This page explains what smart grid control actually does to your heat pump, in plain terms. Let’s dig into it.
Once connected through the ONECTA app, your heat pump’s price optimization checks the current electricity price every 15 minutes and compares it to the rest of that day’s prices. It doesn’t use a fixed price threshold in euros or cents, since a “cheap” price in one country or season can be an “expensive” price elsewhere. Instead, it looks at where today’s current price falls between today’s own cheapest and most expensive hours, and adjusts your heat pump accordingly.
For example, if today’s prices range from 5 to 20 cents per kWh and the current price is 6 cents, that’s close to today’s cheapest, so your setting moves close to your maximum. If the price is 18 cents, close to today’s most expensive, it moves close to your minimum.
Two independent settings can respond to price, and you choose which ones to use:
For each one you enable, you set a minimum and a maximum in the app’s device settings. During expensive periods, the setting moves toward your minimum. During cheap periods, it moves toward your maximum. For cooling, this is reversed: your maximum is used when prices are high, and your minimum when prices are low, since a warmer target means less cooling effort.
During the cheapest part of the day, the setting holds near your maximum for the whole stretch, not just for the single cheapest moment. This keeps your heat pump running steadily through a cheap period rather than reacting to every small price tick.
You don’t have to use both settings. If you’d rather only one of them follow the price, set the other one’s minimum and maximum to the same value. That fixes it at a constant, and only the setting with a real range left will change with price.
Room temperature is a thermostat setpoint. Once your home reaches the target, heating or cooling stops, even if the price is still low. A cheap price raises the heating target (or lowers the cooling target), it doesn’t force the heat pump to keep running once you’re comfortable. If your home has a lot of thermal mass, for example a concrete floor with underfloor heating, widening the range gives the heat pump more room to store extra heat (or extra cooling) during cheap periods rather than idling once a modest target is reached.
How much difference the leaving water offset makes depends on your heat emitters. Underfloor heating already runs efficiently at low water temperatures, so a bigger offset gives a smaller efficiency benefit. Radiators often need a larger offset swing to produce a noticeably different amount of heat. Fan coil units generally sit in between. The same applies whether you’re heating or cooling, just in whichever direction that mode’s offset moves.
The offset only shifts the water temperature up or down from the heating curve configured on the unit, whether that was set by your installer or by you. It never changes the curve itself, so your base heating setup stays exactly as configured.
If your system has a hot water tank, you can turn on “Pause during price peaks” in the device settings. When enabled, hot water heating pauses during the most expensive part of the day and resumes automatically once prices drop into the cheapest part. Unlike heating and cooling, there’s no range to set here, just the one toggle, since the pause and resume thresholds are fixed by the system rather than user-adjustable. It also won’t flip back and forth on every small price move, it waits until the price is clearly back in the cheap range before resuming, and clearly in the expensive range before pausing again. It always resumes automatically if the tank runs low, regardless of price, so you’re never without hot water.
All of the ranges and toggles above are yours to change at any time from your device’s settings in the app. There’s no need to contact support to adjust them. Changes take effect on the next check, so allow up to 15 minutes to see them reflected.
Which of the two heating and cooling settings are available depends on how the indoor unit is configured and what it exposes. A unit set up for room temperature control will offer the room temperature setting; a unit set up for leaving water temperature control will offer the leaving water offset. Some installations expose both, in which case both can be adjusted independently as described above.
The heating curve configured on the unit itself, whether set during installation or adjusted later by the resident, is never touched by this service. Optimization only writes a bounded offset on top of it, or a room temperature setpoint, depending on the control mode above, so that base curve stays intact.
If anything here doesn’t match what you’re seeing, or you have feedback on how this works, contact Erik Eng directly.
Enable your Daikin heat pump to stay informed about real-time energy prices from Nord Pool, allowing it to prioritize energy consumption when prices are at their lowest.
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