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Configuration

Settings → Devices & services → NHS Give Blood → Configure

Option Default Range
Update interval 30 minutes 5–1440 minutes
Fetch donation history on —

Update interval

Donor data changes on the order of days: eligibility dates move after a donation, appointments when you book one. The default of 30 minutes already makes a booking made in the app appear promptly.

Polling faster mostly asks a public health service for data that cannot have changed. There is no benefit and it is not neighbourly. The floor of 5 minutes exists to stop an accidental one-minute setting.

Automatic backoff

On sustained failure the interval doubles, up to a ceiling of 4 hours, after three consecutive failed polls. NHSBT maintenance windows last hours; hammering through one achieves nothing.

Once a poll succeeds, your configured interval is restored immediately.

Backoff does not apply to authentication failures. A rejected credential needs you, not patience, so Home Assistant opens a reauthentication prompt instead.

Fetch donation history

Controls whether /api/account/donation-history is called on each update. It powers:

  • sensor.nhs_give_blood_last_donation
  • sensor.nhs_give_blood_donations_recorded

Turning it off makes each update one request lighter and leaves both sensors unavailable.

Changing options

Options changes reload the integration. Token refreshes do not — the integration distinguishes the two, because reloading on a token write would produce an endless loop.

YAML configuration

Not supported, and not planned. This integration is config-flow only, which is where Home Assistant has been heading for years and is a requirement for the quality scale it targets.

Logging

logger:
  default: info
  logs:
    # The integration
    custom_components.nhs_give_blood: debug
    # The underlying library — HTTP requests, token refreshes, retries
    nhs_give_blood: debug

Debug logging never records credentials or tokens: the library's TokenBundle has a redacted repr, and API error summaries deliberately read only errorCode and errorMessage, never the attemptedValue field that echoes back whatever was sent.