First steps with Home Assistant and the Octopus Cosy heat pump

What I’d like to do is: (a) gather some stats over time of how our heat pump performs; and (b) optimise the cost of running the pump via automations.  All the good people on the internet point me to Home Assistant—software you can run on a Raspberry Pi to program and tinker with this kind of thing.

I finally made a start, and have a default dashboard with everything on it:

Things I needed to set up or know:

• HACS, so that I could install…
• David Kendall’s Octopus Energy component; and
• how to reset the password because I’m an idiot.

With that, it discovered all the bits of the Heat Pump and started gathering data. Brilliant that it works, but sad that it’s not directly from the hardware and has to request the data from Octopus via an API and back down to me.

One gotcha for me: The power supply I started with wasn’t up to the job, reporting “Undervoltage detected!”. The kind folk of Mastodon directed me to the official Raspberry Pi power supply and that fixed everything. 

I now have data I didn’t have before, such as the way the water temperature varies over time.

(Ok, I could have fetched this data via API calls to Octopus, but Home Assistant is way better than anything I could write.)

It’ll be a while before I do anything more, but the next thing will be to find a way to take the data off the Pi before I fill the SD card.

I’m currently dazzled by the toys available, and by the quality of what I’ve tried so far.