There was a morning when I almost went to a shower but right before doing so I noticed that the water is cold likewise my towel heater. Upon checking my district heating provider’s website I noticed that were was an ongoing planned maintenance. Since I didn’t got any kind of a notification of this or found a way to subscribe to alerts about issues with the heating, I decided to create a small tool to achieve this.
Upon browsing the website I noticed on the browser’s network tab that Helen has a GeoJSON feed that indeed provides information about planned maintenance which kind of made it an easier decision on proceeding making the tool.
I made it available to Github here with the required documentation needed to run it e.g. daily at 5 am. It uses Pushover for notifications but changing the notification function to something else is pretty easy.
The only major difficulty was mainly that Helen doesn’t provide accurate timestamps always on when some maintenance is going to happen via the API so I’ve resorted to using only date accuracy. Maintenance jobs aren’t anyway going always on plan so it is better to be sure. Secondly, there seemed to be something off with the GeoJSON polygons or multipolygons provided by the API (mixing ups between those two despite defined polygon type) so using a bounding box is instead used here instead with solving the point in polygon problem.
Here are some screenshots of a successful run from a phone receiving a push notification providing immediately the needed information and details of an upcoming maintenance:
