API unable to access smartpaym.ovoenergy.com

Hey @brucesmith,

Sorry for the issues you’ve been having, 

There may be some advice found in the following topics:

• Can we get access to the OVO energy online account API to download our smart meter usage data?

Hi, experiencing the same issue and it’s Cloudflare that have blocked my IP from accessing the api endpoint. It’s all well and good rate limiting and the plugin owner could do something about that but this is the SOLE reason I’m with OVO. If this can’t be resolved I’ll be changing providers

@BPLightlog @Blastoise186 

Do either of you have any experience or suggestions you could help out with? 

Hi @pauldsmyth 

This comment was left by a Forum Volunteer. @Blastoise186 can only speak in a personal capacity and does not work for OVO

The Home Assistant integration in question was community developed by Timmo001 and can be found at https://github.com/timmo001/ovoenergy . As it makes clear in the README.md file over there, it is not developed nor supported by OVO because it is community developed and community maintained. The Home Assistant Community expects its users to understand that quite a few HA Integrations are NOT supported by the companies whose products and/or services are accessed by said Integration - because many of them are reverse engineered in some way.

By using the OVO integration, you agreed to those terms and also the understanding it could break at anytime - use at your own risk.

The closest OVO has ever gone to supporting Home Assistant is this Pull Request which I authored myself in June 2021 to help make Home Assistant users be less aggressive and reduce the rate at which HA instances were smashing OVO’s API to pieces to something FAR less bonkers. It was this PR which arguably made OVO more tolerant because it meant HA instances were doing a better job of playing nice. Alas, it did not mean that the Integration suddenly became OVO supported - I did that PR in a personal capacity as a way of helping make everyone happy/happier.

It is my suspicion that you’re getting blocked because your instance is smashing the API to pieces again with invalid authentication credentials - there’s already a similar GitHub Issue about this which you can find here. This is something OVO cannot fix - either Timmo001 or someone willing to submit a PR to that repository can fix it needs to do so.

To get help with this, please head over to GitHub in the first instance. You’re welcome to file an Issue against it but it’d be up to Timmo001 to decide whether he wants to respond or not. OVO can’t help with this as it’s not something they made themselves.

For OVO’s part, it’s impossible to know if these requests are attack traffic coming from a malicious actor trying to hack the systems, or just some legitimate tool that’s encountered a bug and has gotten itself stuck in a loop - as far as Cloudflare knows, it just sees tons of weird traffic and takes action to protect its customer as it’s designed to do.

Just another point as all of these type of feeds are prone to issues from time to time as they are often not supplier authored .. if you want to be more self reliant on a data source then an MQTT feed from a CAD/IHD such as the Hildebrand Glow would give you a local unit to suit your HA needs.