Category Archives: Services

Nearly Ready to Start Work on ‘Phase 2’

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Preparation for the construction of the Outbuildings included in the original Planning Permission but excluded from the first phase of Construction has been progressing slowly but steadily since the last post on this topic Preparing for ‘Phase 2’ in August 2024:

  • The design of the buildings is very nearly identical to what was originally envisaged, but with a few minor adjustments to the internal layout
    • A dedicated ‘Plant Room’ is now going to be partitioned-off at the end of the Workshop, to provide a less dusty and more controlled environment for systems like the MVHR unit, the computer network devices, and the solar power storage batteries
    • Some of the internal door openings have been widened to make for easier access within the building
    • A rainwater harvesting system is now part of the design
  • It proved especially problematic to find a structural engineering consultancy to take on the work of preparing the stormwater drainage design
    • The biggest component of this being the hydraulic modelling of future storm events in order to size the temporary storage required to ‘attenuate’ stormwater flows before discharging them off-site
    • All the local consultancy companies seemed too busy with other work to want to pick up this (relatively small) job
    • Manchester-based https://www.freeflush.co.uk offer a range of drainage-related Design services and were able to complete a design without needing to visit the site, based on supplied drawings and photographs; they completed their design last week
  • A total of 5 local construction companies were approached to tender for the work
    • 3 of those provided decent quotes and https://www.jkdevelopmentsltd.co.uk have been selected to undertake the work
    • The J&K construction team are finishing up work on another project and are forecasting availability to start within the next week

NIBE F1145 GSHP Migration from NIBE Uplink to myUplink Platform

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Historically, NIBE’s F-series of heat pumps (like my F1145 GSHP) used the “NIBE Uplink” Cloud-hosted monitoring platform and the newer S-series heat pumps used the newer “myUplink” instead. The S-series models have more capable control system hardware and touch-screen displays and benefit from some of the more advanced features of the myUplink platform. The network protocols used to link the heat pump to the Cloud platform are also different – rather more ‘dynamic’ so setting changes made via the myUplink app take effect more quickly. Another important change is that firmware updates are downloaded automatically and only need confirmation from the control panel, rather than having to be installed via a slightly temperamental procedure using a USB drive.

About a year ago, NIBE decided to retire NIBE Uplink and move the F-series units across to the myUplink platform and they’ve been gradually making firmware updates available which, when installed, point an F-series heat pump at myUplink instead of NIBE Uplink. They started with the more common models such as the standalone SMO 20 controller (used with various F-series ASHP models) and have been working their way through their model range. The SMO 20 update was made available in late 2023 whereas the firmware update for my F1145 only became available in mid 2024.

I had been running Version 9478(R1) of the F1145 firmware, dated 2021-07-09 (the latest available until mid 2024) and I upgraded to Version 9699(R5), dated 2024-07-03. The update was applied without any issues and after logging into the myUplink platform using my NIBE Uplink login credentials, my heat pump appeared in the myUplink dashboard. My installer’s account, which was granted the ‘Manager’ role for my system. migrated too – maintaining their access.

Observations on NIBE Uplink Network Communications

Roughly every 30 seconds, the unit issued a DNS ‘A’ record query for control.nibeuplink.com which resolves to a CNAME record pointing at an azure.com address. It then proceeded to connect to that address using the HTTPS protocol and exchange about 11 packets of data before closing the HTTPS connection. Periodically there were NTPv4 queries to ntp.nibeuplink.com which maps to CNAME time.google.com (although I have been substituting the address of a local NTP server instead).

Observations on myUplink Network Communications

Looking at the network communications following the migration, there are many more server addresses in play; ones I spotted include:

  • iotstatic.myuplink.com
  • api.myuplink.com
  • internalapi.myuplink.com
  • auth-emmy.myuplink.com
  • ipv4.myuplink.com
  • ntp.myuplink.com

It looks like the main data flow is now on TCP port 8883, which implies MQTT-over-TLS, on a persistent TCP connection. By default there seem to be updates every minute and, interestingly, whenever the myUplink smartphone App is accessed there’s a lot more activity that gets triggered.

ntp.myuplink.com is mapped to a CNAME of se.pool.ntp.org – i.e. one of the servers in the public NTP pool for Sweden.

Implications for Heat Pump Monitoring

I had been calling the NIBE Uplink API every 2 minutes from an automated script, to retrieve operational parameter values such as temperatures and circulation pump speeds, and storing those in a local database for display using the Grafana graphing dashboard. Some of these parameters were also being uploaded (via a separate automated script) to emoncms.org for display on the heatpumpmonitor.org dashboard.

While there is also a good API for myUplink, it’s structured differently – actually a bit ‘better’ in that fewer API calls are required to retrieve more parameter data. I now need to update the scripts so as to reinstate the data download to my local database. Since the API is looking more efficient I’m minded to increase the frequency to every minute.