Eversource, our local utility monopoly tyrant, in Massachusetts has been forcing users to accept installation of their new “Smart Meters” (Itron Gen5 Riva) or else pay an extortionary $34/month to retain your old one (this is on top of paying $0.34 per Kilowatt which is almost as high as Germany).
Unfortunately, even if the meters are capable of being “Smart”, Eversource locks them down (with Wifi & Zigbee disabled) so that the user cannot get real time data from their own meters.
The best you can do is to:
- Download a delayed 24-hour csv file showing usage (to within 0.01kWh) in 15-minute buckets, which is only available sometime between about 5AM and 11AM the following day
- Use the HA
Opowerintegration which seems to only download a single daily usage reading, again sometime between 5AM and 11AM the following day.
Indeed, it is very hard to react to and optimize consumption when your results are delayed by up to 40 hours!!!
The result is that the meter is in some ways DUMBER than the old one where I could use RT433 to read real time usage though only in increments of 1kWh.
Regardless, neither manually downloading csv files or a once a day single point usage total meet my needs.
So, I wrote the following add-on that regularly logs in to your Eversource account, checks for new data, and if present downloads and appends it to a cumulative csv file. The data is then retrospectively added to both the states and the short & long-term statistics tables.
To facilitate retrospective loading of states data, a placeholder energy state with value unknown is added to the states table every 15 minutes (also other entities can be repurposed to provide such placeholders if for some reason the placeholder fails to write).
After downloading new data and importing it into the states table, the short and long term statistics are re-run to adjust for the new data.