BCHydro component - where did it go?

[techfreakdad (Lee)]

Little late to the party here. Only recently converted from HK/HB to HA and happily never looking back. I’ve had a BC Hydro hub since the early days of deployment with never experiencing issues with the HydroHome app for retrieving real time data.

Now that I’m in HA, would love to see this integration.

Has anyone successfully (and recently) got the HA integration working?

Anyone manage to get an integration for FortisBC gas usage working?

[mtwo]

tfox’s instructions that they shared here worked well for me, though I noticed that version 6.2 of the mosquitto broker add-on stops the energy consumption from being reported. From looking at the recent mosquitto changelogs, it’s not immediately clear why this would have broken. Rolling back to the previous version of the addon fixed the issue.

@techfreakdad FYI there are a few comments above indicating that the bridge may have received an update that removes the MQTT functionality (?). Mine is firewalled off from the internet and can’t receive any updates, so you’ll have to wait for others to chime in on this.

[marman]

Sorry, just to clarify yours is or is not working currently?

If it is working what firmware version are you on?

It is not longer working for me and I am on:
ebOS: 1.10.8
Nucleus: v1.10.8

I wish I would have thought about firewalling it off.

Edit:

Ok issue is mosquito broker reverted to previous version and it works fine.

[mtwo]

Correct, mine is working fine - had an unrelated mosquitto issue that I rolled back to fix. How do I check the firmware version of the hydrohome hub?

[cturra]

for anyone following along, i was having the exact same issue described by the last couple people here after the mosquito broker add-on 6.2 upgrade. i sifted through the logs for a while and didn’t find anything obvious, so tried simply restarting the add-on to see if anything new in logs showed up to point me in the right direction. when i did that, my energy entities started flowing again!

so… maybe something got confused with the configured bridge on first launch after the upgrade? i wish i knew more, but so far it’s been stable with no regression in behaviour.

i would be curious if someone else could give that a try also and see if you have the same results as me.

[pabla]

MQTT stopped working for my hydro home hub as well as of 2 days ago. Right around when v6.2 of the add on was updated. Not sure if the update broke it or an update to the hub

[tfox]

I was also having the same issue for the last few days. I tried restarting mqtt, power cycling the hydro home hub, but no change. I noticed I couldn’t see the hub in the hydrohome app as connected either. I ended up rebooting my wifi ap. The hub showed back up as connected in the app, and restarting mqtt got it receiving data again.

ebOS: 1.10.8, Nucleus: v1.10.8, Mosquitto broker 6.2.0

EDIT: a month later it stopped working again for me. Renaming to mosquitto.conf and restarting solved the issue.

[pabla]

Weird, my bridge shows up on my network and shows its connected to my wifi. I tried rebooting it and the add on but nothing changed. Same SW versions as you

[iscraigh]

Mine stopped reporting. Restarted everything it shows up in the hydro home app but no mqtt messages. IP is correct and pingable. very strange. Has anyone had any luck getting it working again beyond just restarting everything.

Craig

[mtwo]

I wasn’t able to get it working with Mosquitto 6.2 even after restarting my hub and Home Assistant a few times. Rolling back to the previous Mosquitto broker fixed it, so I’ll wait for the next version before trying again.

[pabla]

For anyone wondering, I got MQTT to start working. Basically had to change the config file name in the share/mosquitto folder from bchydroenergybridge.conf to mosquitto.conf and I also set the MQTT add on debuging on. After a restart of HA then a restart of the addon things seem too be working again. Hereis an issue on github where other users are experiencing similar issues, seems like MQTT was updated to only accept config files called up as mosquitto.conf.

[pabla]

@tfox

Here is what I did to get the HydroHome gateway working on my config. (Using some info from here: DTE (Powerley) Energy Bridge Endpoint error - #83 by eddyg)

1. Assign HydroHome gateway a static IP.
2. Install the MQTT broker from the Add-on Store.
3. Configured the mosquito broker as follows:

certfile: fullchain.pem
customize:
 active: true
 folder: mosquitto
keyfile: privkey.pem
logins: []
require_certificate: false

4. Create a file in /share/mosquitto/bchydroenergybridge.conf /share/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf with the contents:

connection bchydroenergybridge
address 192.168.0.60:2883
clientid homeassistant-1
try_private false
start_type automatic
topic # both 0

where 192.168.0.60 is the static IP assigned in step 1.

5. Start the MQTT broker.
6. Install the MQTT broker integration (MQTT - Home Assistant)
7. Under the configure menu of the integration, listen to # and start listening. You should get messages like { "time": 1643912882895, "demand": 2675 } every second or so. If you are not getting messages, something is wrong with your above config.
8. Add two new sensors to your config.yaml:

sensor:
    #bchydro energy bridge
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "BCHydro Electricity Consumption"
    icon: mdi:transmission-tower
    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 }}"
    # the "time" in the message is a Unix-like timestamp (in milliseconds) of the start of the last reading
    last_reset_value_template:  "{{ now().fromtimestamp(value_json.time / 1000).replace(tzinfo=now().tzinfo) }}"
    device_class: energy
    state_class: total
  - platform: mqtt
    name: "BCHydro Instantaneous Demand"
    icon: mdi:transmission-tower-export
    state_topic: "event/metering/instantaneous_demand"
    unit_of_measurement: 'kW'
    # the Energy Bridge returns watts, convert it to kilowatts
    value_template: "{{ value_json.demand | float / 1000 }}"
    device_class: power
    state_class: measurement

9. Add BCHydro Electricity Consumption as your Grid Consumption value in the Energy dashboard.
10. If you want a card for instantaneous demand, I am using the custom mini graph card with this config:

type: custom:mini-graph-card
align_state: center
animate: true
card: null
entities:
  - entity: sensor.bchydro_instantaneous_demand
    index: 0
font_size: 175
graph: line
line_width: 1
height: 150
hour24: true
name: Demand
points_per_hour: 4
hours_to_show: 24
show:
  extrema: true
  icon: true
  name: true
style: |
  ha-card {
   transform: scale(0.95);
   background-size: 100% 100%;
   border-style: dotted;
   border-width: 1px;
  }

You could also do something with the statistics cards:

type: vertical-stack
cards:
  - type: statistics-graph
    entities:
      - sensor.bchydro_instantaneous_demand
    chart_type: line
    stat_types:
      - mean
      - min
      - max
    title: Instantaneous Electricity Demand Daily
    days_to_show: 1
  - type: statistics-graph
    entities:
      - sensor.bchydro_instantaneous_demand
    chart_type: line
    stat_types:
      - mean
      - min
      - max
    title: Instantaneous Electricity Demand Weekly
    days_to_show: 7

For anyone referencing this in the future versions 6.2 of the MQTT addon requires the config file to be named mosquitto.config instead of bchydroenergybridge.conf

[jackw.27 (jack)]

Still no luck after changing filename → mosquitto.config on 6.2.

When listening in MQTT integration with “#” I see no energy information. I do see other MQTT devices so MQTT seems to be working.

When I have the chance I’m going to try to set it up with a fresh install of homeassistant and see if it works there…

[pabla]

Try and set the addon debugging to true. Restart HA then after HA restarts restart the addon.

[jackw.27 (jack)]

Haha I named it mosquitto.config instead of mosquitto.conf… Got it working now, thanks for the help!

[ksihota (Kim Sihota)]

Glad I checked here.
Same issue, no power reporting since yesterday morning.
Changed the name to mosquitto.conf and after restarting the mosquitto add-on under Settings/Add-ons/Mosquitto broker my energy usage started working again.

Thanks soooooo much

[develeigh (Darren)]

Hey Everyone,

THanks for all the great work on this. I just got my bchydro energy hub yesterday and trying to get this working. It seems to be the mqtt thats causing me issues. I think anyways. Im not convinced my hub is listening on that port. Is there a way to test it? scans or telnets to the port show nothing.

ANy thoughts would be awesome.
Darren

[pabla]

what did you name the .conf in the share/mosquitto/ folder?

[develeigh (Darren)]

share/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf

I’m unsure of the the path should start however. Is this root of the file system or root of the HA directory ?

Thank you so much.

[pabla]

That is the correct path, it should be in the root of the file system