Why have I lost smart half hourly usage data on Daily usage section of online account?

I just wanted to say that within a few days of joining Octopus Energy they had sorted out my smart meters.

E.ON let me down by lying and saying I had to wait until 2022 for a firmware update so I switched but that's another story.

It is true about the Bright app being able to retrieve up to 13 months of electric and gas energy usage data as that is in the official SMETS2 specs although it can take up to 24 hours.

An Octopus customer service rep told me about it as it tends to work even when Octopus's TMA adaptor plays up (not that it has in my case yet touchwood)

I can access all my energy usage from back in November 2019 not long after I switched to OVO !

Hope everyone is OK on the OVO forum :)

p.s. the Bright app is very easy to use and just as well as I am not that technically minded lol

That’s pretty interesting stuff there…

Personally though, the app permissions it requests seem a little bit excessive for the purpose.

However, it does seem capable of grabbing data from DCC somehow, which makes me wonder whether OVO/Kaluza could do the same trick. I’m not keen to grant any random company I’ve never heard of access, but I would be willing to trust my supplier to pull the data out based on the existing agreements.

This may well be one for Kaluza to work on some more.

Thanks for the insights @MikeE . 

Your welcome. 

I don't mind giving out my postcode but that's just me.

I have been visiting the OVO forum on a daily basis and seen your posts.

You know your stuff like @Transparent does ! :)

Thanks :)

Some of the main things I do on the forums (besides answering questions) include hunting down as many bugs as possible across the entire platform, coming up with new ideas and sharing some blog posts and articles of my own. And also keeping an eye out for spammers… They seem to be drawn to this forum like a magnet, but never escape my notice.

In theory, there’s several different ways that OVO/Kaluza could allow you to export all known smart meter data, but I’d still argue that there really needs to be a more standardised process that works everywhere.

The 13 month retention is also present in SMETS1 as well, since my SMETS1 Aclara meter is capable of storing just as much data as any SMETS2 meter, but at least it’s now on the SMETS2 firmware.

@Blastoise186 Love your signature. !

I didn't know that spammers target this forum as I have not seen any spam on here.

I also didn't know that both SMETS1 and SMETS2 meters had enough memory for that amount of time - 13 months of half hourly readings for both electricity and gas.

That's over 40,000 data entries in total !

Hehehe… When it comes to my signature… That’s a secret...

And yep, spammers absolutely love this forum but I make sure they don’t last long. One of the reasons you don’t see much spam is that some of us are very quick with the banhammer! I don’t have the ability to delete posts or ban users myself, but Tim trusts my judgement and he will kick them out on sight.

As for the thread itself… There’s an eventual limit as to how much can be stored, but the brochure for the Aclara SGM1300 Series gives you some idea as to what a SMETS1 meter is capable of. Ideally, you’d have a way to export all the data you need before the storage gets full, but at least there’s the ability to queue up pending submissions if the WAN signal dies for a few days. The meter should be able to simply keep track of usage in the meantime and bulk-submit everything later.

The idea that Bright does is an interesting concept, but I’d like to have that ability more natively for convenience. It’s a better user experience if I don’t have to download a separate app just for one task!

@Blastoise186wrote:

it does seem capable of grabbing data from DCC somehow, which makes me wonder whether OVO/Kaluza could do the same trick

I’m not yet able to conclude that this is what’s happening.

As the link made by the Bright App is to my IHD, I think it more likely that it’s picking up data from the Communications Hub. But I can’t yet prove this either way.

The crucial news at the moment is that it strongly suggests the majority of the “missing data” issues being reported here on the Forum are due to errors being made by the new Billing System (Orion) or Utilita’s uSmart software. uSmart provides OVO with the Business Orchestration Layer (BOL) to interface to the Data Communications Company (DCC). This isn’t handled directly by Orion.

These errors may not be bugs in the code. They could just as easily be poorly formatted SMETS_commands.

Yep this is the same key take away for me, from this fascinating back and forth. Thank you so much for sharing this news, @Transparent, good to hear from you again @MikeE and it's great to hear things have gone well since the move to Octopus. They really do seem to be nailing it atm. Good on them, It’s healthy to see we have competition in this industry for great service and products. Bring it on! BTW yes @Blastoise186 is an absolute titan and we’re lucky to have the likes of them and @Transparent sharing info and news like this Bright app. Speaking of which:

@Transparent just before I make our Orion usage developers aware of this topic thread’s latest comments, can you confirm this is your gas usage? Are you able to do a similar comparison for missing elec data? We are aware of a gas usage data issue on our new billing platform. 

This is so handy, as we work to improve (very slowly but surely) our issue reporting for smart meters and IHDs, it’s so good to have this Bright app as a comparison to go on. As you mention, we will know where to focus on if the online account isn’t showing data but the Bright app is. We can rule out the smart meter and IHD health checks that we’ve in the process of improving. 

This is one step closer to lifting the fog of mystery that surrounds these multiple usage issues…… that fog seems to have come over to Somerset today 

Yes @Tim_OVO, everything I’ve reported above was from my gas usage.

Sure, I’ll have a look at electricity. As we’ve now narrowed down where is the point that data goes missing, we should expect to see similar problems in electricity.

However I must also try to explain the difference between the readings within the SMETS2 Gas Meter itself, and those held in the “proxy gas meter”, which is a virtual component of the Communications Hub. That probably requires another diagram.

OK… So just to confirm that I have no days with electricity meter “missing data” on the Online Usage pages. So I haven’t been able to see any difference between Bright and what OVO is retrieving from my Comms Hub.

I will try to find time to drill down and see if my Online Usage graphs have missing data for electricity at the HH-level. But that’s a great deal of data to look through and it will take a considerable time to check.

I simply don’t understand why OVO’s new Billing System isn’t picking up SMETS Notifications that show an “alert” when there’s data not being retrieved.