ESBN smart meter data app help needed

curioustony

I've been creating an open source Android app for electricity price comparisons.

I'm in the process of adding ESBN smart meter data as a source of usage data, for more accurate cost projections. Using it you can:

• Load a previously downloaded HDF
• Provide ESBN credentials (stored encrypted on the device, only visible when adding) and have the app fetch and check daily for updates
• Estimate bill for a date range and the set of supplier plans (downloaded, shared or added manually)
• Explore electricity import and export, graphically, by hour of day, day of week, day of year, month, year and more
• Create a usage profile that can be used to project usage, and estimate the impact of adding a battery, EV, hot water diverter or solar

To get this you need to agree to being a beta tester in the Android Play store for this app

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tfcode.comparetout

The app is only available in Ireland. Need a device that is running Android 9 (~2018) or later. For geeks, it will run on a Nexus 7 2013 running lineageOS with gApps, slowly.

The app uses an unofficial API for fetching the smart data. ESBN could break this at any time, the fallback is to download the HDF manually. Fingers crossed they don't. Its worked for almost a year like this...

I'm looking for feedback (bugs, ideas, opinions), here, in the app store or in github: https://github.com/Tonyslogic/comparetout/discussions/1

The app is free, add-free and the code is available in GitHub above. The link for downloading supplier costs has a small sample of plans that have been updated for the price reductions that started this month.

Feel free to share this with others. While I like to code, media relations are a real challenge -- I don't like Facebook

The same beta also includes AlphaESS as a data source, with slightly more functionality than above. The help describes where to register with AlphaESS (it's not the same place as the web portal). If you have such a system, feedback would very much be appreciated.

There are also buttons for HomeAssistant and Solis cloud. These don't work yet.

Best of luck, and feedback please!!!

10-10-20

I would love to, but I don't have a smart meter yet. Good luck with it all of the same. 👍️

ColemanY2K

This sounds class. I'll be sure to sign up CT.

curioustony

To get started some costs and ESBN credentials are needed. From a new install

From there, the app will get the MPRNs registered. Select one, fetch, picking a start date. Notifications indicate progress. Then you can explore graphs, or cost a selected date range.

Big Lar

Nice looking APP, Any way to add Day/Night meter ?

curioustony

@Big Lar, afraid not for non-smart ones. If you build a custom 'usage', you can use a standard load profile or manually add your distribution (hourly, by day of week and monthly). The costs do have an option to use 'deemed export' to calculate FIT, but that has limited audience now.

steamdave

Looks quite interesting. Is there any way of using this on a Windoz (or Linux) computer? I don't use a smart phone.

Dave

graememk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121905847#Comment_121905847

This is not a recommendation, but I know of bluestacks and BigNox as android emulators. Been a long time since ive used either.

fael

If you can download the APK file you can run it on windows 11. If you search for Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) it should point you towards some tutorials.

I think WSA will be discontinued later this year though.

steamdave

Thanks for the suggestions.

Dave

curioustony

In theory it will work on a Chromebook. I have not tried it, but the robot tests don't fail. If you have an old laptop, or of it might be worth a go.

https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11552529?hl=en

curioustony

The weekend I push the beta to full release ESBN change the tags on the page used to get the MPRNs associated with the account.

I have a fix but will be a few weeks before I push it as I have gardening to catch up on.

In the mean time when selecting the system folks will need to manually add the MPRN. This is not all that obvious:

Update the 'Not listed' with the MPRN, and then click 'USE TEXT VALUE'.

The HomeAssistant integration is in alpha testing. If anybody is interested, pm me.

Jonathan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121955705#Comment_121955705

Tell me more about the HA integration. Are you using ESBN data to retrospectively update the energy dashboard or something?

curioustony

Right now it's just using the HomeAssistant data as a source. You can view graphs in the same way as for ESBN and AlphaESS, and generate a usage profile for simulation and what-if scenarios.

I have the algorithm on paper to use the AlphaESS data to fix gaps in the HomeAssistant data. It's on the TODO list. I have a 3 week gap when they changed APIs, and 18 months before I started using HA, plus as a cloud service they sometimes have outages that the HA integration does not handle well.

Not sure of the value of doing the same with ESBN data. Not too difficult once I've done the AlphaESS. Problem is you really would need an ESBN HA integration first.

John mac

so when i select set credentials . i get user name and password , prompt , is this the the esb password and username ?

curioustony

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121960350#Comment_121960350

Yes, for esbn, not ei. The links are in the help in the app if you have not registered. Right now you also need the MPRN

championc

Just some small visual feedback, as just installed the app.

On the initial Overview screen, the Select System button was purple rather than being unavailable until you successfully logged in to ESBN. And would it not be better to have this button labelled "Select MPRN" ?

I also wonder if there are Metal tags of some kind which you could set, so that relevant searches on the Play store would find the app ?

I'll start linking it now to my HA too and see how I get on

curioustony

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122071045#Comment_122071045

Thanks for that feedback. I have started to track these ideas/issues in GitHub: https://github.com/Tonyslogic/comparetout/issues

The play store has really reduced the number of available tags. I think they rely on previous searches and installs. No expert here (my first app), so if you know how to promote visibility I'll take all suggestions 🙂

The daily fetch for HA seems to be broken, but you can still fetch manually.

Very curious to see if a generated usage from you HA data is even remotely close in terms of inverter spec and battery characteristics. It's only ballpark for my own system. If the reverse engineering is useless, then I will remove and fallback to some defaults. Maybe pop up a dialogue to check and update them…

I hope to get back coding at the end of May. In the meantime all feedback and issues are very welcome!

curioustony

Latest version pushed to production this morning. Android and ESBN updates had me spinning wheels.

I've removed the broken 'Fetch' function for ESBN as keeping up with the unofficial API was a lot of effort. You can still download from ESBN yourself, and then load the file into the app (once it's location is available to the app). The app will now pick up the MPRN from the HDF file, so there is no need to put credentials in. Though if you do, it will try to get the list of MPRNs associated with the account (for as long as that API does not change too). Hopefully ESBN publish a proper REST interface with standard authentication. I've asked.

If you are using PVGIS, then the app will ask for permission to write to a folder. Android will not let you pick Downloads, but you can create a folder for the downloaded PVGIS files.

I did manage to add price plan tiering support — where there is a limit to how much of a give rate you can use before the price goes up. Rate periods are now possible to specify in minutes to cater for 1/2 hour tariffs.

There is also a table view (of just numbers) in the importers graph tabs, and that graph tab is also included for exploring the simulation output in the what-if usage scenarios. 12 data items can now be shown in 40 different ways (by: hour, day-of-week, day-of-year, month, year; sum, average; bar, line, pie, table) across any available dates.