I’m writing this up, early, with limited experience because I went a-looking on t’internets and there’s very little third-party information or reviews of the Homely system. So, why not add some mud to that water with my own thoughts?

Apologies, this is a long long wall of text with no pictures. And there’s no real conclusion to speak of either

Update 4: 2023-08-29 09:00

General Satisfaction Time.

Over the last couple of weeks the system has been Working As Designed.

We got rid of the “evening” hot water schedule as we don’t really need it. This ensures that the tank is below the threshold temperature when the “morning” schedule is active, which in turn means we have nice hot showers. The Heat Pump has a nicely-recognisable power signature climbing up to ~2kW as it heats the tank up (I expect this peak will rise as the outside temperature drops).

We had (email) feedback from Homely that my principle concerns - no representation of water tank temperature in the App plus consumer access to the raw / graphed data - are being looked at. Nothing’s come of that yet but early days eh?

Next update will probably be a while coming as we start to see the days get colder and our heating needs start to kick in. Will be interested to see how that works out for us….

Update 3: 2023-08-15 13:00

Partial Success Time.

Not at first, no. Friday’s experience was miserable - no heat pump run and manual override (Heating Boost / Hot Water Boost) achieved nothing, no Heat Pump activity. In frustration I disabled the Homely Hub completely for the weekend and we taught ourselves how to use the Midea controller instead.

This was valuable as despite being “dumb” (it only comes on at the programmed times… which is actually as smart as you need these things) there’s clearly enough intelligence in the system such that timer-scheduled runs don’t achieve anything if the water’s already up to temperature. Given the heat storage of the tank this is important to know - a run in the afternoon / early evening will almost certainly mean the overnight run is skipped; our showers the following morning are then at “acceptable” rather than preferred temperatures…

However on Monday I received an unsolicited phone call from Homely themselves being very apologetic - they only received the instruction to change the hysteresis temperature on Friday evening so it hadn’t occurred. I explained the situation and agreed to power on the Hub again. It’s in “Smart” mode not “Smart+” so I’m not expecting any accounting for our time-of-day electricity tariffs in the execution. The good news is that the pump then ran to achieve the target temperature by the evening time window - success!. As noted above, though, this meant that even with a smaller offset temperature (5C instead of 10C) there was no overnight run; this didn’t matter this morning as there’s plenty of hot water from the previous run.

We’re going to have to delete the afternoon schedule to provide a better test of having Homely do a run overnight…

Update 2: 2023-08-11 08:30

Two days later. Still no heat pump run in the morning.

We had a chat with the Installer yesterday who was able to remotely access our data and work out why the hot water isn’t coming on - there’s a programmed Hysteresis correction of 10C to account for lag in the control system and/or measurement errors; at the times of day we were expecting hot water, the tank was reporting (to Homely) a temperature of 41C which is only 9 degrees below target, so it wasn’t bothering to heat. He informed us that he’d “corrected” that (presumably reduced the value).

A little later he also managed to invoke what at first I identified as envy followed some time later by a sense of outrage. Simply by including a graph available to the installer of the performance of our system hour-by-hour with every metric I could think of and many more plotted. None of which data is available (yet) to the owner of the system itself.

Encouraged by this apparent diagnosis and correction of a configuration setting, and encouraged by some manual mucking around with “Boost” modes yesterday (using these to override and get hot water and a run of the heating loop for an hour), we had some confidence that this morning would finally see the desired operation of the system as we expected.

Unfortunately, as before, we woke to a tank of warm-ish water and a heat pump that hasn’t run. Unlike yesterday, however, manual use of the app’s Water-Boost and Heating-Boost controls has failed to prod the system into life…

Update 1: 2023-08-09 13:00

Homely called back after leaving a message on their support line; they have fixed the account login page and I’ve been able to select a Tariff that more closely matches our reality. Smart+ will get 2 nights where it knows there’s cheaper electricity between 02:00 and 05:00 to actually run the hot water so we can have warm showers before I give in and fall back to Smart mode…

There’s also a suggestion that my email requests were ignored because they didn’t come from the account holder’s email (may well have hit the “spam” folder their side). Since I use a unique email address for all my signups (which can receive email but, crucially, I can’t always send email from that address) this is a plausible explanation. Lesson for the future: if I need help use the contact phone number not email…

tl;dr: 10/10 idea. So far, 5/10 execution. I hope I will be able to update, amend and possibly even re-write all of what follows in the near future.

The Homely Smart Controller is working - in the sense that it switches things on and off, it’s connected to the internet, it’s receiving input from it’s temperature sensors, and the App works on the Phone (the only way of controlling it).

But…

“Implementation” issues I’m frustrated I can’t resolve:

  • I selected the wrong tariff on setup - in probably the wrong operation mode for our needs - and I think this is why the hot water’s not doing what I expect.
    • System on probation now after selecting correct tariff.
    • Nope, that wasn’t it. Looks like it’s a default 10C temperature hysteresis correction that stops the heat pump heating hot water as expected.
      • CONFIRMED - internal “tweak” pushed down with 5C hysteresis and, voila, hot water.
      • Also: Internal update so Smart+ knows about our 3-level electricity tariff; doesn’t show in the App yet but it’s being used for planning purposes
  • I’m unable to log in to my account to rectify this and, so far, the support’s non-existent.
    • Used the telephone option, left a message, got a call back within 2 hours. Issue resolved their side, can now log in to account and change settings.
    • Actually +1 for Support given their unsolicited call to explain the situation and check how we’re doing on 2023-08-14. Their heart is in the right place even if the implementation’s not quite there yet.
  • There is no way for the owner to tell what the actual temperature of the Hot Water tank is.
    • This is, apparently, available along with 20+ other metrics to the installer via a separate app/mode. Even post-install. As a nerd and also being vaguely bothered by the “who owns this data anyway” arguments, we have Room To Improve here.
  • The Temperature Node is a little “black box” and you need to continuously monitor the App to tell if/when it’s connected and working.
    • Helped by the fact that once it’s working, it does seem relatively stable if you leave it alone.
  • Reconnecting the Node to the Hub is a massive pain in the arse especially if you need to go into the attic to do so (if our insulation’s effective it’ll be freezing up there come winter…)
    • At the moment I’m more concerned about resetting the Hub itself in the event of problems now I’ve found a work-around for quick-reconnecting the Node (just move close to the Hub - underneath it on the landing - and long-press the button once. Should get a long light followed by 3 short blinks, and the Homely app will report an updated indoor temperature within a couple of minutes)

“Conceptual” issues that I’ve got to deal with:

  • The system is 100% dependent on our trusting it. Without in any way providing the ability to prove that the system is, in fact, worthy of trust.
  • This system is making decisions about when/how to control our heating & hot water and it’s not explaining those decisions in any way.
    • The data to do so is available to the installer but it’s not at all clear that the control algorithm/heuristics are documented in any way (i.e. our installer can see what it’s doing in great detail over time but it’s not clear anyone can explain why)
  • This is a bit more important than “My TiVo skipped an episode of my favourite show”. So far it’s limited to less-warm showers in the morning, but in a few months it could be waking up to and living in a cold house through no fault of the heat pump system but just because we don’t understand and can’t effectively manipulate the control system.

2023-09-08: I’m only going to update “above this line”. Note that I’m leaving everything else below but some of what follows below will be out of date/obsolete and not marked as such. Everything above this line should be accurate as of your reading.

Context

Absolute bleeding-heart liberals that we are, we’ve spent the last year or so undergoing the appropriate review/assessment/preparation to move to a Heat Pump-based system that involves spending as much money as possible to get as many toys as we can into our house er to invest in a future-friendly cost-effective system.

Pretty much at the last minute before installation started, our installer offered us a smarter controller solution - the Homely Smart Controller on the grounds that it’s better at optimising use of the pump for efficiency and allows for better remote control. I was sold on the “it’s smart” aspect so enthusiastically embraced this option.

What problem does Homely (attempt to) solve?

Heat Pump based systems are fundamentally different from traditional boiler-based heating systems in that they’re designed to run for longer at lower temperatures to achieve their efficiency gains. From a control perspective this means they’re a lot more complicated: We’re all used to running the heating boiler a few hours a day to quickly heat the house and/or get a tank of hot water. With a Heat Pump the same approach will mean a cold house & tank and/or expensive electricity bills as the Pump is run at non-efficient temperatures. Instead you’re supposed to run the systems for much longer - up to 24/7 - at much lower temperature differentials to get appropriate and cosy levels of heating & hot water as efficiently as possible.

30 seconds on the internet will lead you down any number of rabbit-holes of people talking about flow temperatures, compensation curves, setback and optimising COP. I’m only passingly interested in this stuff, so having to setup an (effectively) hard-wired pump controller with the knowledge that getting it wrong will mean either a cold house or a massive electricity bill or both and that we’d need to adjust it for the changing seasons regardless of whether our comfort demands have changed is not what I’d call My Primary Interest. So in this sense I’m an ideal candidate for the Homely approach - a smart box on top of a heat pump system that promises to optimise all of the above to make sure we get our target heating/hot water outputs with the minimum of inputs (electricity, human attention).

How does Homely do it?

You should really go onto their website and look because to be honest that’s as much factual detail as you’re going to get. In terms of what I can see:

  • There is a Homely Hub in the attic. It’s connected to the internet, and the Heat Pump’s own controller console.
  • We have a little (Zigbee connected, battery powered) temperature “node” (currently) in the living room that reports actual room temperature to the Hub
  • There is a temperature probe about 1/2 way up our hot water tank that’s linked by wire back to the Hub
  • The Hub overrides whatever’s programmed in to the Heat Pump controller to directly control and adjust the running parameters of the Heat Pump system
  • There’s (inevitably) an App that lets you define target schedules, set overrides and get (rudimentary) operational information for both heating and water. There’s no control interface on the Hub itself, the App is the only way to interact with the system
  • The Hub communicates to the Homely cloud (or “AWS” as nerds know it) to develop a “run plan” based on a number of factors including desired heat/water targets, current and predicted weather conditions and expected electricity costs. This is downloaded to the Hub daily which then executes the plan to modulate the heat pump system to achieve the goals.

That’s the end of the Factual part of this presentation.

Here endeth the “Objective” part of the screed. What follows is more me getting things off my chest than actual science:

So what happened?

We had a 4-day retrofit exercise last week during which our entire central heating system was ripped apart and replaced. New radiators (we need bigger ones for the lower temperatures), lots of new pipe-work, out with the old boiler & control system, in with the new Heat Pump and more tanks than a Panzer division (water tank, expansion tanks, buffer tanks oh my). There’s a beautiful wall-mounted installation of pipework in the attic that interfaces the new Heat Pump plumbing with the traditional heating loop and hot water loop. Sat proudly amongst this is the Homely Hub box. In our upstairs cupboard is the new 300L water tank, alongside which is the Midea heat pump controller box. Two wires go from this location to the Hub in the attic - one for the tank temperature sensor, and the “zombie” control wire from the controller to the Hub.

Friday lunchtime - 3.5 days in and coming to the end - our installers start commissioning the controller system. First I need to supply WiFi credentials to get the hub connected to the Internet; easy. Then I’m asked to download the Homely app to my phone and create an account. OK. So right off the bat it’s new user / password and since this an Internet-facing service I need a secure password so I’m straight into the whole Password Manager create/review/activate process and that’s hampered a bit by the in-app sign up process timing out and dropping me back to the start screen 3-4 times.

Once I’ve created an account and before we can do anything else - with the installer guy looking over my shoulder because we’ve still got to pair the temperature node - I’m forced to select a “Mode” for the account with all the usual online “nudge” patterns leading me towards their premium “Smart+” option. Which, after a quick check, I select (hey, I don’t mind paying for a service if it really does save costs on the heating bills). I’m then immediately told to select a smart electricity tariff, so I hit the one that sounds right - correct supplier but (as it turns out) wrong tariff - thinking I can go back later and adjust it. Couple more screens of setup to define default heating/water profiles and bingo-bango-bongo, we’re in the app.

Now we can try to pair the Temp node. We follow the process but, hey ho, no temperature reported. I leave my phone with the Installer who disappears up into the attic to prod the Hub. Twenty minutes or so later down he comes, temperature reporting on my screen and heating profiles suitably mucked-around-with to try and force the system to come on now so we can test it. This turns out to be harder than we think…

The Homely system is so smart it knows we can all tolerate a bit of flex in our heating. So on a fairly warm day - internal temps of 23C - we’ve had to :

  1. Tell Homely we’d like the house raised to 25C (the max) for an hour or two
  2. Tell Homely not to apply it’s 3-4C flex setting and (eventually)
  3. Put the temperature node on a cold drinks can straight from the fridge to fool it into thinking the house is cooler than it actually is.

…in order to get the system to say “AHA! HEATING REQUIRED! ACTIVATE THE HEAT PUMP!”. But, yay, it all works. Tick in the box for the installers, big “well done” and time to tidy up and GTFO to the pub on a Friday afternoon. Success!

OK so it works then? What’s the problem?

We were advised that to properly commission the heating system - it’s been primed with glycol, water and corrosion inhibitors that all needs mixing up - we should ensure it runs for an hour a day for a week or so. Bit of a pain, given it’s August, but OK fair enough. And, you’d think, easy enough to schedule: We put a 1 hour block of time in to the Homely app where we want the temperature to be the max - 25C - instead of our comfortable default. And we put it in to the middle of the day so we’d be awake to monitor it.

But this is a smart system. We’re not actually saying “please run the system during this time period UNTIL this temperature is reached”. What we’re actually saying is “We want the house to be at this temperature during this time period”. The smart system then tries to work out how to achieve this. Given the long, long latency of a heat pump system this actually meant that to get to 25C by lunchtime on Sunday it needed to run all night on Saturday night. And it still only got to 23C in the measured room.

Our first attempt to “spoof” the system to run therefore was to leave the target temperature at our default - 18C because we’re tight - and instead use the same trick we pulled during commissioning. Placing the temperature node onto a freezer pack works nicely - the Hub thinks the house has suddenly dropped to 3C and thinks that a bit of heating might solve that. Except here comes our first implementation issue: At some point in this process we moved the Node out of range of the Hub. We found that out 90 minutes later by checking the App to a nice “uh-oh” message telling us the system would be in degraded mode attempting to hit a target based on what it knows about our heat-loss and expected weather (and more obviously by the lack of any internal reported temperature). Hmm.

The Temperature Node. All the fun of Wireless Connectivity, None of the Feedback of WiFi’s “Wrong Password” prompts

OK so we follow the guide in the app to re-connect. Step one push little button 3 times to wake it up on Node,OK, step 2 push button on Hub. Which is in the attic. OK, down with the ladder up we go… Oh boy that’s frustrating. Essentially we’re trying to re-pair the components but this process is fragile. Both sides have to be in “pairing” mode then there’s a limited window in which the process wil occur and the only feedback you get is some blinkenlicht on both the Node and the Hub. It’s not helped by the App being quite patronising - “did you see 3 flashes or more?” - without explaining what you SHOULD BE looking for. It took a good 3-4 goes which, crouched down in an attic waiting for pairing mode to expire on the Hub before we can try again was very tedious indeed.

But we got it re-paired. Hooray. For future reference - since it appears to have happened once since - IF it’s a temporary loss of communication you can skip the re-pair process by just pressing the Node’s button once, observing a long-blink and then (if it’s reconnected) 3 quick flashes. It’s best to move close to the Hub before doing so for better chance of success, you can then put it back where you found it afterwards. In normal use it appears to update the Hub once every 15-30 minutes or so so any in-app reading newer than about an hour, don’t mess with the node.

The App. Part One - Account lack-of-management

See Update 1 above - none of the following applies after 2023-08-09

On to the next issue: I read the guide again and find that decisions on when to run the Heat Pump especially for hot water depend not a little on the expected Energy Tariff. You’ll recall I mis-set that to one that’s “Agile” meaning it scales up/down at short notice to exploit generating conditions. Brilliant stuff but, unfortunately, not the tariff I’m on. We’ve recently moved to a Time-of-Use tariff with a similar-sounding name - we pay different amounts in peak / off-peak but (crucially) those periods are always the same.

Presumably, therefore, any goals we’ve given the system in terms of when we’d like hot water or a not-freezing house are then subject to whatever spot-prices are being applied - if it’s going to be cheap for an hour in the middle of the day then yatzee run the system, similarly if it’s expensive overnight then no hot water for you (this is inferred behaviour based on a couple of day’s observation without access to any of the cost data)

So this is something I’d very much like to change. In the App it’s under “More” -> “Update Account Details” but this just launches to a Chrome page where (despite coming from the already-signed-in App) I’m presented with a login page. And here’s where the fun starts: Every attempt to log in fails. But I’m a nerd you can’t keep me down, I find the URL of this page and try it from my browser. And get the same error. And then I try “Incognito” to rule out any plugin nonsense. And then Firefox. And then Firefox Anonymous Window. All the same.

Opening “Developer Tools” and tracing network soon reveals the problem: Hitting the “Login” button sends a request to… an undefined AWS endpoint. Literally a server address that’s ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED by DNS. And “By DNS” I mean my ISP, Google and Cloudflare. So: it’s not on the internet in any meaningful way.

Just to prove it’s not a me-problem, we get Dearly Beloved to download and activate her Homely App on the phone using the same user/password I setup way back in part 2 above. And that works fine. And yet she can’t get to Account settings either.

Time for Some Support.

The Homely Web Page and Support - Great for connecting to internet

So off we schlepp to Homely Energy. I’m mostly not here to complain - clearly this is first and foremost a “sales site” but they’ve got quite the extensive FAQ and self-help guide. And if you’re having the sort of trouble we’ve been having getting your Node connected, or your Hub to the internet, this is the place to be. That bouncing Homely Support Bot in the bottom-right of the page has got you covered for that.

If, on the other hand, you’ve got some other problem then… off you go, digging around looking for e.g. a ticket generation. But there ain’t one. It’s a phone number or an email. So I write them a nice email explaining I can’t login to my account and wondering if this might be a me-problem or a them-problem and, oh by the way I see there’s an name-not-resolved to an AWS domain when I trace it so perhaps it’s not me?.

That was on Friday. It’s now Tuesday. No response. And the account page still isn’t working. I’m going to have to phone them, aren’t I?….

2023-08-09: Yes, telephone support is the way to go IF you’ve been too clever and used a unique sign-up email. If you’re using your main email address, knock yourself out and let me know how it works because I’m genuinely interested.

And what about the system, it’s working right?

This would be fairly low-priority if the system was working as expected.

I’m told, by Homely’s lovely literature, that the system will optimise when and how long it runs for but always with the goal of having your schedules met. At the moment this is simple: I want a tank of hot water at 07:00 so the family can take a shower. I’d like there to be hot water at 19:00 so we can do the washing up and/or those of us that didn’t wash in the morning can scrub before bed.

What I expect to happen is that at some point overnight the system looks to see what the temperature in the tank is currently, what the target temperature is (50C as set in the app), and then come on early enough to ensure that hot-tank-at-07:00 condition is met. So far that hasn’t happened once. In 4 nights.

First night gets a “pass”: we’d only had an immersion heater the night before (system still being commissioned) and, at the time, a dumb one at that. It ran all night and brought the whole tank to 60C (at approximately the same energy cost as driving my car 50 miles, in case you’re wondering why immersion heaters aren’t anyone’s preferred hot water solution…). And there was plenty of hot-enough water left over on Saturday morning to meet that need.

However, Number One Son took the world’s longest shower and as a consequence there was chuff-all hot water come Saturday lunchtime. I rather hoped the system would see this and try and meet the evening temperature goal but… nothing happened.

How do I know the system didn’t run when we were out of the house? I wasn’t watching the app or the heat pump so how do I know. Well there’s no history in the app but I’ve got power monitoring so I can tell when that 10kW heat pump is running (even when it’s only consuming 1-2kW and not the full amount).

We manually scheduled it so we had some hot water - or warm-ish water - ready for Sunday but, again, the heat pump didn’t come on overnight. And it didn’t on Sunday night either. It did run for an hour or so during the day Monday to heat hot water but, again, not overnight.

Each morning we’ve had a tank of tepid-to-warm hot water. And I don’t know if this is working as designed or there’s a problem. Because although we set a target temperature in the Homely App - 50C - nowhere in the app does it tell you what the actual temperature is. And it does know this - as I mentioned the Hub’s got it’s own hot water tank sensor, it’s right in the middle of the tank and I can only presume it’s working. The only actual temperature readings we’ve got are one on the newly-ensmartened immersion heater (but that’s at the bottom of the tank next to cold water input so it’s expected to be low), and whatever the heat pump controller’s telling us. And I sincerely doubt that’s actual tank temperature because there’s no other sensor in the tank; I’m guessing it’s measuring heat-exchanger return temperature which is an analog useful for when to turn the system on/off but unreliable for actual temperature.

The App. Part Two: “Trust us, Bro”

This brings me to the structural issue with Homely. This is a system that is designed to hide all the complexity of a heat pump system - all these flow temperatures, compensation curves, latent heat capacity of the structures and all that stuff - and present a simple, easily understood user interface that “just works”.

If it did Just Work then that would be one thing. If I’d woken up every morning to tank of water at the expected 50C, I’d have some confidence that when the cold weather comes I would also be waking up to a house at the target 18C temperature. But that hasn’t happened once yet, in a sample size of 4.

The mantra of “trust us” is endemic in Homely. Go look for a detailed explanation of how it works on their website - all you’ll find is assurances that it’s doing it’s best to meet your goals as cheaply as it can. No mention of how, at least not in detail. I did find an explanation, from a 3rd party, on the internet that makes sense but honestly I’ve got no idea whether it’s real or not. So I’m not going to repeat or link to it here.

This attitude extends to the App. When I’ve gone into it to find the heat pump running - either heating or water - all you get is a toast at the bottom of the screen saying “why is my heat pump running?” which, when expanded, gives some platitudes about “we’re trying to meet your target schedules by exploiting cheap times of day”.

In the first place it’d just help if the system told you which of the targets it was currently trying to meet. And if it’s skipping one (like a full tank of hot water in the morning), at least some explanation of why would be useful (“electricity prices are currently too high” perhaps. Or “measured tank temperature is within the flex range” maybe).

It’s not like the Hub doesn’t know this - I can see it’s communicating with the mothership overnight, presumably to generate and load the “game plan” for the day based on whatever weather/electricity/target settings the cloud has decided are appropriate. Some way of exposing that plan - just a log page under “Advanced” in the app would do me - would do a hell of a lot to build my confidence in the system and start to earn that trust the system relies on. I get why all that detail isn’t front-and-centre, it goes against what the system’s sold as, but I cannot believe that even the most techno-phobic user wouldn’t find some explanation of why it’s doing what it’s doing useful. Especially when they wake up to a cold house to take a cold shower.

…But what if I don’t trust you, at least not yet?

There’s an argument that nearly all of the above is on me. I clicked through on defaults when setting up the account and got put on a profile that’s not appropriate - “Smart+”. And then, to compound the issue, I selected the wrong tariff so what the system’s trying to optimise for doesn’t actually apply to me. There’s some truth in that but, then, don’t we all just click through on defaults these days?

Certainly, at this point, if I could get through to the account settings page I would strongly consider moving back to “Smart” mode in which considerations of electric tariffs etc are discarded and the system just works to hit the target temperatures at the defined times. I might even revert to “Standard” mode which just energises the system during the defined schedule periods, targets be damned, as I think that might be useful to get some practice/confidence in the actual heat pump environment (as opposed to the heat pump control system).

But I can’t. Because the only way to control this is to use the accounts page. Which isn’t working. And which isn’t responding to support requests.

Or I could climb into the attic and use the vulcan-nerve-pinch method and just disable the whole shooting match I suppose…