Maximising Home Automation: Integrating Octopus Energy & More

Majordennisbloodnok · 2024-08-02T14:03:36Z

In this fourth and final article on home automation, I’m going to see where and how the system we’ve built so far can be extended to get all your kit working more cohesively and, hopefully, reap some real efficiency benefits as a result. I mentioned in the last article that this one would be a bit of a marathon since there’s a lot to get through, so you might want to take a break for a well-earned cuppa halfway through. Recapping, we’ve already set up Home Assistant and installed several integrations for interacting with various things; in my case, we have a solar generation forecast service, a Melcloud integration allowing me to link with the Ecodan heat pump, and a Growatt integration for doing the same with the inverter and battery. The first two are pretty solid and performing as expected, while the web service that the Growatt integration tries to communicate with is less than dependable for various reasons. Moreover, the Growatt integration allows a reasonable range of monitoring but precious little ability to change settings. This leaves us with some jobs still to do: We need to incorporate my Octopus Energy agile tariff information (import and export), but there is no out-of-the-box integration for that. We need a better way to manage the Growatt inverter and battery. We need to start configuring Home Assistant to make some automated decisions based on the data we’re gathering—after all, that is rather the point of this whole exercise! Custom Integrations As I touched on in the last article, each integration is just a small package of code allowing Home Assistant to talk with stuff. If the Home Assistant developers (or manufacturers wanting their kit to integrate easily) haven’t provided an integration for the kit you want to talk to, it’s perfectly possible to write your own integration and there is a VERY good chance someone has already done so. In fact, Home Assistant encourages this and provides what it calls the HACS (Home Assistant Community Store) as a place where you can find third-party-developed integrations and, if you’re techie enough, offer your own. This is exactly what I need to get Home Assistant talking with Octopus Energy since they provide a web service—an API—but no in-house Home Assistant integration, meaning we’ll need to use a custom one. Going to the left-hand-side button bar and clicking on the HACS icon takes me to a screen where I can search for “Octopus”; I’m going to pick “Octopus Energy.” Clicking on it takes me to a page which starts to look worryingly techie, but in amongst it is the information about how to install it. Even better, it splits those instructions in two, the first part being how to install via HACS and that is little more than “click on the ‘Download’ button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.” The Download button gives me a quick popup telling me stuff and reminding me to restart Home Assistant after downloading, and I just follow the instructions. Once the download has finished, I am able to click on the Settings cog on the left-hand button bar, and the ensuing screen tells me a restart is required, so I click on that and it restarts Home Assistant. Bear in mind that all this has done is update Home Assistant to know there is another integration that can be used, but it hasn’t actually told Home Assistant to use that integration. In effect, we’re at the starting point we’ve seen before for adding standard integrations, so we can now add the Octopus Energy one in the same way as we added the Melcloud one or the Solar Forecast one in the previous article. So now we’ve done all that HACS stuff, when we click “Add Integration” on the devices and integrations page, we can now search for and find the Octopus one. Obviously, it asks for a different set of details that are Octopus-specific (an account ID in the format of A-XXXXXXXX that you’ll see on your Octopus dashboard, an API key that you can find by burrowing into My Account/Personal Details/Developer settings (API access button) and perhaps a tweak or two of the odd optional setting but probably not), but you fill them in and Robert’s your mother’s brother. In my case, since I have two tariffs with Octopus, the integration discovers two devices (one import, one export) and a load of entities in each. Now I could click into each device and add the various entities to my dashboard as we did in the last article, and that’s the way I’ll leave it for now. However, there’s a lot to take in with all that info, so I got a bit clever—or at least took advantage of someone else having done so—and also installed an Octopus Energy Rates Card. It does involve a bit of configuring that isn’t just clicking on buttons, but I think it’s worth it. Just bear in mind that it doesn’t affect the automation and decision-making that relies on the Octopus data, but the benefit it provides is easier reading of that data. If you want more information about how I did it, head over to the appendix for more detail, but fo...

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13/11/2025 3:22 pm

Posted by: @batpred

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So it is important to be transparent.

Quite.

I am being Transparent!

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Topic starter 13/11/2025 3:45 pm

Posted by: @batpred

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With all due respect, there is no need to make new definitions for these simple terms.

TCP/IP is a set of protocols that broadly fits into layers 2-4s.

ethernet covers a set of protocols that map to layers 1-2.

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I understand what you're trying to say but the above is not accurate.

802.x (ethernet, wifi, token ring etc.) are technical standards. Although a "protocol" in the grammatical sense is a "set of standards", in networking these technical standards covering layers 1 and 2 of the OSI model are not referred to as protocols.

TCP/IP is a network protocol that happens to operate low down on the OSI model - layers 3 and 4. However, there are other (generally obsolete) network protocols that were designed to operate in higher layers (IPX/SPX and NetBEUI for example). Irrespective, these are standards defining the packets of data transmitted over the physical and datalink layers, and so are communications protocols rather than technical standards for the physical network.

As a result, I'm not making new definitions; I'm sticking to the commonly understood and accepted terminology of IT networking. If I didn't, it would get very confusing very quickly.

Posted by: @batpred

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This is still a good reference model. When (inter)networking started being implemented and deployed, I can confirm the OSI model was very useful.

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I had no intention of suggesting anything else. It's not just useful; it is the de facto model and therefore a standard reference in the industry.

Posted by: @batpred

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A Home Assistant box with all its connections is usually a gateway in that OSI terminology, that spans layers 1-4.

Um, no.

The physical computer that Home Assistant is installed on will contain one or more network cards that allow connection to the network. When Home Assistant is installed (ignoring variations for simplicity) HAOS (Home Assistant Operating System) goes onto that box and the rest of Home Assistant sits on top.

Bluntly, Home Assistant is purely working at the application layer - layer 7. The operating system (HAOS) interacts with the computer and with Home Assistant and so is providing the presentation and then session layer to the application. It could also be argued that the presentation layer is fulfilled by Home Assistant rather than the operating system but even then it certainly doesn't reach down below layer 6.

Any communication with Home Assistant (including for it to act as a gateway) will require any communication to span the whole 7 layers.

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