If you live in Texas, you have countless electrical providers to choose from on Powertochoose.com. Sometimes great deals come up when you're ready to switch power providers but you can't be bothered to check them everyday. In this case, you'll want to download this Python script.

I assume you're using Anaconda. If not, please get that (or Miniconda).

Either Python 2 or 3 is fine.

Then download the essential libraries:

conda install numpy pandas selenium

conda install -c conda-forge phantomjs

pip install py2ifttt fake_useragent

Then sign up for an IFTTT account if you don't already have one. This program uses IFTTT to manage the notifications.

Create a new applet with the IF part using the Webhooks service. You can select whatever service you want for the THEN part later on, but I recommend SMS.

Name your Webhook service whatever you want, but I pick Powertochoose.

When creating your THEN service, make sure you include the ingredients Value1, Value2, and Value3 in the output for the best effect. These 3 values will tell you the average and min prices for Today, Yesterday, and the Last N Days where you can pick N later in the settings.

A settings.cfg template is included in settings.cfg.sample.

Open that and save it as settings.cfg in the same directory

On the second line, put the name of your Webhook service after the ":" without any trailing spaces. For example, if you named it Powertochoose, that line should be IFTTT Webhook Name:Powertochoose

Next, your IFTTT Webhook Key can be found here after you've created your Webhook. Scroll down to the URL and it should be the portion right after maker.ifttt.com/use/.

# of Days to Calc Min/Max Over: any number is fine, I use 30 (which reports the average and min price over the last 30 days)

Zipcode: self explanatory, put your zip code in, make sure it's a valid Texas zip code that Powertochoose supports.

python simple.py

You'll need to schedule it to run once at the same time everyday for this to function correctly, especially the parts that notify you yesterday's prices and the avg and min prices of the last N days. Refer to your OS for the precise instructions. In Windows, use the Task Scheduler and create a task that runs the above command from the folder where you cloned this repository. On a Mac or Linux, run the following and add it to your crontab:

crontab -e

Then add the following line if you want to run it, say, everyday at 7am:

0 7 * * * /path/to/python /path/to/simple.py

Where you replace the bold statements with the respective paths to your python interpreter and simple.py. NOTE: you may need to dig around to find where the python interpreter for your Anaconda environment is installed!