May 28, 20215 yr Several times recently, when the morning is cold, my heat pump has turned on but the compressor hasn't run. Instead I get the defrosting (snowflake) symbol showing. My question is does this mean that the pump is doing something and the compressor will eventually start working again? The manual that I downloaded is silent on this matter. My current MO is to turn the geyser circuit breaker off and then back on. This seems to reset the system and the compressor then kicks in. I actually toyed with the idea of having a timer on the geyser circuit to kill power to the pump for 5 minutes each morning to clear any such errors, but this is a bit of a brute force and ignorance solution.
May 28, 20215 yr Author OK.... I have it. I'll post the information I got here in case it helps somebody else. When the timer turns the pump on there is a temperature check. If the GAS is too cold then the pump goes into a mode where it draws water out of the geyser and circulates it through the heat exchanger. This circulation is in the reverse of the usual direction. As the water is almost certainly warmer than the gas under these conditions, the system will start to warm up to the point where it can run again. By default this defrost operation will run for 45 minutes or until the gas reaches 12 degrees C. These defaults can be overridden in the setup menu. Another strategy is to have the pump turn on earlier to give the defrost time to complete before you need the hot water.
May 30, 20215 yr Author Another update. I set it to turn on an hour earlier, and that worked for one day but it meant the compressor started working at 5am and I thought that to be a bit antisocial. So I reverted to the original time settings and decided to have just a look at the settings that they tell you to not fiddle with. Aha! "Time interval for defrosting" should be 45 min by default, and the allowable range is 10 to 90 minutes. "Running time for defrosting" should be 10 minutes by default and the allowable range is 5 to 17 minutes. Both of these were somehow set to zero. In my experience with timer switches "zero" generally means "infinity". I set them both to 10 minutes and we'll see how things proceed.
May 30, 20215 yr What size/ cost would a heatpump be to heat a geyser? How does one determine the specs required?
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