CONGRATULATIONS AND THANK YOU! Amazing work.
For those of us who were using the HACS integration, do you have a recommended transition strategy? Is it better to delete the HACS integration before using the official one?
@ChrisMD123 did you happen to also configure Home Assistant’s Energy Dashboard using your OPower entities? If so, do you mind taking a look at my post to see if I configured it right? I’m not sure if I added the correct OPower entities.
Hey, sorry, I misread your previous post. You want to use an entity named opower:<utility>_elec_<account number>_consumption and opower:<utility>_elec_<account number>_cost, not the sensor.current_bill_<...> values.
See the Energy section of the doc… Opower - Home Assistant You’ll find it works with those!
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Thank you so much. That’s what I was missing! I just added them, now it says it will take 2 hours for the new data to arrive.
I found opower populated the historical data way faster than 2 hours. Due to limitations in the feed from the utility, it’ll never populate any real-time data.
I started another thread here to see if there’s a way to merge real-time data (direct from a smart meter, or a solar generator or something else) with the historical data retrieved by opower: Opower integration with solar generation, or other local electrical metering
I am more interested in real-time data versus historical. For PG&E smart meter, what is best way to get that data? Is it a local device that picks up the RF signal from smart meter?
Feel free to share your success experience. Thanks!
Is gas expected to put all usage into a single hour?
For me it’s all usage every two days which I guess is how the electric/gas company post the data
Trying to set up BG&E with an account that has multiple addresses. I verified my login credentials via bge.com and they work fine but getting a “Failed to connect” error when setting up the integration. Nothing in the logs that I see and can access bge.com from my HA instance. Any suggestions?
Edit: Get “Invalid authentication” for BG&E and other providers (e.g. PG&E) if I use bogus credentials so seems like my login is doing something. Do not have two-factor enabled but unsure where it’s failing to connect.
Edit 2: Wonder if this is my issue, I’m also getting “null” for account number.
Can anybody help a Opower noob? I have ComEd, which is a Exelon subsidiary. Supposedly ComEd uses Opower, but I can’t find any place where I can register for the service. It looks like Opower was acquired by Oracle. They don’t seem to know anything about it, and ComEd doesn’t either.
Can anybody point me in the right direction to sign up? I can get to the opower login page, but there’s no register/signup link that I can see. TIA…
Read Opower - Home Assistant. You need to add the integration, select ComEd and enter your ComEd login username and password.
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@tronikos
Great to see this integration with Opower.
I installed it and I seem to be getting very irregular data pulls, and not more than daily. Is there a way to get hourly data into HA, which is available through the API? If so, how?
Thanks
Data on the Opower/utility side is typically updated daily. The integration polls data every 12 hours. Make sure you add the statistics and not the sensors to the energy dashboard. See the documentation. You should see data for up to a few days ago at whatever resolution your utility provides. Typically it’s hourly but for some it’s monthly.
You also see sporadic updates if your utility provider does not release updated data. For example, PG&E seems to batch things up and releases data on apparently random intervals, sometimes daily and sometimes every 2nd or 3rd day. They also appear to stop updating for up to a week after your bill cutoff date. Initially I thought this was a problem with the integration - but then I went onto PG&Es website and notice the missing data was not updated there either. And Opower seemed to pick it up quickly after it was actually available.
Thanks for the response, but that’s actually my challenge. When I went to the OPower link on that page, there’s no information about how to setup an OPower account and my utility is useless when I ask them. I can see how to set it up in HA, but it seems like I need to have an OPower account first?
@mluck
Opower is the 3rd party platform utility companies may be using. If your utility company doesn’t use OPower, then this is not the integration for you. If it does, then all you need is setup the integration with the username / password you use for your utility web access.
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Hi there! do we know if PG&E ever plans to release gas consumption on a more regular basis? right now they only seem to be updating every 1 therm. If not, are there methods out there to get that data independently? for example computer vision to decipher meter data?
That worked. For anyone that follows me, what I didn’t realize is that there is no separate OPower registration or account setup. As long as you have web access to your utility, that’s all you need.
Probably the easiest way to get real-time data is via an Emporia Vue Utility Connect: https://www.amazon.com/Connects-Electric-Metering-Burlington-Mountain/dp/B084T6HGNR. It’s around $30-40 depending on if it’s on sale. It connects wirelessly to the power meter. Connecting it to the meter is self-serve via the PG&E site - no need to call PG&E. The data is updated every 5 seconds. There’s an integration with Home Assistant too.
Unfortunately it relies on the cloud by default, but it’s essentially just an ESP32 device that communicates with a Zigbee radio, so some developers have figured out how to flash a custom firmware onto it to make it entirely local.
Note that this only works for electricity. I’m not aware of a way to get gas data in the same way.
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