I just signed up for the HydroHome trial (had never heard of it before seeing it on this HA forum, shouldn’t BC Hydro be telling us about these things? 
) but no data seems to be populated yet.
Is it better to get a HydroHome Hub ($50) instead of the Rainforest Eagle 200 ($120) to get live data into HomeAssistant? How do the apps compare? Or would it be better to just get clamps for the breaker panel?
You’re using solar in BC? Are you based in the interior or Metro Vancouver? Wondering if we get enough sun here to make it worth it? (Especially with the cheap electricity here)
Do you guys live one detached/town houses?
Per my understanding, the hub needs to be in range of the meter. I live in the 28th floor, do you know if they install the meters on the unit floor or in some power cabinet down in th ground floor or sub floors? Where I used to live before (outside Canada), the common practice was to have metering in the ground floor / sub-floors of the build, if so, there is no way a multi-story build will benefit of the hub.
BRs,
Jose
I’m in a detached house, it’s a panhandle lot with a long driveway and the meter is at the end of the drive. I have the hub in the closest corner of the house which is about 150’ from the meter and it was able to connect and maintain 3/4 bars of signal.
That’s through one exterior wall and then open air, so not sure how that would compare to transmitting through a building.
Depends on the radio technology used. Since you guys reported there is some paring process, I believe it is based on zigbee or other kind of mesh network radio layer. With repeaters/routers in the way it may travel long distances, but I hardly believe a point-to-point connection between hub and meter passing through 28 concrete slabs, furniture, people, etc.
I will investigate more, first try to discover where is the meter in my building.
Thanks for sharing!
Hey folks, figured I’d stop by and provide a 2022 update on the Python and HASS component for extracting BC Hydro account data.
Bad news: They implemented a hidden captcha on the login page. A couple of users reported auth issues a few weeks back, turns out the library wasn’t filling captcha values during login.
Good news: it appears that a headless browser can get past the captcha.
Bad news: that means this library is (once again) a step away from being dysfunctional. This is more fragile than being at BCHydro’s dev team whim, because the captcha machine learning can adjust quickly and without human intervention.
I’m in the middle of a library rewrite at WIP: Feat/headless rewrite by emcniece · Pull Request #25 · emcniece/bchydro · GitHub for the curious. Still frustrated with BCHydro’s corporate shell and lack of API access. I wish they would realize that exposing an API would let the community do the dev team’s work for them.
Yes I am in BC, but I am in the interior. My house gets a massive amount of sunlight for a good portion of the year.
With the Greener Home Grant my ROI period is 12 years or so, but if get an electric car in the next few years it’ll be much faster.
That is really annoying actually. Thanks for keeping up with the project though. I’ll continue using it and hopefully someday they will provide a public API so this isn’t such a messy solution.
I had left this for a bit due to … gestures broadly … but I just got a smart thermostat and am back on the “HA train” now so will likely be diving into this again soon!
Has everyone gotten on OK with updating their MQTT sensors to deal with this coming change / warning?
Your manually configured MQTT sensor(s) needs attention
Manually configured MQTT sensor(s) found under platform key sensor.
Please move the configuration to the mqtt integration key and restart Home Assistant to fix this issue. See the documentation, for more information.
Original (what I have today in configuration.yaml):
sensor:
- platform: mqtt
name: "BCHydro Energy Bridge"
state_topic: "event/metering/instantaneous_demand"
#state_topic: "event/metering/summation/minute"
unit_of_measurement: 'W'
value_template: "{{value_json.demand}}"
- platform: integration
source: sensor.bchydro_energy_bridge
name: "energy_used"
unit_prefix: k
round: 2
What I need to move to for the coming MQTT Sensor changes and where I’m stuck:
mqtt:
sensor:
- name: "BCHydro Energy Bridge"
state_topic: "event/metering/instantaneous_demand"
#state_topic: "event/metering/summation/minute"
unit_of_measurement: 'W'
value_template: "{{value_json.demand}}"
#I'm not sure what to do for the "- platform: integration" part below. I forget where I copied this from / why I did this...
- platform: integration
source: sensor.bchydro_energy_bridge
name: "energy_used"
unit_prefix: k
round: 2
So I used @tfox config and its been working flawlessly. However I started noticing that the Electricity Consumption is way off what is shown in the Hydro Home app and my BC Hydro bill. Anyone notice that the totals are completely off? BC Hydro and Hydro Home both say I used 153 kWh but Home Assistant Energy graph shows only 2.5 kWh.
Edit: I had to edit this line since the conversion was incorrect
state_topic: "event/metering/summation/minute"
unit_of_measurement: 'kWh'
# the Energy Bridge returns "Watt-minutes" every minute in the "value"; convert it to kilowatt-hours
value_template: "{{ value_json.value | float / 60000 }}"
changed the 6000 to 60 consumption looks correct now
Edit 2: I changed the 60 to 1000 since the Hydro Home reports the consumption in Watt Hour not Watt Minutes. I have cross referenced the past days usage compared to the BcHydro website, and the usage is not almost 100% accurate.
I just got my Powerley energy bridge yesterday that was branded with BC Hydro Power Smart but I cannot get it to connect to my WiFi. I tried near the smart meter and then right beside the router, quadruple-checked the password (even tried forgetting the network on my phone and reconnecting with the password to ensure it was correct) but the energy bridge keeps saying Failed to join Network. I’ve tried power cyclying and different rooms in the house. I even factory reset.
I tried calling BC Hydro but they refered me to Powerley. I tried calling Powerley and the message says they are all working from home but they check the voicemail every so often (which company doesnt even answer their own listed advertised number?!?).
Just wondering if anyone here had similar problems and if so how you managed to fix it?
I had similar challenges but got on the in app help chat with powerley and was eventually able to get it working. I think they hadn’t configured it correctly on their side but they managed to do it remotely, eventually.
Thanks, will try that on Monday and see if I can actually talk to a real person (no-one replying now)
Just an update, managed to use the in-app chat and actually speak (type) to someone - thanks Courtenay. They asked me to try a wired connection (even tho my router is MUCH further than 25ft from the meter) and its worked! WiFi still doesnt work tho.
Its connected now (binding only took 2-3 minutes) and giving me live values in the app, and the Meter Connectivity is showing less than half signal strength, probabably ~2/5 bars, and yellow instead of green. But its working!
Now to figure out the HomeAssistant part 
Update after a week: working fine, the signal sometimes goes Red but hardly ever stops completely, and HomeAssistant is showing all the data fine
From what I’ve read, they are planning to go smart meters 2022-2025…probably start seeing things happening this year if the regulator gave them the thumbs up.
Something changed with the Energy Bridge. I noticed my hydro usage stopped in HA Feb 10 at 5pm PDT so I decided to do some digging. No MQTT messages being received now from the bridge, but I am still receiving MQTT messages on energy from my Tasmota plugs, so the problem is not with MQTT. The Energy Bridge now only has one local IP address instead of two that it used to. Of course the IP address now missing is the one where I think MQTT messages were being sent from. Is a stealth firmware update mean this is the end of this thing working in HA? The Hydro Home app reports software versions ebOS 1.10.6 and Nucleus v1.10.6
EDIT: the second IP address has come back. Looking at the Hydro Home app, I think something is broken since I can’t see minute by minute consumption anymore, it seems to be dumbed down to an average consumption per hour.
EDIT 2: turns out my meter died and was stuck on 0. Hydro replaced it, but things are still messed up! Still trying to figure this out.
Mine was working ~30mins ago but I noticed there was a (stealth?) update pushed out and WiFi is working for me now, so I configured that and moved the unit into my garage so its closer to the meter. Its connected fine to WiFi and the meter in the HydroHome app (much better signal strength too) however nothing is showing in HomeAssistant now 
After ages I finally got the Energy Bridge set up. But disappointed to read in this thread that’s its not working now.
Tried setting up the MQTT sensors myself but its returning unavailable. Is everyone having the same issue? Any ideas?