DISCLAIMER: the heat pump installed in my house was provided free of charge as part of a Daikin field test trial. Running costs are covered by myself.
We’ve just “celebrated” two years since we’ve closed our main gas account and switched to a full electric house and I want to show some of the changes and improvements this choice has lead us to. Mainly, I want to focus on energy savings.
The phrase “energy savings” can be used in many different ways and more often than not, is not as simple or transparent as it should be. To me, the only way to interpret the statement is to refer to its most basic version: you used to use a certain amount of energy in the past, now after some changes you are using less.
Simple right?
I wish that was the case! The industry in general has gotten better at communicating to consumers the advantages of switching to more energy efficient products. Despite all these advancements, I still believe the best way to judge savings is by being able to tangibly measure them.
Before going too deep into the data, allow me to introduce you to the Heat Pump itself:
EDLA08EV3
A very neat and tidy installation, at high level, allowing us to still maximise the floor space!
With introductions done, let’s delve into the numbers, by breaking out the trusty Excel! The result of months of monitoring and data gathering is what you see below – lots of pretty colours! Let me show you the system!
[Full disclosure – I lost some data between March ’22 and May ’22 for the Space Heating portion]
What you see here is a monthly breakdown of kWh of energy used in our house. If you can’t quite read the legend, here are the colours again:
- Bright yellow: general electricity usage (not heat pump related)
- Orange: space heating (via heat pump)
- Dark orange/red: domestic hot water generation (via heat pump)
- Green: EV charging
- Grey: gas
Where does the data comes from? It’s a mix of sources, which I’ve then combined together manually (more on automation later).
- The total energy consumption comes of course from my energy bill
- The heat pump consumption comes from Daikin’s Onecta app
- The EV usage comes from the Easee charger app
On the left: the EV charger consumption data – On the right: two examples of energy data from Onecta
With apps and connected services is so easy nowadays to retrieve all the data in the world, the most difficult part is how you make sense of it, which is why I started this journey in the first place, making sure I could gain useful insights and make informed decisions for the future.
Now, I realise that this is a very involved process, which is why I also set out on finding ways to automate the process and make this data gathering easier. At the end of the day we are surrounded by computers, they should be the ones doing the hard maths!
Enter Home Assistant! For the uninitiated, Home Assistant is a fantastic open source smart home platform that can run on a super simple Raspberry Pi board and unlock a world of automation. It’s then up to you to decide how far down the rabbit hole you want to go. Spoiler: I’m going quite deep!
The reason for bringing Home Assistant into the picture is because of the recently announced Daikin Onecta API (fair warning: it’s still in beta and sometimes things do not behave as you would expect, but overall very solid – if you use the API, please give feedback and report bugs to help the development).
Home Assistant has a wonderful energy tab, which can gather consumptions from all sort of connected devices and visualise it for you. It’s still early days for my dashboard, but it looks something like this:
You can definitely get more creative with the dashboard, I’m still figuring out the best ways to display data, so watch this space!
So, going back to my original point: am I saving energy?
Well, the numbers don’t lie: since switching to a fully electric life, and leveraging the power of connectivity for better monitoring and operation, I’m absolutely saving energy! And at the same time I’m also way more in control of what goes on in our house, which is an added bonus!
Now, to close this small exercise, I also wanted to find a way to make this data more relevant for you. Which is why I’ve built this small form below. If you input the number of bedrooms, baths and occupants in your house, I’ll try to proportion the energy usage of my house for your hypothetical case – if you then enter your current energy tariff (if you have dual tariff you can enter that too), you will get a very basic approximation of costs.
Full disclosure: this is not meant to be a scientific tool, nor will it be really ever 100% accurate and reflective of your actual bill, but I wanted to find a way to give you an order of magnitude – because I love data!
Please note: you can only edit the yellow cells, then press enter to see the updated results!
I will be sharing more data, especially the more I get into automation, but I hope this gave you at least a quick peek into the possibilities that Heat Pumps can unlock in a real life application!