Target rate sensors not turning on

[justinswabey]

I think I might have done an up date of the integration yesterday, not sure. But today, all of my sensors have failed to turn on. Entities are all enabled and the integration has started fine. I tried a restart and set up a test sensor, but that failed too.
Would much appreciate any ideas of how to troubleshoot this please. Everything else in HA working as expected, so don't thing it's an issue there

[BottlecapDave]

Nothing has changed around the target rate sensors work for a little while. Is the last evaluated attribute updating every minute? Is the target rates last evaluated attribute updatingnat least once a day? Have you performed a restart after updating the integration?

[justinswabey]

Thanks for getting back. Since my post, I decided to just remove the integration, re-install and create all of my sensors again.
I remember there being a glitch in HA when I did the update, so thought this may have caused the issue. Re-downloading didn't work, so I went for the full re-install.
The test sensor that I have made since doing this has turned on, so fingers crossed that has fixed it!
Would be stuffed without it working. Thank you for your work, I think this is probably the most useful integration I have.

[BottlecapDave]

Yeah I've had various reports over the years of sensors just stopping as of HA has forgot about them. I've never managed to track down the root cause.

[fernando155]

Well... It happened to me again this time. First one I through it was update and takes some time, but after a week it happened again. It shows Target times last evaluated
27 November 2023 at 12:00:12
Last evaluated
27 November 2023 at 12:06:12

I checked a few and basically all off them are the same, same times.

[justinswabey]

Again, up and running after a re-start. Have enabled debugging in the integration now, although I am sure I had enabled it last time and it seems to have turned off. So that I know next time, where do I find the debugging logs?

[BottlecapDave]

In the future if an integration fails, you can reload it manually without restarting. Unfortunately this can happen if the OE APIs can't be reached. HA stops debugging if you restart HA, but when active it can be found in the full HA logs in the normal location.

If the integration failed to setup, then this was probably why the sensor didn't turn on.

In a future update there will be a new attribute on target rate sensors that will indicate if rate information is incomplete and the result of target rate sensors not turning on.

[justinswabey]

How would I re-load it manually please? Seems almost like the problem might be caused by the sequence in which things in HA re-start after a core update.

[BottlecapDave]

I personally haven't had any issues after updates (as it's like any other update), but because it needs access to the APIs, it's a bit of a luck of a draw if they're available.

To reload you go into the integration, find the entry that states it's failed to load and click the three dots next to it. This should open a menu, where you just click reload.

[justinswabey]

Thanks, I'll try that next time

[justinswabey]

Mine are working again after another restart. Will post logs here if / when they go down again

[alfwro13]

I have the same issue, my target rate binary sensor was off all night despite the fact it should have been On.
Was fixed by integration reload.
Im on v9.1.0 and HA 2023.12.1

[BottlecapDave]

To give me a chance of trying to track down this issue I need

• Logs from HA
• the last updated timestamp of the sensor. This can be retrieved by putting the following (updating for your sensor) in the template section of the developer tools
  {{ states.binary_sensor.octopus_energy_target_dishwasher.last_updated }}
• The value of the target rates attribute on the sensor
• The value of target_times_last_evaluated
• The full config of the target rate sensors.
• your tariff

My assumption is the sensor doesn't turn on because there is a delay in retrieving rate information, and once present the sensor picks a best time which is in the past.

[alfwro13]

I will try to provide that info if I can replicate that issue in a control way - at night I just want it get working so I restart HA.
However as a workaround if anyone is having this issue I use this template that does the same thing, and use that in automation as a condition, automation is setup to run every 30 minutes. That template will render true if current time is the same as the date and time in the target_times start and false when end time is reached

{% set current_time = now().timestamp() %}
{% set target_times = state_attr('binary_sensor.octopus_energy_target_intermittent_best_charging_rates', 'target_times') %}

{% for target_time in target_times %}
  {% set start_time = as_timestamp(target_time['start']) %}
  {% set end_time = as_timestamp(target_time['end']) %}
  
  {% if current_time >= start_time and current_time < end_time %}
    true
  {% endif %}
{% endfor %}
false

[seanmaskey]

Hi
I'm new to HA; I have tried to follow instructions for setup & this query so apologies if ive missed something obvious. this Conversation seems relevant to the issue the has just developed for me.

I installed your very useful integration to run my heating and how water using octopus agile & updated to v9.1.
I started with a DHW immersion and have slowly added switches to control other appliances and most recently a Ground Source Heat pump. all worked well until a few days ago when the dependant Octopus energy rates display card failed to initialise consistently when restarting HA; it did so after another restart or I realised after a few minutes with no action, but then (yesterday) stopped its self recovery.
The reason appears to be that the integration is not loading on restart & has to be done so manually.

Ive attached the log from recent restart - on this occasion it required 2x manual reload.

does this give you enough info to make sense of the Home assistant octopus energy .txt

Raspberry Pi 3b.
Supervisor
HA OS11.2
Core 2023 21.1
the integration diagnostics file is empty
HA Octopus Energy v9.1.0

Thanks

Sean