Following on from our post on getting historic Hive heating data here: https://www.digitaltechnologylabs.com/2017/12/09/temperature-data-from-hive, I had another go and was able to extract the data again. However, I found that the process still did in fact work, which I’m very happy about.

**** UPDATES 3rd Feb 2019 – see bottom of blog post ****

Actual Hive heating data shown here

Here is the data for November.

hive heating data for november

And then I got the temperature (Actuals) in my area during that time. And then, I compared the inside temperature to the outside temperature.

Min outside temp vs inside temperature

Max outside temp, versus inside temperature

Both suggest that the temperature in the house remains quite stable, even on the coldest days.

Monitoring temperature and expenditure wish list:

1. Correlate that with the gas spend on those days.
2. Automatically pull in the heating data from HIVE and spend – UPDATE: I’ve partially implemented this! See update at the end of the blog post.
3. Automatically pull in the temperature data (actuals)
4. In fact that would make a cool project over christmas to make a Raspberry Pi temperature monitor to go outside, and post the results to an endpoint for me!

And if you’ve already done any of the above we would love to hear from you!

Some important hive heating data links

https://www.hivehome.com – Here is the where you can login to Hive, and you’ll find all the data described for your own Hive setup.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/gb/basildon/ss14-1/month/328073?monyr=11/01/2017 – Here is where you can get historical outside temperature data for your area, and find out what the min and max temperature was in your area!

How to access the Hive temperature data

Here is a tutorial video created 5th January 2019 with details of how to access this data.

I hope this is of use!

How to automatically pull in temperature data from Hive – Update 3rd February

Big thank you to Andrew (from the comments below) – who pointed me at Home-Assistant.io https://www.home-assistant.io/components/hive/ with a little jiggly pokery I got this working to pull in the data from the Hive smart metre automatically – this is very exciting!

Here’s the proof:

The Home Assistant working on my Mac showing this:

Home Assistant working to pull in the HIVE data

The app showing the same thing…

The hive app showing the same data

Okay I need to try and recall how I did it. I achieved this on a Mac with a recent Mac OS install.

1. Registed for Docker so I could login and get to downloads
2. Downloaded Docker (for Desktop) dmg here: https://store.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-desktop-mac
3. Followed the link here (https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/installation/) which gave me the docker component to download here: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/installation/docker/ Basically you have to create this command string and run it at the terminal:
4. This is the command I ran:

   docker run -d --name="home-assistant" -v /Users/kevingordon/home-assistant/config -e "TZ=Europe/London" -p 8123:8123 homeassistant/home-assistant

5. Please note however apart from the Timezone, the config bit did not work I don’t think
6.  If you accidentally run the docker component wrong, find the id by running the command: docker ps -a -q and then run this docker rm your_component_id to get rid of it.
7. In order to sort out the configuration, one must go into the Docker image. To do this download the app Kitematic and put it in the Applications directory.
8. You’ll be able to see the volumes, choose the /config, double click, enable it, then edit the configuration.yaml here.
9. And in the configuration.yaml you need the following, note you can add after the first section or probably anywhere in the configuration.yaml:

10. hive:
        username: hive_username_here 
        password: hive_password_here
    

11. Take care to restart the component via Kitematic and ensure the Hive component has started okay.
12. Then go to http://localhost:8123 – here you’ll be prompted to create a name, username and password – note these so you can login.
13. Now when you login, you should get a Hive component with the temperature as the photo above. If not, then go to configuration > General and click ‘Check Config’ this should load without errors.

I hope that helps. I’m going to work on extracting a polling of the thermostat reading of the temperature from this. Then I need to install a temperature reader outside my house 🙂 And the final step will be to simplify this – as that took at good couple of hours of hacking to get that all working!