Taming your own heat pump

For the full list of articles demystifying heat pumps click here

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As you will have read in the previous article, using weather compensation mode is usually the most efficient way to use a heat pump.

To set a heat pump up properly in this mode and give you the comfort you want means teaching the heat pump what temperature the radiators need to be for different weather.

Taming a heat pump therefore needs the householder to be involved in a little experimentation to suss the right settings.

This can be done with no technical knowledge as you will find later.

“Shouldn’t the installer do it ALL?”

It’s a fair question. 

There are practical reasons why this can’t ALL be done when a system is installed, at least not perfectly:

Working out exactly the right settings can only be done during cold weather, and the colder the better.

If your system is installed in spring, summer or autumn, installers can only make an educated guess based on predictions for the property or their judgement. 

Even then it is pretty much impossible to get it right because:

Installers can never know:

• Exactly how the house or heating system will behave in really cold weather

• What temperature you find comfortable. YOUR Goldilocks temperature

• How you use your home day to day

Trying to decide and adjust the weather compensation settings is a little bit like cooking a new recipe that uses chili powder. Until you’ve cooked it and tried it you don’t know whether you’ve put the right amount in.  It usually then means experimentation to get the amount of chilli just right.

Final tuning either therefore requires either:

• Several paid return visits by an experienced person from the installer, or

• The householder doing it themselves

In practice heat pump installers frequently leave a home with weather compensation settings that are plenty hot enough to keep a home warm and not settings that exactly right for the house or the householder.

The penalty is poorer efficiency and unnecessarily high running costs.

A great opportunity for a householder to take control

But there is good news.  With the right knowledge and guidance, you can fine tune weather compensation settings yourself.

Decide your own Goldilocks settings.

You could look at this as a life skill — like setting up a new phone or checking the tyre pressures on a car.

It’s also a great way of becoming a little bit of a geek on this subject….(one of my fun goals!)

Unless your home or your circumstances change, setting weather compensation for you and your home only needs to be done once.

If you move home and need to do it again on another heat pump just come back to these blogs for a refresh.

Next: Article 8: Step-by-step guides to tame & train your heat pump. These are the only guides of this sort online.

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Mark Thompson

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