Ovo integration for Home Assistant - Unofficial API

Tada!

All done. :)

My PR has been merged and is planned to be included in the next update to Home Assistant Core. I don’t know when that’ll go out, but when it does, my fix will be included. From there, once users update their own instances, they’ll slow down the polling to once per hour rather than once every five minutes. This will result in each HA instance massively slowing down from 288 pings a day to just 24 pings a day. Much nicer!

Trust me @Tim_OVO , you’ll thank me later. I bet this will also make a few of your friends happy too. XD

Nice one, @Blastoise186! 

Do we know of any communtiy members here using this integration? I think @ArundaleP mentioned they were in another thread, despite this:

And @SianiAnni was close to. 

Just an FYI to you both and anyone else, if you ‘update your instance’ this change will kick in. @Blastoise186 is it obvious how to do this? 

Yup, I do indeed.

Please bear in mind that right now, my code changes have been Merged to the Dev branch of the Home Assistant Core repository and have not yet been released. It’s been added to the 2021.6.4 Milestone as seen in PR #51613 and will go out when that release is published. They only just released 2021.6.3 yesterday, so it might be a few days yet but it’ll go out soon!

As for updating, that’s pretty easy really, especially if you installed HA from the Snap Store. Assuming you haven’t told snapd to pin the home-assistant-core-snap Snap to any specific releases or disabled auto-updates, you can simply let snapd run an auto-refresh once the update is published on the Snap Store - HA will then be updated automatically and you don’t have to touch anything. Alternatively, you can force snapd to refresh all Snaps immediately if you want to - the command for that is sudo snap refresh in Terminal. You need to have sudo permissions to do this (you will if you’ve got admin rights). And then just give it a few moments. To check on the status of recent updates, simply do snap changes - you don’t need to use sudo for this command. And to monitor a specific task, it's sudo snap watch X replacing X with the task number you’d like to monitor.

I used the HA Ovo integration briefly, but didn’t find the HA lovelace display particularly helpful, as it only changed once or twice a day (the twice a day update looked like some kind of glitch).

I also use a HA Hive integration which shows length of time gas boiler is ON. 

I also already have access to gas and electricity half hourly data via a Carbon Co-op members service, which I can download as a csv file, and then do with as I like.

Would be interested in giving the HA Ovo integration another go though. Took delivery of yet another pi yesterday, with HA installed and configured for another Carbon Co-op prototype service.  I now have seven Aqara temp sensors connected and am building up a really good picture of how the house responds to weather and heating! Now I just need to get that retrofit done...  

No worries :)

I think it’d definitely work better when OVO releases a Public API in the future - which is something that’s on the to-do list from my understanding.

The maintainer behind the ovo_energy integration on GitHub appears to be pretty active as well, so I’m confident he would be happy to update the integration to use any future Public APIs rather than the current one.

Just as a heads up though, as this stuff isn’t official, OVO’s teams can’t help with setting it all up, fixing bugs and offering support. The best places to go for that would be via GitHub and you can find all the docs you need via the links over there.

These are the two repositories you’ll be most likely to want to check out.

Home Assistant Core - GitHub - for anything to do with Home Assistant itself, this would be the place to check out first. This is also the best place to ask for the polling rate on the ovo_energy integration to be tweaked if needed in the future.

ovo_energy HA integration - GitHub - for anything related to the ovo_energy HA integration, this is the place to go.

My fix is now being released as per https://github.com/home-assistant/core/releases/tag/2021.6.4 .

Please allow a few hours or so for the update to reach Snapcraft on the Edge channel. It will be released on the Stable channel later. You can't replace an installed Snap with the raw files from GitHub, so please don't do that cuz you'll break something if you do!

We love seeing the innovative ways our customers are using tech to help monitor and manage their energy usage. It’s inspiring us to think about ways to do energy differently. We know some customers have been using some of the application programming interface (APIs) behind our public facing services. While we’re OK with that, we do need to make you aware of a couple of things.

These APIs are designed to be used by OVO teams only, and aren't public facing. There are some downsides to using APIs that aren't for the public, and we wanted to let you know what these are. Behind the scenes, OVO uses APIs to share and update information between systems that power your bills and your online account. This is done in partnership with Kaluza, the tech company that’s part of the OVO family. They’ve built the billing platform designed to put our customers in the driving seat of their energy usage. 

These internal APIs are intended for use by Kaluza and its clients, who are energy retailers like OVO, rather than customers. Because of this, there’s no support for them being used anywhere else, which means they may be discontinued with no notice when we update our products and services. 

OVO Energy and Kaluza need to be able to monitor these APIs, and may block access if there's any problems in the future.

We know some customers may have put time and effort into developing solutions that use these API. So, now that you know the risks, we want to hear from you on how you’re using the APIs and the problems you’re solving with your DIY approach. 

Is there anything you’d like to see from OVO to help you monitor and manage your energy better? Leave a comment below to tell us.