Limiting Polling

Configuration
1

There are some integrations -- my worst offender is Home Connect -- that rate-limit their APIs and then Home Assistant frequently triggers an API block, thereby temporarily disabling the integration. The accepted and standard fix for this problem is to either use an alternate integration that has resolved the problem, or disable automatic polling and new entity discovery in the integration and set your own polling. My question concerns the latter. I have automatic polling disabled on three integrations (under system options in the 3-dot menu for the integration), and then I use the following automation:

alias: "Intelligent Polling: Home Connect"
description: Poll less frequently normally
triggers:
  - minutes: /10
    trigger: time_pattern
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: homeassistant.update_entity
    data:
      entity_id:
        - sensor.dishwasher_operation_state
        - sensor.oven_right_cavity_current_oven_cavity_temperature

This should update the two sensors once every ten minutes. So here are the mysteries:

  1. Mostly Home Assistant detects changed state within a few seconds;
  2. Home assistant sees updates of sensors not listed but part of the same integration, e.g. door status on the dishwasher;
  3. In the data stored on temperature, temperature sometimes changes every few seconds;

While I singled out Home Connnect, the other two integrations I am limiting, LG_Thinq and Ecowitt, have the same issues.

Is there some other place to turn off automatic polling besides in the system options for the integration? I have carefully checked that automatic polling and new entity discovery are turned off, and this setting survives an HA restart.

I use HAOS on a dedicated mini-PC to run Home Assistant.

How is it possible that Home Connect is a platinum quality integration, when out-of-the-box it can trigger an API rate limit that disables the integration?

2

That is 144 updates per day, assuming each integration only makes one call at a time.

What are the rate limits imposed by these services?

Not that I'm aware of.

3

Home connect is not a polling integration, it's a push integration. Changing the polling frequency will do nothing. The cloud service will send HA updates when it receives them and there's no way to limit that.

I suggest you read the quality scale documentation. It mentions what's required for each quality tier. Note that the quality tier does not have a metric for "API rate limits".

4

I would think that (random?) temporary interruptions does not achieve the requirement of:
Provides a stable user experience under various conditions.

5

By all means, start a campaign to knock it down from platinum to something else. That seems like a great use of time.

6

I don't know of rate limits on LG and Ecowitt. I limited Ecowitt because it generates so much data, most of which is useless, and LG because I was concerned about rate limits even though I never hit one. I was also trying to reduce the size of home-assistant_v2.db; ecowitt was generating hundreds of MB with 11 soil moisture sensors.

7

Agreed. My user experience has been unstable, although I recently switched from Home Connect Alt to the standard integration because the Home Connect Alt was also having the API rate limit problem.

As a push integration, I guess the right thing is to disable the automation and just hope it doesn't hit the rate limit.