Unfortunately, the manufacturer’s heat pump technicians are obviously not professionals at all: electricity meter edition
For two years now I’ve been dragging around a long story about damage to our heat pump and the incredibly overwhelmed factory customer service and I haven’t gotten around to writing it all down. Today Kathrin wrote down her experiences with her mother’s new electricity meter and at least this part of my story can be told quickly, because something similar happened to me.
I’ll add the previous events later, all we need to know here is that our heat pump had relatively minor damage that the factory customer service couldn’t fix for about half a year. As a result, after legal proceedings were initiated, we received a new heat pump under warranty and in the meantime we heated almost the entire heating period in emergency mode, i.e. practically with an instantaneous water heater that is also installed in the heat pump. For when it’s really cold or you have a problem.
The heat pump has its own electricity meter because heat pump electricity is subsidized and is therefore a few cents cheaper. There is also an interesting story to be told here that has to do with market power, network operators, regulation and metering profiles, but I didn’t understand the details sufficiently to reproduce them here. In any case, the emergency operation of the heat pump is not subsidized and runs on the household electricity meter. In the emergency heating period, around three times the consumption of the heat pump was recorded on the household meter instead of on the heat pump meter. That’s about how much profit it makes on average compared to directly converting electricity into heat with a heating element. The four-digit additional costs incurred were at least largely reimbursed to us as a “goodwill gesture” shortly before another legal action was opened.
Much more exciting, however, is the moment when I want to read the meter readings a year and a half after replacing the heat pump: I was amazed when the number for the heat pump consumption appeared on the display. Nothing. Like nothing? Why not? The system had not been in emergency mode for a year and a half and I expected the usual 3000 kWh annual consumption as before, so the zero difference is quite a surprise. The missing 3000 kWh are quickly found in the household electricity and I quickly suspect what is going on here. A short test later brings certainty: the heat pump has been connected to the household meter since it was replaced and the (unused) emergency mode is connected to the heat pump meter. The matter was solved in 20 minutes with the power switched off, a screwdriver and a ladder to climb to the heat pump in the garage, but our discounts from the electricity provider have of course been significantly imbalanced since these years of chaos. And if the emergency operation had been running, we would have unknowingly committed subsidy fraud.
The factory customer service not only needed twelve attempts to repair the heat pump or ultimately replace it (story 1), but also not only screwed one of the screw fuses back in so loosely that our house was on the verge of a fuse box fire (story 2), but also mixed up the circuits in the new pump and apparently didn’t check it even after installation. Because that’s apparently how a professional proceeds when dealing with three-phase power installations. I am so impressed that my next heat pump will 100% never come from this manufacturer again. As if heat pumps were rocket technology… (They’re not, upon closer inspection they actually have a surprisingly trivial structure, but we’d rather not reveal the details to the BILD newspaper editorial team.)
(Gregor Meyer)