A couple of months back I upgraded my old Potterton Prima 80F to a Vaillant Ecotec 428 boiler.....and very impressed I have been too.
Being a bit of a data anorak I am very curious about the VRDialog software that Vaillant offer, for logging and diagnostics. readily available for about £70.
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would be really interested to log all the key boiler paramaters such as on/off times; temperatures; modulation %age etc over a few days.
I can't find any meaningful documentation to download anywhere.
Does anyone out there actually use this? What do you think of it? Is it worth the dosh?
In my case I am using the (Ecotec Plus 428) boiler alonside a thermal store that is also has an indirect solar heat source. Solar side has a RESOL controller and logger and I have 5 minute (or for that matter any other interval I want) temperature readings from store top, bottom, solar manifold and return pipe.
I therefore have a good idea of the solar energy input to the store, and (overnight) I also can calculate a good estimate of system heat losses.
Top up heat comes from the boiler and I'm really interested to collect a dataset of boiler on/off times, flow and return temperatures over a period of time. To be clear I am using the boiler for "heat only"; there are no accessory controls installed.
Looking at your screenshots, it would appear that the VRDialog can do what I want.
I believe the boiler itself has no internal logging capability? If this is the case I assume I will need to leave a PC running for a few days to acquire the data (I have an old laptop I can use).
some of the values I read come from the VRC400. If you have no eBus controls you'll only get the values that are visible on the screens relating to the boiler. That should give you flow and return temperatures.
On and off times isn't quite so easy but you'll be able to do something; at worst you could calculate them by looking at the change in flow temperature. The "flame ionisation" sensor value gives a really good indication of when the flame is lit.
I'm not sure there'a good way to calculate power output though; the burner modulates, so knowing it's lit doesn't tell you how much it's outputting. I've found a value in the logfile which varies 0-100 and *might* be a percentage of maximum output; am not sure.
It's not practical to read the data from the boiler more than once a minute with VrDialog, AFAICT. The burner might modulate up and down more than once inside that time - I don't know.
It doesn't know how much gas it's using; it doesn't meter it.
It logs to a degree; it remembers error codes, and it records values for things like how many times (since it was manufactured!) the burner has lit and the pump has started. It doesn't log temperatures, so you will have to do as you suggest. It's pretty flakey and tends to crash at random; pops up an error message in German and quits - so you need to keep an eye on it.
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