All has been well with my new ground source heat pump system since it was commissioned at the beginning of January although it has needed a fair bit of tweaking of controls to get everything working as desired. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to really understand how all the different settings work together to produce the end results, but I think I’m almost there with it now…

That was until the underfloor heating simply refused to get warm a couple of days ago!

The target temperature being shown by the heat pump for the underfloor circuit looked perfectly reasonable yet the actual temperature reading from the sensor next to the shunt / mixer valve controlling the underfloor supply was way too low. And it simply refused to get anywhere near the target temperature despite regardless of any settings changes I made. After previously thinking I’d got the heat pump operation and control completely sussed, this was a bit of a let down.

After speaking with the excellent technical support team at ICE Energy they decided it would be best if an engineer came out to check the shunt valve, so an appointment was booked.

Shortly afterwards I just happened to be looking over the heat pump installation and I noticed that the pressure gauge for the unvented system had dropped from the normal of around 2 bar to just over 0.25 bar. This wasn’t right so I corrected it and lo and behold, the temperature of the underfloor circuit started to rise!

I called ICE Energy back and explained what I had found and they told me that an air lock or low pressure would cause the symptoms I’d been experiencing, which was reassuring.

So fingers crossed, that little hiccup is fixed now. And, as equally important I am back to being confident I know how the system works again!