@Transparent , @Tim_OVO Just had a look at my ovo usage and the half hourly data restarted on 17 Dec 2020. Hurray. How about yours @RichH ?

Hi @SianiAnni , @Transparent and @Tim_OVO ,

Mine has also started to show from 17th December . My automated scripts are now pulling through this information too. Happy Days!!! Long may it continue. A shame about the missing data but if it’s working going forwards then that will do!

Did anyone find out what caused this ‘anomaly’?

Thanks again all!

That’s great news @RichH and @SianiAnni !

I’m not currently aware of anything in particular that caused the issue or fixed it, but I’m pretty confident we’ll find out sooner rather than later.

However, I do begin to suspect this might be related:

The capabilities of the forum community is impressive stuff and extremely powerful. You can be amazed as to what it can do sometimes.

@RichHwrote:

Did anyone find out what caused this ‘anomaly’?

Well someone does!

But either they don’t realise the significance of the bug-fix they’ve done, or else they don’t consider it information which should be shared with us.

That means us Forum Contributors continue to put in months of analysis concerning “missing data” without having a clue what gets done about it.

Anyway… only one of the bugs has been “fixed”. The symptoms we’ve been describing on various Topics here are certainly caused by more than one fault.

I suppose you’ve noticed what @Tim_OVO wrote here about the conversation between Stephen Fitzpatrick and I last week?

The Missing Data issue did come up, although it wasn’t on the agenda.

Note particularly what Tim said in para.3

I must admit to holding off on my renewal on this. It being due next month but on the basis of what I have seen here on this forum I’m going 99% sure that I’m going to stick around for another year….. unless I can get a significant saving elsewhere. 
 

It has been years since I’ve seen a forum be so active in (pushing towards) resolving an issue and want to thank everyone who has helped so far, @Blastoise186 especially for pointing out some of the more obvious things that I missed !

You’re welcome, I’m glad it helps. :)

This is one of the hot issues that OVO is keen to address and it’s great to see some progress towards getting it fixed.

There’s a fair few planned upgrades coming for the forums in the near future. I can’t say too much right now but we’re definitely making progress on some planned ideas to improve communications, add some more tools to the forums… And maybe one or two other secret surprises as well…

Nice reporting @SianiAnni @RichH and great to hear!

I’ve asked the usage devs what has changed from the 17th and will report back here. As @Transparent mentions, we really want to be closing the loop better in these instances. 

Given that my Carbon Co-op half hourly gas data also reappeared on the same day, isn’t it more likely that the fix was at the DCC end?

That information @SianiAnni, is precisely why OVO’s in-house techies should not be trying to analyse these bugs with us! {erratum: that should read without us !}

That was the main thrust of what Stephen, Tim and I were discussing last week. It isn’t the issue of the Missing Data per se, but rather the reluctance or inability of relevant OVO staff to engage with those of us who report such details.

It is clearly not in anyone’s best interest for super-analysts like yourself to be directed through Customer Support when you have a bug to report. Their remit is to “solve it” as quickly as possible - thereby losing all the evidence we so carefully collate.

This will now change!

*Should?

Thanks @SianiAnni this has also been passed on. 

The devs aren’t aware of any changes made around the 17th, and two developments that have been made don’t seem related to this missing daily gas usage. 

@RichH can I confirm it was your missing daily gas usage that returned on the 17th? 

Erm… yes, thanks for spotting that grammatical error @Tim_OVO  I’ve amended it above!

Did the developers check if any changes had been made to the uSmart software on 17th Dec?

We need to remember that the new Billing System doesn’t directly communicate with DCC. It’s uSmart provides the BOL (Business Orchestration Layer).

Morning everyon!

I’ve been advised that:

“An issue was identified where most of the gas meters stopped sending half hourly (HH) consumption in volume units. This was fixed back in December where the meters where re-configured to start sending again HH consumption in volume units.”

I think we may have found our candidate. Let’s test our current way of passing on feedback to these devs: @SianiAnni @RichH if this HH gas usage data goes again, let us know here. I will grab your account details and go direct to the devs to check if this correlates with any of the changes they’ve made, or if it’s related to uSmart.  

Thanks for the explanation, but there’s insufficient detail for me to feel confident that the issue has been addressed.

Think about this for a moment:

Here’s my gas readings for the month of Jan, which is after that bug was fixed.

So there are obvious (and different) points of “missing data”.

Let’s look at the HH readings for both of those days:

A: For 2nd Jan, the HH totals bear no relationship to the bar on the month-histogram. Since there is no correspondingly high reading the following day, should I assume that this low figure for the day has been applied to correct previous days when the usage was over-reported?

There’s no indication that any “correction factor” has been applied however. This leaves the customer unaware of what’s happening.

The other “issue” is the final reading of the day, which appears to be missing. Here’s the same graph obtained from my Comms Hub by Bright:

Note the 48th reading of the day is present.

That data is available to OVO, but still hasn’t been collected.

B: For 20th Jan, there certainly are HH readings up until 17:30 and yet no day-reading has been shown on the month histogram.

Tim and I had a hypothesis about the reasons for this. But we had to abandon that theory a couple of months ago. It concerned the presence or absence of that final reading of the day.

Once again, here’s that same data from Bright:

Note that 48th reading is present.

Let’s stop there and allow @Tim_OVO to show this to the Orionites.

It takes a long time to collate this level of evidence to be fed back. So I want to ensure it’s being noticed.

This is incredibly useful feedback, @Transparent - the time and effort required is not lost on me, so thank you. 

I’ve passed this on, and sent a more detailed updated vis the Super User Treehouse, here

One of the issues to consider is the time after midnight at which the SMETS_command is received from OVO to retrieve the readings for the previous day.

As the gas meter only awakens from its slumbers to transmit data every half-hour, there is no guarantee that the Comms Hub will have received the 48th reading until 00:30. Retrieving data prior to then risks the final reading for the day being absent, even if the ZigBee link from the gas meter is perfectly functional.

Hi everyone, 

Following on from updates from the likes of @SianiAnni and @RichH that confirmed that missing gas half hourly usage date had been populating in online usage graphs since mid December (and subsequent reports from @Transparent that indicated the opposite), I’m looking to collect more feedback from those that were previously effected. 

I could set up a private area and give willing members access, to allow this feedback gathering to happen free from concerns of who else is watching. So if there’s demand for it, let me know @Jequinlan @Thurion @PRoberts @TomatoPlant @TomThumb @TheBatsWhiskers @Steve77 @Blastoise186 

I think it might be useful to have one, even if it’s done on an open invite basis. It could also allow more in-depth discussions to take place without clogging up the main public areas too much.

Well I think we’re chasing more than one “bug”. We might only be able to discriminate between them by sharing symptoms that are specific to our personal accounts.

So if we’re wanting to capture useful feedback from a number of customers, then I’d favour the use of a Private area (aka Treehouse). Otherwise some might be reluctant to post details on such an open Forum.

The other advantage of a Private Area is that those who agree to be within it should be assured that this acts as a replacement service for faults that would otherwise be notified individually to Customer Services. Whilst we’re bug-hunting it’s very important that an over-enthusiastic staffer in CS doesn’t send a Reset-command to our site, thus destroying all the symptoms we’ve been so painstakingly reporting!

Once we’re in a private area, the OVO/Kaluza techies are basically agreeing that our reported issues will be fixed, but in the meantime we try to leave code as undisturbed as possible during the analysis phase.

I’m willing to be in such a group, if it will help. 

Thanks for confirming @Thurion .

Just so you know, the forum software that we use can be a bit quirky when your permissions are changed, and it often won’t fully apply the changes until you log out and back in, which makes sense.

The snag is that it has been known to instantly kick people out if they were logged in at the time, but you should be able to log back in afterwards and the new permissions would then be active. It’s something that has been forwarded to the provider and hopefully should be fixed eventually. Please don’t panic if this happens!

@Tim_OVO , @Transparent ,@SianiAnni , @RichH , @Blastoise186 
I must admit that I haven’t been following this particular topic since my HH gas readings became available again, which was from 00:30 on 1st December 2020, over two weeks before everyone else on here? 

Which confirms my suspicion that we have several bugs with similar symptoms, @TheBatsWhiskers 

Are you telling us that you now have Usage graphs with every gas reading correctly displayed for each day of the month? I’ve never had a full month like that!

If I can be any help at all, I’m in.

In the 2 weeks of being on the new account platform & the way usage data is displayed now, I haven’t noticed any dropped data at all. 

On the old platform I had missing data quite regular, day’s / hh readings being averaged out was quite normal.

The only thing I know for sure, is my hh gas usage graph runs 1hr behind my actual usage & any gaps in my daily graph are due to no demand on the boiler. Although there are not many gaps during the day due to the cold weather of late.

I don’t think I keep any screenshots of my erroneous gas data usage from the old platform, but if I can find any, i will compare how it is now reported by the new system.

Tom...

Excellent. I will admit though Tom, you were already on the invite list anyway. 

I will also give you a clue as to what to look for. Once this particular Treehouse has been created… Look for an icon that seems unusually different from all the others...

@Blastoise186wrote

Look for an icon that seems unusually different from all the others…

because it will be an icon with lots of missing data! 

@TomThumb wrote

my hh gas usage graph runs 1hr behind my actual usage

Well that’s a new symptom. I can think of a couple of logical reasons why this might be…. and several illogical ones as well.