Daikin Altherma ASHP Problems

Hi all, I hope someone here can help me shed some light on some of the problems we're having. First I'll lay out some facts....

We moved into this property 4 months ago and are experiencing extremely high electric bills in return for what I would regard as poor performance.

We have radiators with thermostats in all rooms except the open plan living/kitchen/dining room where there are two convection type heaters/air cooling. No underfloor heating.

I'm sat here where the heating has been on all day and the house has not gone above 19.5C despite setting the convectors to 21C. The main thermostat is set to 21C. This always happens when the temperature outside drops below 0C. It's like the system can't cope.

Despite failing to reach the temperature we'd like my smart meter tells me we've used £13 of electric today! I have a 16kw solar panel array that is supposed to be supplementing this as well. I am on the cheapest tariff that I can find by the way. Once outside temps drop below 5C our bills don't go below £10 a day.

We have had an engineer out and also had a full service. He was unable to shed light on the high bills.

My hot water is set to 50c and is always hot.

There is one setting on the boiler "heating" homepage called "offset" this ranges from -10c to +10c. If have fiddled with this up and down but cannot see what difference is made either way. There is nothing in the manuals about this setting. Can someone please shed some light on that?

Sorry for such a long post but I thought it best to give as much info as possible. Any help would be much appreciated.

Scobecu,
I can’t help with much in this area, except do you have a display on solar to see how many watts or kilowatts you are generating, if any.
Obviously depends on weather, but it’s meant to help.
Have a look, could be out on a fault, solar panels shaded.
We are lucky as 3.5 kw solar, excess put back into the grid, halves our power bill.
Also have good insulation & no hot or cold ingress through doors, cracks, windows etc.


Others will have to help you with heating issues.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RANGER1

Scobecu,
I can’t help with much in this area, except do you have a display on solar to see how many watts or kilowatts you are generating, if any.
Obviously depends on weather, but it’s meant to help.
Have a look, could be out on a fault, solar panels shaded.
We are lucky as 3.5 kw solar, excess put back into the grid, halves our power bill.
Also have good insulation & no hot or cold ingress through doors, cracks, windows etc.


Others will have to help you with heating issues.

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Hi, apologies. I have a 16 panel solar array not 16kw like I said before. About 4kw I believe. I checked earlier and we had generated 6.5kw today.
I just don't get it. I'm reading all these blogs online extolling the virtues of ASHP's, how it's costing them no more than gas etc. My heating was on 24/7 in my last house during the winter and my gas was £400 for the year. I've used more than that in two months in this house. I'm actually at the point of costing up ripping this system out and putting back an oil system that the previous owner had replaced. The house is 6 years old and well insulated btw.

Every thing heat pump over this way, but not my area.

Maybe call another Daiken representative.
They should be able to work out it’s efficiency if they know what their doing & also should know if using to much power.
Europeans leaders in this area as far as I know.

https://www.daikin.com.au/faq/how-does-altherma-work


https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/is-it-more-energy-efficient-to-leave-the-heating-on.html

the off set is to calibrate the sensor the units give priority to hot water and will not heat the house until hot water is at correct temperature is your house insulated air sauce heat pumps need well insulated houses and as the ambient temperature drops they become less efficient

Quote:

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Originally Posted by martinw58

the off set is to calibrate the sensor the units give priority to hot water and will not heat the house until hot water is at correct temperature is your house insulated air sauce heat pumps need well insulated houses and as the ambient temperature drops they become less efficient

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So, do I go minus or plus to give more priority to the heating? Yes, I believe the house is well insulated. It is 6 years old and built to current legislation.

Fiddling with the settings will not solve the problem. There are quite a number of settings that need to be applied to each system at commissioning based on the output of the selection software, to optimise the ssystem to your particular location, situation and home. Changing 1 or more individually can have a negative effect. The Altherma is a specialist bit of kit and needs careful design, good installation and setting up by a fully trained technician, to get the best out of it.

You don't say what type of Altherma you have, Monobloc, Low Temp, High Temp, Bivalent, Series 1,2, 3 etc. but whichever you have, they all need the same specialist attention.

I,ve seen good installs and a lot that leave you asking yourself if the installers should be allowed to even purchase the kit, where trained monkeys could have done better. The poor old customer is always left disappointed and out of pocket in cases such as this.

One installation I was asked to investigate came about where the customer (in the middle of Lincolnshire) had spent considerable money on building a new house with underfloor heating throughout and heated by 2 Althermas to give sufficient heat load. Problem was, when the ambient temp dropped to -11C at night, the house would not come up above 14C! Turned out that the underfloor heating had been designed to give 21C with an ambient of 3C - typical CIBSE design criteria. He wasn't too pleased when he asked me how he could get it working correctly, to which I said 'you need to rip up the underfloor heating coils and re-install them with additional loops to increase output'

Have a look at page 234 onwards of the Altherma 3 manual which shows the Field Settings - 10 pages of it. https://www.daikin.co.uk/content/dam...de_English.pdf

You can then appreciate that just changing the 'Offset' will not cure your problem. What you need is for Daikin themselves to attend and review your installation - it will be money well spent in my opinion and at least you will then know what, if anything, you will need to do to get your system operating correctly, and at what cost.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by frank

Fiddling with the settings will not solve the problem. There are quite a number of settings that need to be applied to each system at commissioning based on the output of the selection software, to optimise the ssystem to your particular location, situation and home. Changing 1 or more individually can have a negative effect. The Altherma is a specialist bit of kit and needs careful design, good installation and setting up by a fully trained technician, to get the best out of it.

You don't say what type of Altherma you have, Monobloc, Low Temp, High Temp, Bivalent, Series 1,2, 3 etc. but whichever you have, they all need the same specialist attention.

I,ve seen good installs and a lot that leave you asking yourself if the installers should be allowed to even purchase the kit, where trained monkeys could have done better. The poor old customer is always left disappointed and out of pocket in cases such as this.

One installation I was asked to investigate came about where the customer (in the middle of Lincolnshire) had spent considerable money on building a new house with underfloor heating throughout and heated by 2 Althermas to give sufficient heat load. Problem was, when the ambient temp dropped to -11C at night, the house would not come up above 14C! Turned out that the underfloor heating had been designed to give 21C with an ambient of 3C - typical CIBSE design criteria. He wasn't too pleased when he asked me how he could get it working correctly, to which I said 'you need to rip up the underfloor heating coils and re-install them with additional loops to increase output'

Have a look at page 234 onwards of the Altherma 3 manual which shows the Field Settings - 10 pages of it. https://www.daikin.co.uk/content/dam...de_English.pdf

You can then appreciate that just changing the 'Offset' will not cure your problem. What you need is for Daikin themselves to attend and review your installation - it will be money well spent in my opinion and at least you will then know what, if anything, you will need to do to get your system operating correctly, and at what cost.

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Thank you for that. I'm definitely prepared to pay for a Daikin engineer to come and evaluate the system. Thing is where do I start in finding one? And even then how will I know I'm not just getting another "monkey?"
I'm in the Northamptonshire area.

Ps. I have a Low Temperature Altherma.

I would suspect that the Birmingham Daikin office is the nearest to you https://www.daikin.co.uk/

Just ring them up and request a Daikin Altherma specialist to come out and evaluate your system as you are experiencing problems. They have a fixed charge system for the visit and you will get a written report and recommendations. They do not provide repairs etc. but can recommend a list of their approved contractors from whom you can chose to carry out any modifications that are recommended.

P.S. I do not work for Daikin, But owned a D1 approved company before retirement