Service Date Values not Showing Properly in Home Assistant

[cyber553]

Checklist

• I made sure that there are no existing issues or discussions - open issues,closed issues,open discussion, closed discussion - which may answer my question or that I could contribute my information to.
• I have read the Known Issues Wiki Page and my question / issue is not listed.
• I have provided the version of the software and the operating system in my post.
• If I have an issue with genmon not communicating with the controller, I have read and followed the serial troubleshooting guide.
• I have included the generator make and model in my submission.

Version

2.0.1

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I have not submitted logs

What is/are your question(s)?

I installed "Home Assistant MQTT Discovery" on the Pi that runs Genmon so I could pull its reporting into Home Assistant. This created 117 entities and most work great after I got it connected to my Mosquitto Broker app in Home Assistant.

However, the 6 "service due" entities ("Battery Service Due" and "Service A Due", for example) all have values that just say "or". When I look in the Genmon's (port 8000) site, it shows the Service A and B Due values properly as something like "119 hrs or 10/06/2026", so my guess is that Home Assistant just isn't parsing those values with an "or" on them properly.

Does anyone know why this is and if there is a fix for it so I can see actual dates from these entities/sensors in Home Assistant?

Many Thanks!

Additional information

I have a Liquid Cooled Generac RG04854ANAX, with Evolution 1.0 controller from 2018.

[daveshenal]

This looks like a known weak spot in how genmon's MQTT discovery handles text based (non numeric) sensors. In a related discussion on this repo, a contributor noted that "Service A/B" and similar text based values aren't published cleanly as JSON the way numeric sensors can be, and the maintainer agreed it's a genmon-side issue that hasn't been fully addressed yet. Your "119 hrs or 10/06/2026" values are exactly that kind of compound string - a number+unit and a date stitched together with "or" - which is more fragile to publish/parse correctly than a plain number.

The fastest way to pin down exactly where it's breaking: check the raw MQTT payload genmon is actually publishing for one of those topics, independent of Home Assistant. You can do this with mosquitto_sub -h <broker> -t 'homeassistant/sensor/+/service_a_due/state' -v (adjust the topic to match your discovery prefix - check it in Settings > MQTT Discovery or via HA's MQTT integration "Listen to a topic" tool), or just watch it live in HA's MQTT settings page. That tells you which of two things is happening:

• If the raw payload on the wire is already just "or" - the bug is in genmon itself, in how it formats/sanitizes that string before publishing. Worth checking if a newer version than 2.0.1 has addressed it, and filing this as a bug report with that raw payload included if not.
• If the raw payload is the full correct string ("119 hrs or 10/06/2026") but HA still only shows "or" - the problem is in the auto generated discovery config for that entity (likely an inappropriate device_class or value_template trying to coerce a compound string into a stricter type, like date or duration, and failing silently down to a fragment). In that case, try deleting and re adding the MQTT discovery topic to force entity recreation - per that same discussion, several discovery config changes (like display precision or entity category) don't take effect on existing entities until they're deleted and recreated, only on fresh discovery.

That raw payload check will tell you definitively which side to focus on, and either way it'll give the maintainer something concrete to act on if you open an issue.

[cyber553]

Thanks Dave, that was great. I listened to the service a due topic ("genmon/sensor/service_a_due/state") and found the payload is correct ("119 hrs or 10/06/2026"), but now the entities in Home Assistant are correct too (yay!).

On the other hand the other service due entities (generator_battery_service_due, generator_filter_service_due, etc.) are only showing values of "or" still, and I have been unable to locate the exact topic name to view the raw payloads coming in from MQTT. Do you have any suggestions for where I can find the topic names?

I tried guessing based on the naming convention of the service A topic and the corresponding entity names in HA for the other service due entities, but nothing was returned, even after hours of listening. I also tried listening to "homeassistant/sensor/generator/#", but it returned 117 messages quickly and the UI in Home Assistant only lets me see the most recent 30 messages received, none of which were related to the other service_due topics. "genmon/sensor/+/state" also returns 100+ messages, none of which are the other service_due topics either. :/