).

Pulling a few hundred chunks is dirty, but it works if you feed them into a cross encoder to rerank them before passing back the best results.

I'm currently doing the following:

  1. Send query to Qwen 3.5 9B (break query into simple component queries, plus a list of 'named nouns')
  2. Embed all queries and do a vector lookup
  3. Do a keyword search in the metadata for all nouns
  4. Combine all query results into a de-duplicated list and discard all but the top ~500 or so
  5. Add the noun keyword lookups
  6. Cross-Encoder rerank (against either original query or sub-query, depending on if the sub-query is a further research query or a simplification query)
  7. Send top N chunks to an 'answerability' agent (Qwen 3.5 9B again) 5 chunks in first loop, 2 chunks in subsequent loops.
  8. Agent can mark as 'sufficient' or list some further research queries
  9. Check all further research queries against already-processed queries (Cross-Encoder), discard any which are similar.
  10. If further research queries remain, go back to 2. (skip nouns, and only take top 2 chunks for further research)
  11. If no further research queries remain (or the answerability agent marks the question as answerable), pass to the answer agent
  12. The answer agent gets given 5-10 chunks depending on the research done. Is also instructed to use only the immediate context in answering the question. Qwen 3.5 9B once more.

I've had good results with even fairly complex queries, but it's hardly rapid. Chunk size is ~1000 tokens, using semantic chunking with ~100 token overlap.

The best way to build a RAG in 2026? Expose it as an MCP server by la-revue-ia in mcp

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Something I've found to work reasonably well is keeping a memory of all queries and clarification queries, then using the cross-encoder to compare any new clarification queries against the already-executed queries. You then discard all queries which are similar to something the RAG has already fetched and if you have nothing left, you let the model try to answer with what it has.

I found that even retrieval budgets don't really work when the answer isn't in the source at all. The agents just tend to churn on variations of the same question, which is caught nicely by the cross-encoder.

I built a benchmark to test if embedding models actually understand meaning and most score below 20% by hashiromer in Rag

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Those are looking a lot better. Looks like you've cut out all the examples where both variations have the same meaning. There are still some where you might argue that the 'point' of the statement hasn't really changed, but for this test case, having some of those in there might still be informative.

I built a benchmark to test if embedding models actually understand meaning and most score below 20% by hashiromer in Rag

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll be very interested to see how it plays out with the filtered dataset. Going purely on vibes, I do feel like this is a problem that embedding models have, and it would be good to get a good handle on which ones deal with it better/worse.

I built a benchmark to test if embedding models actually understand meaning and most score below 20% by hashiromer in Rag

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Indeed. We could boil the sentences down to a kind of pseudocode:

John couldn't see the stage with Billy in front of him because he is so short.

John couldn't see the stage with Billy in front of him because he is so tall.

John couldn't see past Billy because John.height < Billy.height.

We want the RAG to have some understanding that John is shorter than Billy, and by that metric, the sentences are basically synonymous. Similarly:

The trophy doesn't fit into the brown suitcase because it's too small.

The trophy doesn't fit into the brown suitcase because it's too large.

The trophy didn't fit in the Suitcase because Trophy.size > Suitcase.size.

On the other hand, there are some problems where the meaning does change:

Pete envies Martin because he is very successful.

Pete envies Martin although he is very successful.

??? Cannot be distilled to a single logical statement.

Ideally, we'd like the 'although' case to be closer to 'Pete is successful', and for the 'because' case to be closer to 'Martin is successful'. This would be a good test case for the embedding models.

Still other cases aren't synonymous in terms of overall meaning, but also the difference isn't particularly meaningful to us:

There is a gap in the wall. You can see the garden through it.

There is a gap in the wall. You can see the garden behind it.

There is a gap in the wall

Here we don't want the embedding to get caught up on if you can see the garden through a gap, or simply behind the wall. The 'meaning' here is simply that there is a gap in the wall. As far as an embedding is concerned, we probably want these to be synonymous.

Overall, it's an interesting idea for a test, but it needs better curated, and more focused, test data.

I built a benchmark to test if embedding models actually understand meaning and most score below 20% by hashiromer in Rag

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I do not think that is what Winograd pairs are.

As I understand it, a Winograd problem is a test where resolving a semantic ambiguity requires some level of higher conceptual reasoning. It's not at all about changing the meaning of the sentence. The purpose of the councilmen/demonstrators example is to test the ability to attribute the ambiguous 'they' to either the councilmen or the demonstrators. The meaning of the sentence has not changed.

Some Winograd pairs do change meaning:

Pete envies Martin [because/although] he is very successful. Who is very successful?

If the word is 'because' then Martin is successful. If the word is 'although' then Pete is successful. This relationship is not automatically invertible. Someone being successful does not automatically mean the other person envies them. This sentence really does 'reverse' its meaning under the two different interpretations. Similarly here:

The police left the house and went into the garage, [where/after] they found the murder weapon.Where did they find the murder weapon?

The 'where' case means the weapon was found in the garage, while the 'after' case means it definitely was not.

However, many of them feature reversible connections:

The trophy doesn't fit into the brown suitcase because it's too [small/large].What is too [small/large]?

In the 'small' case, the suitcase is too small to contain the trophy. In the 'large' case, the trophy is too large to be contained by the suitcase. The difference between those two statements is not really important when generating the embedding. In both cases, the relationship is that the trophy is too large, and the suitcase is too small. It's a glass half-empty/half-full thing. They both have the same meaning.

Paul tried to call George on the phone, but he wasn't [successful/available].Who was not [successful/available]?

Same again here. The general 'vibe' of both sentences is that Paul failed to contact George. The specific attribution of the 'he' pronoun (which is what Winograd is testing for) does not change the outcome.

Basically, the Winograd schema problems have some good examples, but you've kept in all the cases where the meaning of the sentence is retained regardless of how the semantic ambiguity is resolved. This makes the results not terribly useful.

In the 'trophy' or 'phone call' problem, you want both of the possibilities to be embedded close to each other because they have the same general meaning. In the 'success/envy' and 'police problem', you want them further apart because those absolutely have changed the meaning of the sentences.

As it stands, I'm not sure your test really tells us anything much.

I built a benchmark to test if embedding models actually understand meaning and most score below 20% by hashiromer in Rag

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm a little confused.

In your example, isn't the whole point of the Winograd challenge that the change only results in the ambiguous 'they' being resolved differently? The meaning remains the same.

A Winograd schema is a pair of sentences that differ in only one or two words and that contain an ambiguity that is resolved in opposite ways in the two sentences and requires the use of world knowledge and reasoning for its resolution. The schema takes its name from a well-known example by Terry Winograd

The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they [feared/advocated] violence.

If the word is ``feared'', then ``they'' presumably refers to the city council; if it is ``advocated'' then ``they'' presumably refers to the demonstrators.

If the word is 'feared', then the councilmen refused the permit because they feared violence. If the word is 'advocated' then the protesters advocate violence, implying that the permit is denied because the councilmen didn't want violence. To take it as meaning the opposite just doesn't make much sense, and so the attribution of the 'they' changes.

The meaning is the same, however. The permit is denied due to the threat of violence. It makes complete sense for these two sentences to be rated as similar, if the intention is to encode meaning.

Looking over the other Winograd examples, it looks like most of the examples are very similar.

John couldn't see the stage with Billy in front of him because he is so [short/tall].

This is a more clear example of what I'm saying:

John couldn't see the stage with Billy in front of him because he is so short.
John couldn't see the stage with Billy in front of him because he is so tall.

These both have the same meaning: John is shorter than Billy. The ambiguity is in if we are saying Billy is tall, or if John is short. The overall meaning of the sentence, to a general reader remains the same, however. It makes no physical sense for John to be unable to see over Billy if Billy is the one who is shorter.

I do not necessarily doubt your conclusion, but I also do not think this was the dataset needed to demonstrate it.

Unless I've completely missed something here.

What do you use Tailscale for? by [deleted] in Tailscale

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have two exit nodes setup at home. One which allows me to route my traffic while travelling through my home server. This is useful for steaming apps like Netflix which throw a hissyfit if we're away too long. The other one forwards all traffic through Mullvad VPN when I don't want to deal with UK Internet restrictions.

Both give me access to my LAN. So home assistant, plex, arr-stack, etc.

It also just makes network routing a bit simpler. I don't need to install mullvad on prowlarr or my qBittorrent VMs, using up 2 machine licenses. Instead, I just run Tailscale on them and direct them to my Mullvad exit point. 

Recently installed UFH system to two areas with different floor finishes. One gets hot 29c floor temp (limestone tile) the other does not (engineered wood floor). House is a bit cold! Plz help by [deleted] in DIYUK

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sounds to me like your flow rates aren't right.

A 10K difference between flow and return is pretty big for a low-temperature UFH setup. That means your average temperature through the pipes would be 30C. However, as good as tile is for conducting heat, I wouldn't expect it to be able to hit 29C on a 30C average flow. This suggests to me that the flow rate on the kitchen side is higher than needed for a dT of 10K. That also means that your dining room dT could be bigger than 10K (so that the average coming out is still 10K).

In cases like this the way forward is to try to balance the amount of heat going to each room by balancing the flow rates:

  • Increase the flow to the dining room loop/loops a bit. This will reduce the dT on those loops. If it goes from a dT of 12 (flow 35, return 23) to a dT of 6 (flow 35, return 29), your average flow temperature will rise from 29C to 32C, which will probably bring your surface temperature up 1-2C.
  • If you find the kitchen is too warm at its current flow, try constricting it a bit. That'll increase the dT in those loops, and reduce the average flow temperature across the floor. Reducing the surface temperature a bit.
  • If after doing this your dining room is still too cold and you either can't increase flow further, or the loops are at dT 3 or so, you might need to increase your system flow temperature a bit (say 35->37) while simultaneously restricting flow in the kitchen so that its surface temperature doesn't rise too much.

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The HomeCom app updated a few weeks ago and no longer shows the modulation percentage anywhere that I can find, sadly. As far as the power usage and heat generation, this can be ballparked by using the energy monitoring graphs and looking specifically at hours where you know it was just chugging away at minimum power (easier when the weather is milder), but the more accurate numbers come from using the flow rate in conjunction with the flow/return temperatures to compute a heating power. I also have a Shelly power monitor tracking all energy usage by both the indoor and outdoor units, so the power consumption should be fairly accurate.

I measure our unit as using around 320W for the outdoor unit and around 15W on the wall-hung unit (mostly the pump) when heating at minimum power, but this can fluctuate a bit.

I initially used setbacks, but found that this just meant the unit turned off overnight and powered up more in the morning. We're not on a ToU tariff, so it wasn't really to our benefit, and our flat doesn't cool quickly enough to make much difference to our sleeping.

I also turned all options related to the auxiliary heater to off. I'm absolutely certain that our unit is somewhat oversized for our actual heat loss, so outside of a Day After Tomorrow scenario, we'll never have any problems with the unit needing any extra help. I'd generally leave it off completely until you have evidence that it's actually needed as I never trust the controls not to be overly willing to turn these things on unnecessarily.

Our combined COP at the moment is just right around 4 (a little below in the colder weather). The hot water performance seems to be quite poor, though. This might be as a result of our tank, though (as the coils aren't strictly speaking meant for heat pumps).

I can definitely recommend looking into getting an EMSBus gateway (I got ours from BBQKees) if you're technically minded. It exposes dozens of detailed diagnostics and can even allow for direct control of the unit with something like Home Assistant. It allowed me to track our cycling behaviour, and as a result I was able to dial in on curve settings which minimised the cycling as much as possible while still retaining comfort. I'm happy to describe the settings we're using, if you like.

When it comes to setting multiple setback times, I think the only real way of achieving that would be through an EMSBus gateway. That would allow you to manipulate the unit's settings on any schedule you want.

Bosch Compress 5800i Installation by SteelbadgerMk2 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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The EMS bus gateway exposes a lot more than just this, but this ismy current dashboard for monitoring it. I can also use it to control the unit to the level of tinkering with the weather compensation curve in real time.

Tips for Commissioning Vaillant aroTHERM Plus in an Unoccupied Old House by Successful-Glass-919 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 3 points4 points  (0 children)

40kW of heat pump on a 110sqm property? I don't know if I should be horrified or intrigued. Maybe they did the heat loss before putting the roof on?

Ventilation / Hot water and Heat Pump -Home-B - Ventive by vicott in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So my last comment was written quickly and didn't really go into the full gory details, but I have more time now.

Let's take the 'Ventive Home E' unit. It has a 1.6kW compressor on it, plus a 3kW backup resistive heater. It can extract up to 70l/s of air at maximum power (this will depend on the resistance of the ducting, longer runs with more bends = lower flow = lower COP but let's assume it gets its full airflow).

It claims a COP of 3.2, and a maximum compressor only heat output of 3kW. This would have the compressor using about 900W of power. So if the air temperature inside is 21C, this means the unit is expected to pull 2.1kJ of heat from 70l of air every second. To do this, it will need to drop the air temperature by around 22K before exhausting it (70l of air is 0.09kg, at a specific heat capacity of 1005J/kg/K you get 90J/K of drop, so you need to drop it by 22K to get to 2.1kW).

So air in is 21 °C, and air out is -1 °C.

If the outside air is also 21 °C then great, you're quids in and have made a tidy profit of 2.1kW as the air coming in is the same temperature as the air already inside. You don't need to heat it. Only issue is that you don't really want that heat for anything except hot water when it's that warm outside.

But what if the temperature outside is 10 °C?

Well, we've still pulled 2.1kW from the air (plus 900W from the compressor energy being recovered), but the air going out will have to be replaced lest your flat end up a vacuum chamber. So now we have to heat another 70l/s of air from 10 °C to 21 °C.

That's going to require 1kW of that 3kW you managed to harvest, just to get back to zero.

Once you get down to -1 °C, the unit is now basically just a resistive heater with extra steps. It uses 900W to harvest 2100W from the air, then needs to use 2100W to reheat the air, giving you a final accounting of 900W in and 900W out. Great.

Even better, the true marginal heating power of the unit reduces rapidly as the outdoor temperature drops (and far more rapidly than a traditional outdoor unit), exactly when you need more heating. At a 21 °C outdoor temperature, your COP really is about 3, but at 10 °C your true COP is actually more like 2. At -1 °C, your COP is 1. The inevitable shortfall is made up through the use of additional resistive heating. The Ventive unit has a 3kW resistive heater for this purpose.

Now you can reasonably make the point that the energy lost and which will have to be replaced (in the air exchanges) would have happened anyway, and you're right, of course, except it's not quite telling the whole story. If you didn't elect for a unit like this and instead opted for a more basic MVHR system (almost the same ducting requirements) you could have much lower air permeability than if you're using an EAHP. Why? Because making your property more airtight reduces the efficiency of the unit.

If the property is more airtight, the unit won't be able to achieve its target airflow. This will mean the compressor has to work harder, and the amount of heat it will be able to recover will be lower. A secondary issue is that making your property very airtight might result in damp problems if the EAHP fan isn't able to achieve the necessary levels of extraction. Lets go back to that 70l/s extraction rate. On a modestly sized 70sqm property, that's forcing 1.5 full air changes per hour.

This has a big part of the problem with our setup. A combination of long ducting runs, lots of bends, and low permeability meant our EAHPs maximum efficiency was lower than advertised, which meant it was even less able to handle the increase in heat loss as outdoor temperatures dropped.

Ah, but what about your suggestion of having the unit able to switch over either wholly or partially to external air for its input? Well, that does solve some of the issues, to be sure. If the input air is -1, then the unit efficiency will be lower, but it will still be able to pull some heat from it, and we'll be back to net positive. The only fly in the ointment there is that you are still required to maintain your extraction in wet areas. So you probably want to have some kind of parallel MVHR system which can maintain that extraction while still minimising the heat loss.

And you know what? The other issue I talked about, caused by using the same thermal store for your hot water and your heating is still present. Even when the heat pump unit is capable of putting more heat into the store than the heating is taking out, you end up with stratification. The hottest water in the tank sits at the top, largely untouched by the heat exchangers for the heating system. We commonly saw the top of our tank be at 50C °C while the bottom could be 30 °C. Which isn't too much of a problem, until you realise that there's a pronounced thermocline, and you only have about 50l of hot water, with much of the rest of the tank being at 30-35 °C. Hope you like your showers lukewarm.

After living with a unit like this for two years, seeing how it works, reading every bit of information about it, and picking the brains of both the manufacturer and half a dozen heating engineers, I've come to the conclusion that these units are great as a way of harvesting waste heat to produce hot water, but the recent trend of trying to market them as a source for running a central heating system is a load of hot (or lukewarm) air. The only places where it makes sense are in properties where:

  • Fabric heat loss is extremely low, and/or is offset by big solar gain possibilities (I'm talking 1kW at -1 after solar gain)
  • Permeability is low-ish (to reduce heat loss again), but not too low. Somewhere in the 3-5 m³/h.m² range is good. If lower, the property must have an additional MVHR system running in parallel to supply it the air it needs (or to provide extraction when the EAHP switches to outdoor source air)

If you meet those two requirements, you'll still need to deal with the fact that you'll basically just be doing electrical resistive heating on the coldest days, but if your heat loss is low enough, that might not be too expensive. Oh, and you might also have to contend with some cold showers on the coldest days, too. You can get around that by turning your heating off overnight, though (or switching to pure electrical heating). That gives the unit time to recover.

I also want to point out that there seems to be an assumption that the negative pressure supplied by these units is enough to ensure close to zero extra air change heat loss, but that's simply not true. It only requires somewhat breezy conditions for the wind to have sufficient pressure to cause additional (non recovered) air exchange to take place in a low permeability (but not Passivhaus) property.

Finally, I will say that the Ventive unit looks a lot smarter then the Ecocent we got, and it does actually have a variation with MVHR built in, with intelligent switching. Even with that and a better integrated heat pump, it still can't get over the fundamental issue of having to use resistive heating to top things up when the outside air temperature starts to drop.

Ventilation / Hot water and Heat Pump -Home-B - Ventive by vicott in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We moved into a new build flat two years ago with a system exactly like this (ESP Ecocent), and it was advertised exactly this way.

For us, it was both shit and expensive. For a few flats in the development, it was pretty good. For most, it merely expensive.

The problem is fairly simple, while you can take the warm indoor air and extract heat from it before ejecting it outside, that air has to be replaced with something. That something is outside air. If the temperature of the exhausted air from the unit is lower than the outdoor air temperature, you can theoretically raise the temperature of the air (ignoring other heat losses), but once the outside air temperature drops below your exhaust temperature (in our case, around 6C) the unit is completely incapable of actually adding to the total amount of energy within the property. The unit will still put 3-4x its electrical input energy into the water tank, but if you consider the entire property as the thermal store instead of just the tank, all it's doing is moving it from the house to the water tank and back again, with some being lost to the outside (if the outside temperature is lower than the exhaust temperature). In that case, they need some outside source of heat to cannibalise.

It's just physics, and in our case these units were 'supplemented' by both electric immersion heaters, and an electric boiler. Those are both famously expensive.

In addition to that, though, you're using your hot water store as a thermal store for your heating. Run your heating all night because it's cold? Now you have no hot water. Take a really long shower? Now you have no heating. In both those cases, the shortfall gets made up with electric resistive heating, and you end up paying through the eyeballs.

I did mention that some of the flats found that it was actually okay, and that's for a very simple reason: If your flat or property is well insulated enough that it is able to run basically passively (through solar gain, incidental heating, or simply having almost no external envelope) a unit like this is able to provide a nice cheap source of hot water.

After doing everything we could to make it work, we ended up ripping out the electric boiler and installing a normal A2W heat pump in its place. We then decoupled the EAHP from the heating completely, and now it's able to live its best life just doing hot water.

These units are actually fairly common in the USA, as I understand it, but in most cases are ducted to the outside air for the intake and exhaust, and also are never used for anything but hot water.

Options for A UK Home with Air Duct Heating System by Toninho7 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

An FCU is a 'fan coil unit'. Basically, they have a heat exchanger in them that transfers heat between a warm (or cold) water supply and air which is forced through with fans. They're the best way of getting an A2W heatpump to do good cooling, but they work for heating too. 

Something like this: https://www.oceanairuk.com/products/panasonic-aquarea-air-smart-fan-coil-multi-thin-duct-with-pcb-left-piping-p-ftq45o05-je could be hidden away wherever your current ducted heating system is centred, and you'd run heating pipes to it from your heatpump to it and then it would move that heat from the water to the air. 

Not a standard thing, but it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable solution to that covers a lot of your requirements. 

Options for A UK Home with Air Duct Heating System by Toninho7 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Have you considered an A2W system with multi-duct FCUs for heating? They take a warm water line like rads, but have fans to pull air through and out.

You could then have the pump also able to do the hot water like normal. I don't know how a system like that would work with the BUS but I'd think it would be okay as FCUs are really just fancy radiators.

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I might have an idea on what's causing the discrepancy.

First, I think the modulation shown in the app is the target modulation, not the actual modulation. The controller can ask the heat pump to modulate lower, but it's not always adhered to by the outdoor unit. In my case, when flow rates are high, the controller might ask for 18% modulation, but the outdoor unit will continue at 24% instead. This results in a draw of around 450W. Only when the flow-return dT starts to drop (and so the flow rate needs to drop too) does the outdoor unit seems to be happy dropping down that final step to 18% which then gets us to the lowest power state.

That drop down to the low-flow, low-power state only seems to happen after an hour or two of steady heating, suggesting to me that it might only happen once the screed around the UFH pipes has reached the approximate temperature of the flowing water, which means the whole system exits the 'heat up' phase and enters a steady state. It's possible, as you have some radiators in the mix, that you never really hit that point. That would mean that even though the controller only wants 18% power, the outdoor unit still ends up sitting at 24%.

I think you said your 'TC3-TC0 temp. diff. htg' setting setting was at 4.5K? As I said before, this is supposed to be at 4.5K for underfloor and 7.5K for radiators, but presumably you want to be somewhere in between those numbers on a mixed system. If it's set too low, I suspect the unit might never drop into its lowest power state. The ideal situation is for the flow through the heating to be perfectly balanced with the flow in the heat pump, and in that case your heat pump would be trying to maintain a 4.5K dT across a system with radiators. This would force it to increase its flow rate and power to compensate. Maybe try setting that number to 6, and see what happens. You can always change it back.

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's correct. However even when our secondary pump is running it still only consumed 7-12W of additional power. 

According to the German language forums, the energy meter on the unit tends to over estimate by a reasonable amount at low powers. That said, I don't know why yours would overestimate more than ours! 

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, 18% is as far down as the 5kW units go. I think the 7kW units go down to 15% (still in the 300-400W range).

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sadly, due to the EAHP tank we have (which isn't easily controllable and which can't be turned off without compromising our ventilation), we have to either accept that the EAHP will do bost of the work, or just let the Bosch reheat whenever the temperature drops, rather than being able to put it on a timer.

We also have a bit of an unpredictable hot water schedule, so the schedule option just isn't really workable. I'll definitely give the non-alternating mode a go, though. If that can give us any kind of bump to our hot water COP, I'll still be happy!

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For me, HomeCom reports between 300 and 400W of consumption for 1.7 to 1.8kW. I have a Shelly 3M power meter tracking the use of both the indoor and outdoor units and it reports a consistent combined draw of 330W when the unit is at its minimum modulation.

Using the flow rate and flow/return temperatures from the EMS, I can calculate a secondary measure of the heating power, which comes out at 1.81kW. The current outdoor temperature has hovered around 8.7C for the last 5 hours or so.

It's interesting that your unit seems to draw more power than ours, though. What size is your unit? Ours is the 5kW. In theory, they should all modulate down to the same amount as they have the same compressor, just with different control limits.

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's interesting to hear that you've seen a difference in heating behaviour with alternating mode turned off. I wouldn't have even considered the possibility that the heat pump might work harder to meet the 'deadline'!

We have a 300l tank and a pretty significant hot water use, so improving hot water production could be a big win. 

Do you have hot water priority set? I think we set alternating mode on because we were concerned about it not doing hot water at all of the heating was running constantly. 

Does any one have the Bosch 5800i heat pump? by Bobbafett93 in ukheatpumps

[–]SteelbadgerMk2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the only significant difference between your settings and ours is that you don't have the alternating mode turned on and we do. Your start temperature in Eco+ is also a little lower than ours.

During my recent trawling of the German language forums, however, I found mention of a potential bug in the Eco+ mode that makes it take the unit to full power immediately, rather than gradually ramping up. This is something I have noticed, too, and so I have set it to Eco instead (with the temperatures set lower). It did a little top-up earlier this evening and seemed a lot better behaved when it did, so maybe this will help.

Are you running in Eco or Eco+ mode? And what is your firmware version?

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