Download a month's worth of half-hourly usage data via the existing CSV download link on the online account

A must have feature. 

That would be nice.

The sources I’ve tried can do this, but a month’s worth of readings is probably a set of columns each with a long list of 1500 numbers. However these numbers are delivered, it’s likely that some massaging will be necessary before they can be plugged into a spreadsheet. 

To monitor daily usage, e.g. when taking part in a Power Move challenge, it might be best to do a catch up of the missed days, then aim to add a day’s worth of numbers at a time.

There are a couple of other ways to get your data.

You can register with https://data.n3rgy.com/consumer-login. You can download 90 days worth of data (gas and/or electricity) and import into a spreadsheet or database. You will need your meter's MPAN (Meter Point Administration Number) or your MPRN (Meter Point Reference Number) plus your IDH MAC address. The data is of the form

timestamp (UTC)    energyConsumption (m3)
08/07/2023 00:30    0
08/07/2023 01:00    0
08/07/2023 01:30    0

Sadly I have never managed to download my electricity data from this website but others have managed. Also the gas data is in m3 so you will need to know the Calorific Value of the gas for your region (which can be obtained from https://data.nationalgas.com/ ) It takes at least a day for the Cv of the gas to be available (they need to collate information from many gas chromatographs around each local distribution zone). The data may be revised several days later.

Alternatively you can register on https://glowmarkt.com/ where you can download your data. Mine went back to the start of the year. 
The data is of the form

epochTimestamp    kWh    dateTime
1672529400    0.093    2022-12-31T23:30:00.000Z
1672531200    0.113    2023-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
1672533000    0.113    2023-01-01T00:30:00.000Z

The epochTimestamp is actually seconds from 1-Jan-1970 (sometimes known as Unixtime?).

Both are free services.

It would be nice to have the same information direct from OVO both for convenience and privacy.

It would also be useful if the download could have the 30min consumption data to 3 decimal places. 

This will then be consistent with all the 3rd party data sources and the OVO meter reading page.

At the moment it is definitely not easy for people to replicate the ovo figures

Do you know if thus is being worked on @Tim_OVO

Am sure it would be preferable to customers going to other sites.

Just picking this up and finding the right person to flag it to. In short we’re looking for:

1. CSV downloads of half hourly usage for the whole month not just the individual day
2. For that half hourly data to be to 3 decimal points rather than 2

Correct me if I’m wrong, otherwise I’ll get this raised and pass on any feedback or update I can. 

Perfect @Tim_OVO 

That sounds brilliant @Tim_OVO …I’m trying out the Bright site (via their glowmrkt.com) and the gas data are brilliant, nice histograms; their nice (and very helpful) tech people assure me there’s every chance the electricity data will follow, but it’s only been a few days. I did download the .csv file but it is indeed massive and would definitely need “massaging”.

I’m with the other cats on here who’ve expressed a preference: it would indeed be wonderful if something were visible to OVO consumers in-house. Even over a shorter time period (monthly would be brilliant). Even the “simplest” (I know! I know!) histogram would be luxury.

I’ll say it again: try Smart Meter Reports (guylipman.com). Once you’ve got the hang of it, there’s no fuss at all. When the latest data are loaded, this is the screen I get:
  

The 3kB CSV file looks like this when I open it in Excel (probably the default if Excel is installed):

The right-hand column is all ready to be copied and pasted into my PM worksheet. The whole process takes just a minute or so each morning.

It will be useful to have the ovo csv file to compare to the n3rgy data via the guylipman link provided 

Especially for the numerous ovo customers who currently haven't got great 30min consumption data from ovo.

I like the ease of this guylipman.com presentation, @Firedog, I should have said that it’s quite a few years now since I finished work and stopped using my (now ancient) laptop. My current device has no Excel…but I might just dust off the old laptop one of these days!

Actually, have just spotted iSpreadsheet, which apparently is free…

Whenever I’ve compared the 3DP OVO data (retrieved via the API) with the ones I get from n3rgy, they’ve been identical. They come from the same place, after all, so there’s no reason why they should be different. I’ve tacked on OVO’s figures to the last column of the table above:
  

🙋🏼

Firedog wrote:

Jeffus wrote:

It will be useful to have the ovo csv file to compare to the n3rgy data via the guylipman link provided 

 

Whenever I’ve compared the 3DP OVO data (retrieved via the API) with the ones I get from n3rgy, they’ve been identical. They come from the same place, after all, so there’s no reason why they should be different. I’ve tacked on OVO’s figures to the last column of the table above:
  

  

Jeffus wrote:

… the numerous ovo customers who currently haven't got great 30min consumption data from ovo.

 

🙋🏼

 

Yep. I know you are OK @Firedog 

Always look on the Bright site … 😊

You should be able to use Excel in the browser. Have a go: OVO-PM-Nov.xlsx. 

If you manage to open this workbook, you’ll find it populated with my data. Just paste your own on top of mine to see what happens. 

That’s very kind of you @Firedog, many thanks, I’ll give that a whirl…and actually earlier today I’ve been looking at the Apple version of MS Office (iWorks), which is freely available when you’ve bought an iPad or iPhone.  Their iWorks spreadsheet equivalent of Excel, called Numbers (comprehensively enough!!) seems interesting and I’ll be having a go playing with that over the next week or so.

But in the meantime I’ll very gladly avail myself of your kind offer, thank you, and I’ll let you know how it goes! Give me a day or so to get my spreadsheet brain in gear, it’s been a long while!!

All the very best, cheers….

I have changed this idea to indicate that we can’t consider it for our roadmap any time soon. 

The reason is that the billing platform that OVO gets your half hourly usage data from only provides access (API endpoints to be precise) to this data in daily intervals. So for a monthly view that would be 31 requests for data per customer. Not a very scalable solution until that changes. 

Thanks for everyone’s votes and for the idea. One to watch...

Oh well, good try! Maybe in the future…

Actually, in the meantime, as others on here have pointed out, I find I can simply paste in the data from n3rgy.com on a daily basis (i.e. 48 half-hour cells per day) into my own little (monthly) spreadsheet, which then enables some nice analysis; I’m finding Apple Numbers is OK to work with.  And it’s not too much of a pain to select 48 cells at a time (24 hours’ worth) from the downloaded CSV file and paste them into the spreadsheet in one easy copy and paste. Takes seconds for each day’s worth. 
 

The next stage is to be able to paste in a whole month’s in one go, which will need the original CSV file to be jiggled about a bit first so that all the monthly downloaded data are in a block of 31x48 cells. 

Brand new here and really useful stuff, thanks folks.  Being unaware of the n3rgy and glowmarkt services, I had, over the last few days, written some C++/VB dotnet code to auto login to my OVO account and, on a day by day basis, trawl back through all half hour data.  I should perhaps explain - effectively, within the program, I created a simple web-browser, and by ‘inspection’ of the HTML code, found which ‘buttons’ to (auto) press, and then within the HTML, locate and extract HH data.  I accumulated all 48 per day into a dated CSV string array.  [ Perfectly valid site scraping, not ‘hacking’ which I never do! ]

It all went well until I simply could not “get the values to balance” with what OVO presented on the site for both daily totals and monthly totals - OK - not FAR out but no real explanation.  [ I fully understand the possibility of rounding issues to 2dp - but, say over a month’s worth it would have been pretty darned close - say +/- a few hundredths.]  So, when in doubt, ask Google LOL!  And I arrived here.

Rather than responding to several of the useful posts, I’ll just quickly sum up and thank BeePee who mentioned n3rgy and glowmarkt, and to Firedog for their useful insights!  

State of play: using n3rgy, although it DID say it would take some time to fetch the data, there was no indication of exactly what that meant, and it did permit me to download, but all I received were two empty (apart from the header lines) .csv files.  Perhaps it is still “collecting”?

On the other hand, with glowmarkt it advised that it may take a day to prepare the data, so I’ll check back with both of them tomorrow.

Anyway, looks like I have found a ‘home from home’ with folks who are happy to address often technical, software and general Smart Metering technology issues!

Thanks folks!

I haven’t trawled back to see what nonsense I’ve written here before, but I’d just say that I prefer to use Guy Lipman’s simple but effective interface to access the data. It’s exactly the same as you’d get from n3rgy direct, but without the extra hassle of the zipped files. It’s become a daily routine to pick up the previous day’s data and plug them into my spreadsheets. I usually get a day’s figures before 01:00 the following day, so before they’ve even had chance to cool down.

I may have mentioned this, too: rather than scraping web pages, you could automate extracting the data on which those pages are based. This URL, for example, should return a JSON file of yesterday’s half-hourly data if you substitute your own OVO account no. for nnnnnnn: smartpaymapi.ovoenergy.com/usage/api/half-hourly/nnnnnnn?date=2024-03-15. You’ll have to work out the authentication; there are instructions somewhere at this site for doing that, too. You can see the data if you sign into your account in a (Chromium) browser and then visit the URL in a new tab in the same session.

Have fun!

I can definitely vouch for the Guy Lipman site after @Firedog recommended it, it’s brilliant, and brilliantly easy to use.  You wouldn’t need anything else.  For gas and for electricity.  He also specifies (with dates) any “missing data” HH slots, which on its own even without any of the many other features in the site is a very good thing!

But very recently I’ve also gone down the route of buying (just under £70) Hildebrand’s  Glowmarkt IHD which comes with all sorts of benefits over and above the “normal” Chameleon, for example in opening up the possibility of “easily” working with MQTT  (!!! Easily for some…I’m still trying to get my head around MQTT).  But even apart from that it’s a lovely IHD (displaying to the nearest Watt) and even though I have few 70 quids to throw about on a whim for technology I barely understand, I do consider it an absolute gem for the money. 
 

Just by force of habit the associated Hildebrand Bright app (free) and Glowmarkt data (free) (incidentally, I’ve found the free Bright app is greatly enhanced by their bought IHD) has been for some months now my go-to solution for downloading my HH electricity data early next day. But this is not to detract from the Guy Lipman site, which offers far far more information than I’m ever able to glean from the Hildebrand or n3rgy data off my own bat.  
 

And the n3rgy website HH data (also free, also to 3 decimal places) has also proved over the last five or six months whenever I’ve dipped into it, very dependable.

And the Hildebrand support staff have been absolutely brilliant with my queries. 
 

Yup @Firedog - good point - “I may have mentioned this, too: rather than scraping web pages, you could automate extracting the data on which those pages are based. This URL, for example, should return a JSON file of yesterday’s half-hourly data if you substitute your own OVO account no. for nnnnnnn: smartpaymapi.ovoenergy.com/usage/api/half-hourly/nnnnnnn?date=2024-03-15.”  Indeed!  I just hadn’t got that far as yet, but that type of thing is on the cards (as I have done with a couple of other sites).  Driven by curiosity I have as we speak (well, as I write, LOL) just tried that - and it’s ideal!  Authentication was already present due to an existing live login on the OVO site.  Cool, saved me some time on the HTML “Page Inspector” on Chrome and tracking down the links….  At least I have it now, TY!

Oh, and @waltyboy  as well as Firedog, I have had a good look at the Guy Lipman site, gave it a quick try-out, and it is impressive, basically it’s all there!  ( I already handle data gaps in the current software I have, which on the OVO site just show missing kWh as a “-” char.  Something slightly different to do, but not at all difficult)

So, I have several options now I have the “real” data readily available.  I’ll probably pick one way or another to integrate it into my existing V.Studio program.  [ Although I can ‘work well enough’ with Excel, its marcos and its VBA I generally prefer to do a lot of pre-processing of data for “specific analyses purposes” in C++/VB and then launch out the results to Excel

Thanks both for your hints and advice!