A rather fraught day

On Thursday (19th October) an affable young man arrived from Daikin to connect and set up my heat pump. It took much longer than I expected, several hours actually, and he seemed to be on his phone quite a lot.

Having arrived at around 9.00am he finished at around mid-day and said that he’d give me a quick run through of the controls. For that we went up to the wall-mounted thermostat in the corridor and he implied that everything I needed to do I could do from there. First he showed that when you initially touched it, it would light up and show the room temperature ie the temperature of the space it was in.

Then he showed that by touching the button again you could see the hot water temperature. In the following image it is at 54 degrees C but when he showed me it was only at 45 degrees, much too low. Nevertheless, he said that I’d be able to have a hot shower by the afternoon.

Then he demonstrated how to see the temperature of the floor heating and said that by increasing or decreasing that on the thermostat you could change the room temperature, which seemed pretty logical and straightforward.

So after he’d gone I waited to see what would happen and the result was nothing. The hot water temperature remained at 45 degrees and no matter how much I fiddled with the thermostat setting I couldn’t get it to change either upwards or downwards. And the same with the heating system.

A massive wad of papers came with the heat pump and one of them was a user instruction manual for the thermostat tweely referred to as a Human Comfort Interface so you immediately suspect it to be cobblers, which it was. It said that you could change settings on it and I was mainly interested in the hot water temperature which failed to respond to the simple instructions contained in the manual.

I immediately suspected a fault in the heat pump thinking that was why the engineer was on his phone for so long and scooted off so quickly and sent a snotty message off to Daikin Europe saying that I was rather unimpressed. However, being an inquisitive soul and fairly tech-savvy I decided to take a peek at the main heat pump unit that I’d previously already discovered while I was waiting for the pump to be connected had a master menu of its own.

The engineer had not shown me this at all and I suspect he didn’t know his way around it and after I’d changed the language from French to English I started to pick my way through it. One of the first things I found was that there are two heat settings for the hot water – Eco, the minimum setting and Comfort, the higher, both of which are user-settable and both of which were at 45 degrees C, the first clue.

So I left Eco at 45 degrees at set Comfort to 55 degrees, a much more usual temperature for domestic hot water. I also adjusted the settings for room temperature, 24 degrees and floor temperature increasing the latter to 28 degrees in an attempt to evoke a response but still nothing changed.

Paging through the menu I then found that there were sub-menus for some settings and the interesting one for water heating was ‘schedule’. I wondered if the reason why nothing was happening was because the system needed a schedule to work to and entered one for the day (Thursday) the best I could. Nothing seemed to change so then I paged through to see if heating needed a schedule too, which seemed logical.

And sure enough it did, so I went ahead and entered one for that too, setting one up for Monday which I then copied and pasted for all of the other days of the week. Then I went to check what was happening on the Human Comfort Interface and was astonished to find when paging through its menu that the hot water temperature had already increased to over 51 degrees C! So I was on the right track.

So I then went ahead and set up proper schedules for both hot water and heating and both systems are now working as intended. I’m not saying that I understand them fully as there is at least one other temperature in the menu that you can change but whose relevance I don’t know and the instructions provided in the main wad of paper are scant and aimed more at the installer it seems to me, than the user. But the house is comfortable and I can now start to fiddle with settings to see what happens.

Here’s how the pump unit main menu currently looks with hot water at 54 degrees C, room temperature at 24 degrees, floor temperature at 25 degrees and an outdoor temperature of 15 degrees.

The next two images show what a schedule screen looks like and the daily schedule I’ve set up for hot water, referred to as ‘tank’.

And the final image shows the schedule I’ve set up for heating.

What I find slightly annoying is that none of this was explained to me by the Daikin commissioning engineer and I’ve had to find it all out for myself. He didn’t even show me the main menu on the heat pump unit and I don’t know how someone less tech-savvy than me would have fared as I’ve failed to find a Youtube video that explains this stuff despite the engineer saying there are several and the paperwork doesn’t cover it in sufficient detail. Shame on Daikin! Their heat pump seems to be working but their instructions seem to me to leave more than a little to be desired 😐