How can we tell if an Octopus Savings Session has been joined?

[jameslavery]

I know the system will auto-join sessions.

Is it possible to tell from the UI/output that a session has been joined? Or is it just a case of keeping an eye on the Plan?

[marksie1988]

I got a notification on my phone when it joined

[jameslavery]

Was that from Octopus, or from HA?

[marksie1988]

That was from HA it told me that batpred had signed me up to a saving session

[springfall2008]

There’s a notification, you can see the rates on chart change, it’s mentioned in the log file or you can use the octopus app to confirm

[jameslavery]

Rate changes etc. are a good indicator - yes. Also I then did check on the Octopus app and it said I'd enrolled. That's good enough for me!

I was just wondering if BatPred indicated explicitly that a Savings Session had been signed up to.

When you say 'notification', is that a HA notification - if I've set HA to give notifications? I'm new to HA, and getting to grips with its features!

[springfall2008]

Yes a HA notification is generated, this goes to your mobile devices that are linked to the App.

[gcoan]

@jameslavery if you have the Home Assistant Companion app installed on your mobile, that's how you get notifications from Predbat when saving sessions are automatically joined

[pacemaker82]

@jameslavery I am checking this via the binary_sensor.octopus_energy_a_c{x}_octoplus_saving_sessions sensor from the Octopus integration (not PredBat). If you check the attributes of the sensor you can see the "next" charge start/end time attributes are set when one is coming. This sensor will return true when the session is active.

I too would like an explicit boolean true/false if one is signed up to though. Would be a good addition to PredBat.

[gcoan]

You can always create a custom template sensor in HA to read the attribute value using state_attr()

This would be a better solution than adding an extra sensor that's populated infrequently (and repeats other data already in HA).

Have a look on youtube for videos on custom template sensors - smarthomejunkie ones are quite good