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

Loved reading up on this, and it’s nice to meet you, @BillyG.

So what’s your latest recommendation for someone looking to easily get their half hourly usage data? If you think it’s helpful, you’re always able and welcome to put that in a separate topic guide for someone falling in your footsteps looking for advice...

Thank you @BillyG for all your useful and fascinating info and analysis, and for your kind and informative feedback…I second the @Tim_OVO comment above, re any of your thoughts on whether you feel there is a single most straightforward approach to folk downloading their HH data, particularly from their OVO account rather than through a third party?

I’ve been quite happy so far with my present approach to viewing and storing my daily HH data, but always willing to learn, even if some (most?!) of your tempting recipes for accessing direct from OVO might seem at first reckoning to be beyond my ken!  I lag behind many on here in technical knowledge, many who’ll be much more au fait with your workings than I, but with a few good guidelines and pointed nudges I’ve been helped a lot on this forum…
 

And your time is definitely much appreciated, thanks and all the very best…
 

Hi @Tim_OVO and @waltyboy - let me get back on this later, but I’ll “half-answer” the question - from Tim “for someone looking to easily get their half hourly usage data?” and yourself Walt - “downloading their HH data, particularly from their OVO account rather than through a third party”

Right now I’m with Firedog on the “easiest” - the Guy Lipman route.   

However, the “direct from their OVO account (avoiding 3rd party)” I feel is more ‘problematic’ (in the sense of not impossible by any means, but may have a level of difficulty depending on the end-user’s skill set)

I have to go attend to dinner (my turn tonight Grrrrr…. nah, I don’t mind) but I thought I give a quick response and think a bit more about “direct from OVO account”…...

Many thanks @BillyG, that Guy Lipman site is great, right enough.  And as for playing with the HH data direct from one’s OVO account pages, yep, it’s that “skill set” bit you mention that I did rather suspect.  I shall await with great interest any further developments that might occur!

And, even more important, enjoy that dinner! My go-to meal preparations usually involve pasta in some shape or form…
 

All the best again…cheers.

Putting my pedant hat on for a moment, I’d regard OVO as just another consumer of the Hh data held by DCC, albeit a rather special one by virtue of being the supplier. So they’re just as much a ‘third party’ in this exercise as n3rgy and others who have your permission to access the DCC data. 

I haven’t checked how many gaps there are in the data OVO hold for me, but I reckon there are fewer in the data I’ve got from n3rgy (a total of 13 half-hours in the past 18 months, four of them while the meter was being exchanged, the rest two local power cuts).

@Firedog, complete with “pedant hat” !  ( Love it!  With my own pedant hat always within easy reach, we’re going to get-on famously here, I can tell !) ROFL.   

Yes indeed you’re absolutely correct.  It was my lack of specificity (tut-tut) in the above comment ‘avoiding 3rd party’ that invoked the donning of your pedant-hat!  I apologise for the inconvenience!  

I had a mental image of the 3rd party, referred to originally by @waltyboy , as being that of Guy Lipman’s useful site, and perhaps with an implied desire to “have something, local to my computing environment that is under MY control, maintainable and modifiable by myself should the need arise”.  [ I don’t know, maybe a scripting language like Python, JScript, Powershell, whatever - but avoiding the need for having to resort to some form of compiled language - although ‘complex’ scripting kind of demands an underlying knowledge of various things anyway - oh, perhaps like WebClient, JSON, HTML, DOM structure, CIM methods etc etc...]

Absolutely agreed Firedog, we’re on the same page.  At the end of the day, SM data presented on OVO ‘Usage’ pages, just as with any other supplier (DCC ‘Core Users’), will all have been ‘lifted’ from the DCC, post-processed, and presented in their (the supplier’s) chosen format Yearly, Monthly and Daily - hence the usage to 2dp only and the identification of missing readings with the “-” char as with OVO.

Out of passing interest, here’s an example of my current ‘scraped’ data set for one day.  Although in CSV format, it’s not really intended for immediate and direct import to Excel, it’s an intermediate file for use with my program. (It COULD be directly opened in XL of course, but I prefer to have the ability to pre-process it first and selectively create different types of .csv exports for XL).  In the following, note that I coalesce the entire day’s readings into what can be easily expanded into a 53 element array - it contains the date, 48 HH kWh values and 4 final fields, namely ‘Missing HH count’, OVO’s ‘Daily Total’, my calculated daily total from the 48 HH readings, and finally a ‘delta’ value, being the difference (if any) between OVO’s Daily total and my summed HH total - 

13/03/2024, <date, then split for readability, then 48 readings below>

 0.08,0.04,0.03,0.05,0.02,0.05,0.04,0.03,0.05,0.19,0.08,0.00,0.19,0.24,0.12,0.30,0.17,0.12,0.10,0.03,0.17,0.08,0.31,0.93,0.19,0.17,0.23,0.07,0.05,0.06,0.06,0.20,0.09,0.10,0.17,0.67,0.24,0.10,0.12,0.10,0.18,0.18,0.08,0.10,0.07,0.04,0.05,0.03,

1, <missing (0.00 in red above) [ And Firedog, I haven’t yet checked for consistency of missing data between OVO and N3RGY, but it’s on the cards !  Having been unconditionally transferred from SSE to OVO about 18 months back, to be able to get ANYTHING meaningful on the site is wonderful compared to what was offered by SSE, and drove me close to breaking point back in 2019 trying to retrieve HH usage for the previous year!  ]

6.77, <my calculated HH daily

6.77, <=OVO’s stated HH daily

0.00<<delta value
 

It was partly the occasional difference in the ‘delta value’ that prompted me to investigate further, resulting in finding the forum - for instance the end of an earlier date - 

…...,0.04,0.04,

0,<missing (none)

5.97,<My total

5.90,< OVO total

-0.07<delta  (it’s (OVO’s) is less than my HH summation)

I KNOW, it’s only 70Wh and neither here-nor-there in the greater scheme of things.  (And I should make it absolutely clear - doing this was NOT about checking out what OVO say, it was all about ‘consistency checking’ of my own code!) Clearly, it’s statistically possible due to rounding, but, hey, I was curious, and also because I was already aware that the SM collects “active power’ (Watts) to 1W (or better), but for energy (Wh) usage meter and IHD display reasons, generally limits the presented data to steps of 10Wh (i.e. expressed as kWh to two dp) - although as collected from the meter to DCC, to 3dp

Anyway’s - enough already, and good morning to all !

Morning Billy 👏🏻

One of the reasons why I started looking for ‘better’ data was the lack of precision in the figures displayed at OVO’s site. It’s difficult to detect small variations in those circumstances, and that may indeed be the very reason why the OVO figures are limited to 2dp. 

I wonder if you’re comparing results from two different data sets. On the OVO Usage pages, the Day bar chart and table is derived from one set, while the figures at the top of that page and on the Month and Year tabs are from the other. The Day tab shows the Hh data (to 2dp), while the others pick up the advance from the meter readings themselves. There are all sorts of reasons why these don’t match precisely, but that’s another topic. 

Hh data for each day are polled from DCC sometime the following day, usually before noon. Readings are - I think - fetched from the meter automatically around the same time. In my experience - currently based on 6 months’ (actually 173 days’) data since I got a new meter - there is no (i.e. < 1Wh) difference between the aggregate Hh data and the meter advance. Today, they’re both precisely 532.118 kWh, which says quite a bit about the accuracy of the meter’s records.