Improving your service with the Internet Service Gateway (ISG)

Have you ever had one of those faults where even Shelock Holmes would be baffled? The client insists the system isn’t working, but when you turn up there is nothing to see?

I’m going to share with you how installing an ISG (Internet Service Gateway) on our heat pumps can help cure this kind of headache – and what is more - cure it before the client even realises there is a problem. This is the kind of German efficiency for which Stiebel is justly famed and in which our systems lead the market. Only with the level of detail logged and stored by our system can you be the super sleuth of heat pumps.

So let me give a recent example of how this works. We had an installed and commissioned bivalent system with a GSHP and an oil boiler back up. All was apparently working well. We set up the ISG to report the energy usage and switch on the boiler if there was a fault so there was no reason for the house to ever get cold.

Yet whilst the system had been checked and re-checked by the installer, commissioned by one of my staff and the client was happy with the performance, there was something going on that no human had spotted. The ISG however, never sleeps and is always checking. So it detected that the system was operating outside its ideal parameters.

The system was set to monitor the gap between the set temperature and the actual temperature and to turn the boiler on if it was taking too long for the heat pump to respond to heating needs. Normally this would only happen in extremes of weather when the system was operating in temperatures outside what it designed to cope with or during the super-heat cycle used as a hygiene measure for the hot water tanks once a week. Yet in this case the boiler was turning on for perhaps a few minutes every two or three days when the heat pump failed to respond sufficiently to maintain the temperature in the hot water tanks.

So when the system was commissioned all was running perfectly and the client didn’t notice the little extra use of fuel or any drop in water temperatures.

But having spotted an anomaly the ISG sent an email asking us to check the system. This prompted a check of the operating graph produced by the system, where it was easy to spot the anomaly in the hot water heating pattern. Because the Stiebel system (unlike most of our competitors) has true diagnostic capability, we were able to look at the stored data for the refrigerant system. The heat pump system monitors the water flow rate running through it and if it is insufficient it turns on the boiler. We looked looked at this data set and saw a dramatic drop in the flow rate every two or three days which triggered the boiler to be turned on.

Because this was an intermittent fault, we knew it wasn’t a burst pipe, and were able deduce that the circulating pump was intermittently sticking. So even before the client knew that there was a problem we were able to despatch a replacement pump and book an engineer to arrange a call.

Since the pump has been fixed we are now able to see that the fault has stopped and the pump is working without interruption. So the ISG has allowed us not only to spot a problem, and diagnose a fault, it has allowed us to ensure that the fix has resolved the problem.

If you want it to be the level of service that you provide to your customers then Stiebel Eltron heat pumps are the way forward.