@WalksWithTurkeys …fair question.
We had quite a few quotes before embarking on our installation in our [badly insulated] house a couple of years back. A few of these companies offered the ‘premium’ option of the vaillant, or something like the ecodan or in one case a clivet rebadged midea, at a cheaper price.
The company we went for were the ones who offered the clivet and this was over 2k cheaper than the vaillant offering. My one regret is that I didn’t enquire at the time how much it would have been just to get a midea as their comparative unit is generally around 1k cheaper than the clivet….
Anyway since installation I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with it, designing my own controls and monitoring using home assistant. I’ve tweaked a few bits of the physical install side as well, and I also peruse various ashp forums regularly and have read up a lot about them and various units people have installed, and issues that crop up. I did a lot of research beforehand but I certainly know a lot more now about them, than I did.
As said the Bosch is or at least was a midea underneath so you’d be paying a premium to have a Bosch warranty rather than midea- the benefits of which might not warrant the price difference. I assume most people wouldn’t know this and think they are getting a Bosch engineered product when they are not.
The vaillant- it’s expensive, and I’ve also seen more complaints about them (noise being a big one for the 7kW unit) than I ever have about the midea. In fact the only complaint I have seen about the midea is that the controls aren’t the easiest but I think these might have been updated now to be a bit more user friendly. And there’s a lot of midea owners out there. There are equally a lot of people happy with their vaillants.
Efficiency wise they are all very similar so you’re not gaining anything there. It then comes down to considering aftercare and warranties (and assumption perhaps that vaillant might be better), and of course the controls. Is this worth paying an extra 2-3k for? I thought probably not.
Our install now works well by the way and I’d recommend them in general- if the price is right as you say.
We had quite a few quotes before embarking on our installation in our [badly insulated] house a couple of years back. A few of these companies offered the ‘premium’ option of the vaillant, or something like the ecodan or in one case a clivet rebadged midea, at a cheaper price.
The company we went for were the ones who offered the clivet and this was over 2k cheaper than the vaillant offering. My one regret is that I didn’t enquire at the time how much it would have been just to get a midea as their comparative unit is generally around 1k cheaper than the clivet….
Anyway since installation I’ve gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with it, designing my own controls and monitoring using home assistant. I’ve tweaked a few bits of the physical install side as well, and I also peruse various ashp forums regularly and have read up a lot about them and various units people have installed, and issues that crop up. I did a lot of research beforehand but I certainly know a lot more now about them, than I did.
As said the Bosch is or at least was a midea underneath so you’d be paying a premium to have a Bosch warranty rather than midea- the benefits of which might not warrant the price difference. I assume most people wouldn’t know this and think they are getting a Bosch engineered product when they are not.
The vaillant- it’s expensive, and I’ve also seen more complaints about them (noise being a big one for the 7kW unit) than I ever have about the midea. In fact the only complaint I have seen about the midea is that the controls aren’t the easiest but I think these might have been updated now to be a bit more user friendly. And there’s a lot of midea owners out there. There are equally a lot of people happy with their vaillants.
Efficiency wise they are all very similar so you’re not gaining anything there. It then comes down to considering aftercare and warranties (and assumption perhaps that vaillant might be better), and of course the controls. Is this worth paying an extra 2-3k for? I thought probably not.
Our install now works well by the way and I’d recommend them in general- if the price is right as you say.
