Ecoflow PowerOcean Data can be outdated

[Jelledb]

Describe the bug

This is an issue of the Ecoflow API and not evcc.

The problem is that the Ecoflow API will return outdated results until you open the Ecoflow app
A lot of reports of this can be found online like these:

• Entities are updates only when Ecoflow app is open tolwi/hassio-ecoflow-cloud#57
  There is also some Reddit posts about it.

There seems to be some kind of trigger in the Ecoflow system to refresh the data which can be triggered by i.e. opening the mobile app. When you open the mobile app after a while you directly see EVCC updating to the correct values within 30~ seconds.

This is an external issue but I figured it's still good to track so people are aware and maybe workarounds or potential solutions can be discussed.

Steps to reproduce

1. Run EVCC
2. Open Ecoflow mobile app
3. Wait a few minutes
4. Check EVCC again - you'll see the data is still the same pretty much.
5. Open Ecoflow app
6. Wait 30 seconds
7. You'll see now EVCC is updated with the correct values.

Configuration details

-

Log details

-

What type of operating system or environment does evcc run on?

Docker container

External automation

• I have made sure that no external automation like HomeAssistant or Node-RED is active or accessing any of the mentioned devices when this issue occurs.

Nightly build

• I have verified that the issue is reproducible with the latest nightly build

Version

No response

[andig]

Thanks for the report. Since this is nothing we can fix it seems it doesn't belong into issues. Moving into the home installation discussions.

[Jelledb]

So one workaround I have so far (it's a crap one) is leaving a client on all the time. For example the "PowerInsight" tablet but I feel the web portal also works for this purpose. This keeps the data to be fresh at all time and EVCC picks that up right away.

[Jelledb]

Just sharing my learnings here so far, it's quite a shitshow around the EcoFlow APIs.

I had noticed that the folks at https://github.com/tolwi/hassio-ecoflow-cloud are able to "fix" the data hanging issue by restarting the instance. This taught me that actually they don't use the official but some (reverse-engineered?) MQTT API from Ecoflow. But, I also learned they do not support this because PowerOcean specifically has weird data encoding things going on (more info here)

Then I learned that someone built a working Ecoflow MQTT plugin for iobroker (I had never heard of this, seems some kind of self-hosted plugin based smart home tool).

After struggling a bit with iobroker I can now report that I actually have consistently data coming through as long as you do not open & close the Ecoflow Mobile App. This is already much better than the official API because that one never gets new data unless you open the app.

There is still some weird data caching shit going on in the Ecoflow MQTT iobroker setup but it has at least improved my set up quite a bit. You can see the data caching problem here in my MQTT explorer graph for for example mqttPower which has gone up steadily during the day but also keeps receiving old values.

I have also tried reverse-engineering the iobroker ecoflow plugin and implementing it in Go but for some reason I am not receiving all of the right messages but I'll try more on that at a later point.

I think for now there are these options we have as Ecoflow Powerocean users:

1. (Dumb & Expensive) Run the Ecoflow PowerInsight tablet all the time. This will keep data fresh.
2. Install IOBroker and the ecoflow plugin and use mqtt into EVCC to get kind-of accurate and timely data (this is what I'm doing right now)
3. Implement the same logic and approach as the Ecoflow-mqtt Iobroker plugin in Go, and use that in EVCC
4. Hope that Ecoflow gets their shit together and builds a proper API.

cc @JulianKahnert as I know you're also looking into this.

[andig]

If you're happy with ioBroker, just get the data from there? See template: ioBroker.bmw for an example.

[Jelledb]

Yeah it's at least something but I would be happier if it just works directly within EVCC and I don't need to run iobroker.

Also the iobroker data is bad but that might be a iobroker plugin problem or becasue the ecoflow api is just trash

[andig]

If the api is as bad as you say, it won't get better in Go and I'd really like to now attract new sources of endless problems ;)