How Homey helped me catch a hidden (and potentially expensive) problem with my heat pump

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I just had to share a quick story about how home automation can help you discover existing problems you didn’t even know you had. Today, a new Homey flow brought to my attention that my Ecodan air-to-water heat pump wasn’t working the way it should.

I’m a bit of a data fanatic, and I already have several flows monitoring and logging my systems. This morning, I asked Gemini (AI) to come up with a new metric I could track via Homey. It suggested building a flow to count how many times my heat pump turns on and off during the day.

This is actually a really important piece of knowledge, because a repeated, rapid on-off cycle (short-cycling) wears down the compressor quickly—and that’s a very expensive piece of equipment to replace!

So, with a little help from the AI, I built a flow that records the number of start cycles and keeps track of the total operating time each day so I could log the values.

As soon as I got the flow working, notifications started rolling in. The pump was stopping and starting… every 15 minutes! It was constantly turning itself off and on completely under the radar.

Thanks to this data, I managed to track the issue down to a malfunctioning water pump. The problem went away after fixing it, but the main point is this: without Homey and this specific flow, this problem would have continued silently in the background for who knows how long. Sometimes the best automations aren’t just about convenience—they save your hardware!

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That’s a good find. However, this shouldn’t be necessary with a decent setup:
A pump runs or it doesn’t run. Or possibly rotates very slowly due to dirt / corrosion.
But this really should cause your heat pump to error at some point.

If I were you I’d discuss with your installer why it didn’t report an error and stop normal operation to stop further damage & to get your attention.
Maybe it even can be a possible warranty claim.

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Thank you for the response.

I did call the installer and the water pump wasn’t (the only) problem. Its the weather and low target temperature. Outside temperature is above 0, and less that +10 celcius most days, and Ecodan only needs to make water that’s +33. Powerful machine makes this very quickly and turns itself off because the quota is met.

I have an older house, and there is not enough thermal mass to storage the heat, so another cycle is needed. Once I demanded more from Ecodan and raised the target temperature, forcing it to make hotter water the cycles got longer.

During January and February there was no problem, since outside temperature stayed between -15 and -25 for weeks, and the heatpump worked 24/7 just anti-icing itself sometimes.