This is a technical github repository for OpenEnergyMonitor open hardware and software heat-pump performance monitoring development.
Heat-pumps are a key component of zero carbon energy systems making it possible to provide heating efficiently from renewable energy, they are featured in many zero carbon energy scenarios such as ZeroCarbonBritain developed by the Centre for Alternative Technology and are also highlighted in David MacKay's book Sustainable Energy without the hot air.
By monitoring a heat-pump its possible to see how well it is working, diagnose problems and get a better understanding of how a key potentially zero carbon heating solution works, data gathered and shared from well performing systems could help de-mystify heat-pump operation and help improve performance by diagnosing any problems early.
The heat pump monitoring application guide in the main OpenEnergyMonitor guide is a good place to start, covering the different options, including the use of the main OpenEnergyMonitor hardware:
https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump
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Electricity consumption and system temperatures Monitor electricity consumption and system temperatures using clip-on CT sensors and one-wire temperature sensors connected to an emonPi or emonTx. This provides the simplest solution for installation on existing systems. See main guide for details. |
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Using external MBUS reader module An external MBUS reader connected to the emonPi or emonBase can be used to read from high accuracy electricity and heat meters. See main guide for details. |
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This is a new heat pump monitor board designed specifically for interfacing with MID standard electricity and heat meters via MBUS. It has a RaspberryPi at it’s core running our emonSD image enabling local or/and remote logging and data visualisation. |
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Main Features:
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USB to MBUS
WiFi MBUS Reader
Emoncms includes an application specific heat pump dashboard available in the Apps module. The following video gives a good overview of what this dashboard can do, how to access daily electricity consumption and heat output data as well as detailed system temperature and power data.
There's also a little feature shown briefly at the end that simulates the heat output and COP of the heat pump based on the Carnot COP equation.
YouTube: Introduction to the Emoncms heat pump dashboard
It's also worth checking out David Bowen (@MyForest on the forum's) heat pump app, see forum post: Heat Pump Experimentation App - Release News.
The My Heatpump app includes a feature to simulate the COP and heat output of a heat pump from the flow temperature, outside temperature and electrical power input. The equations used are documented here: https://github.com/emoncms/dynamic/blob/master/docs/heatpumpmodel.md
- Blog post: Heatpumps in the ZeroCarbonBritain model by the Centre for Alternative Technology.
- Blog post: Heat pump Testing: Initial results
- John Cantor's heat pump monitoring blog
This project is open source software and hardware.
The Arduino firmware is available under the GPL v3 Licence.
The Web Dashboard is available under the GNU Affero General Public License and is based on emoncms.
The hardware design (schematics, board files and gerber) files are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and follow the terms of the OSHW (Open-source hardware) Statement of Principles 1.0.