Why Does Every New Heat Pump Come with an Unreadable & Useless Controller?

Right, so I do have one question, just straight off the bat, and that I've seen that homeowners on the forums, there seems to be a trend where systems that are underperforming always seem to come back to the controller.

Now I've looked inside our own heat pump and there is an incredible amount of electronics inside of these actual units.

So to me, that implies that there is a call for something to be quite intelligent.

And it almost seems like there is a disconnect between what's happening inside the unit itself and what actually the heat pump is doing inside the house in terms of delivering efficiency and comfort.

Is that purely the controller's job?

uh yes i mean interestingly you bring this up so i literally got back home two days ago from china sitting with developers talking about exactly this every heat pump has got essentially three bits you've got the bit in the garden which is pretty mechanical not not that much going on quite simple machine and it is it's a bit of a dumbass so it just is sitting there it doesn't know what it's doing it's just going to be doing what it's told inside you've got some kind of control right very elaborate looking pcb and a horrible controller on the front end so all that thing inside your house is all that controller is doing is taking whatever command you tell it you know turn on do hot water go on holiday be quiet all that crap and it translates that into a very simple message to the outdoor unit which is start make me water at 40 degrees that's it so the outdoor unit is just this dumbass that was told, do 40 degrees and do it

now.

It does a little bit of maths of kind of, am I a long way away from 40 degrees? Do I need to go quickly or slowly? But the outdoing is pretty stupid.

The thing that I find fascinating, I was going through the menus of our controller, because our controller at hire is, like everyone else, is unintelligible and quite difficult to use.

And I was sitting with the developers going, things like, Does a homeowner really want to know exactly how many kilowatt hours of energy I've used today, yesterday, day before? Surely what the homeowner wants to know is it's about right.

Yeah, things are looking good.

So they've put together a little screen that says you spent 50 pounds this month.

And I went, OK, that's quite cool.

But how many pounds should I have spent this month? And they said, well, I don't know.

And I said, well, so you are giving this information to the homeowner.

You spent £50 this month.

And they go, OK, good, bad, you know, not sure.

So it was really interesting to talk to them about this stuff because what they do is they test on each other.

So one developer checks on another developer and goes, what do you think of this screen? And they all go, oh, that's brilliant.

They go, yeah, you're all geeks.

LAUGHTER

How about me, my wife, and normal humans? So we've got them to sort of learn to test on other people.

So they actually go out into the office and go, right, what do you think of this kind of stuff? And divide them up.

So we're actually building a bit of a platform where...

You've got a really simple, everything's going okay screen.