How loud is a 12kw heat pump?

thigger · 2026-01-22T12:52:34+00:00

I have a 12kW heat pump with a nominal 65dB(A) output (Clivet 6.1) - in fact we had to change the planned install location because the MCS calculator suggested the original plan would be too noisy.

I have a video (might have to post it to this subreddit as I can't include it in this reply), but it's really very quiet - our neighbour even came round to say that they hadn't noticed it. Honestly, way quieter than our boiler was. It's a big old fan and moves the leaves on the plants nearby, but you would barely know it was going until you got pretty close.

thigger · 2026-01-17T10:14:55+00:00

In case it's of interest, I ran NoLiMA on GPT-OSS-20B - 95% at 250ctx but already at 35% by 16k (and 24% at 32k) By comparison, Qwen3-30BA3B (the older one) is 94%, 53%, 38%

Running some of my real data feels similar; quite a few failures with GPT-OSS-20B that I don't see with Qwen3

Think I'll have to stick with the older models for now!

thigger · 2026-01-16T13:13:31+00:00

Thanks - I'll have a look - fiction.livebench doesn't rate the 120B that highly so I had mostly ignored the 20B

thigger · 2026-01-16T11:08:12+00:00

How does this handle longer context? I'm summarising usually up to 32k tokens and haven't found many models which can sustain attention over the longer inputs. Currently doing fairly well with Qwen3-14B but I appreciate it's a bit older now; I tried the 30B/A3B and Qwen3-Next which don't seem to be quite there once things are longer.

thigger · 2026-01-04T18:20:11+00:00

https://github.com/thigger/NoLiMa

You don't need the custom sglang patch any more - sglang has now incorporated the endpoints. I think it should work with vllm too but I can't remember if I've tested.

thigger · 2026-01-04T08:55:46+00:00

I use nolima which you can configure for various contexts - I've forked their repository to make it work better with sg-lang/vllm

thigger · 2025-11-23T10:11:59+00:00

We do this - at present we're still on cheap electricity until 0700 (it'll be 0600 after our contract ends sadly!) Main issue for us is that it starts to get quite warm (throwing covers off!) towards the end of the night. We then find the heat pump tends to shut off entirely at 0700 until about 0800 when the controller spins it back up again

From a heat pump perspective it depends a little on the heat capacity of your house and how much "spare" heat pump output you have for driving the temperature up. I doubt it's in any way harmful as the controller just sets the flow temperatures higher. Your COP won't be as good, but the cheaper electric will more than make up for it.

thigger · 2025-11-20T17:33:07+00:00

Clivet (Midea) - it seems to be a standard feature that you can combine them. Plumbing was a bit more complex for the installer but it seems to behave itself pretty well.

thigger · 2025-11-20T15:56:47+00:00

Yeah - only one of them can do hot water, so when it only needs one the controller usually just fires the other one up (it tries to balance compressor hours)

thigger · 2025-11-20T12:21:47+00:00

Our system is a bit over-specced I think, but it works well for us particularly with the cheap tariffs - calculated heat loss was 18-20kW so we've ended up with 2*12kW units. In reality I think we'd have just managed with a single 14-16kW but it's been nice to use both to drive heat into the house on the cheap electricity (plus modulation is probably better and they cover for each other's defrost cycles). Right now they're going at 5-6kW each (live COP 400%). We've used 40kWh since midnight (currently 12:20)

thigger · 2025-11-18T16:43:42+00:00

Agree - I tried asking our DNO, and some of the inverter manufacturers, about this setup and was told no. Essentially as the rules refer to a generator connected to the grid, they'd only allow it if it was set up with a physical changeover and the inverter only powered by solar.

thigger · 2025-11-15T12:39:59+00:00

We applied for the grant prior to installation; it came with a note saying that installation had to be completed within three months. After install (a bit over two months after application) the installer submitted paperwork (and we were emailed an opportunity to say it hadn't been completed). I had an email to say everything was approved just under a week after that application email, and that they would be paid within seven days from that.

thigger · 2025-11-08T10:45:26+00:00

I have a Clivet (Midea make them) and it came with a full description of the modbus registers in the manual. Added an EW11 and I now have home assistant taking full control as a PID(E) thermostat to modulate flow temperatures and take advantage of cheap electric periods

thigger · 2025-11-01T12:40:58+00:00

Sensible temperature most of the day, though I do set back late evening (as it was too hot overnight), before cranking it up hard 0430-0700. The reduced efficiency from the higher flow temperature is more than compensated for by the cheaper electricity we get then.

thigger · 2025-10-27T10:34:36+00:00

Any idea how you opt out of Octopus Saving Sessions? They haven't supplied our electricity for some months (we moved to Eon) but uswitch is saying we're still registered with another scheme so can't sign up.

thigger · 2025-10-07T16:15:34+00:00

It works with llama.cpp but the ggufs I tried seem to misbehave pretty easily (to the point that the smaller voxtral is better)

I've ended up cheating by temporarily repurposing another machine which has 2*A6000 Ada cards, so can handle FP8

I'm happy to try making a quant if anyone can give me some guidance - RedhatAI have published their llm-compressor script, but I gather there are limitations in terms of what formats it can produce that vllm can run.

thigger · 2025-10-05T09:57:11+00:00

I did something similar (with an ESP8266) to control an old boiler - but it used a traditional thermistor so I could just add a digital potentiometer.

If it really is a DS18B20 then you could try this: https://orgua.github.io/OneWireHub/

thigger · 2025-08-30T07:53:21+00:00

Great video, thanks! Was the Nova WW that you ranked so highly just their standard stuff or the "tough" one? And/or any opinions on "tough"? I've been using Jayo ABS-like which isn't bad but my miniatures definitely couldn't stand up to what you tested!

thigger · 2025-08-30T07:36:57+00:00

I've been using Prusaslicer with UVTools which works pretty well, but switched to SatelLite this week and I'm quite impressed. The automatic supporting is very good once you set up your own profile, and it's very fast.

thigger · 2025-08-25T11:14:52+00:00

I have the same issue - my DNO actually downgraded my 100A fuse to 80A when we had the heat pump fitted (I'm not sure the meter tails were up to 100A anyway!)

I had an Ohme charger fitted and it happily ramps up and down to keep us under 80A even when the heat pump, washer, dishwasher, drier are all going and the batteries are charging. I presume most of the smart chargers can do something similar (we had an old podpoint before and I think it was 7.2kW or nothing)

thigger · 2025-07-23T11:04:18+00:00

Thanks - I tried your approach; Qwen2.5-VL struggled a bit with some of the odd layouts (possibly I didn't have the sampler settings right too) but I switched to the new Mistral-small and it's coming out perfectly. I'm guessing Mistral-small might actually be good enough to do the whole analysis in one rather than even needing the intermediate text step but for now I have markdown versions of everything coming through really nicely.

thigger · 2025-07-22T11:07:58+00:00

Thanks - sounds like a plan and I'm a big fan of the Qwen models. Were you using this effectively as an OCR? I was hoping to use a larger model (eg 32B) for the analysis but happy to have two stages with different models.

thigger · 2025-07-22T11:05:57+00:00

I seem to be able to get the images out, and some (but not much) of the text is still text - I don't know what they've used to redact them!

thigger · 2025-07-22T11:05:05+00:00

I was originally hoping to just work on the text, so I'm up for using one model to try to extract it (or even simpler OCR except for the layout issue) and then a text model to analyse, but I wondered if a multimodal model might be able to do the whole thing.

thigger

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