Hinckley and Bosworth fails to pull

[tallbfg]

Name of Council

Hinckley and Bosworth

Issue Information

Integration fails to pull data from council website
Have retried with UPRN on separate install, still no luck
integration fails

Verification

• I searched for similar issues at https://github.com/robbrad/UKBinCollectionData/issues?q=is:issue and found no duplicates
• I have checked my address/postcode/UPRN works on the council's website
• I have provided a detailed explanation of the issue as well as steps to replicate the issue
• I understand that this project is run by volunteer contributors therefore completion of this issue cannot be guaranteed

[tallbfg]

have also tried adding the ical as a remote calendar with no success.
pre-existing ical already set up in Mac calendar app still pulls correctly.

[Xtra89]

➜ ~ docker exec -it homeassistant python3 -m uk_bin_collection.uk_bin_collection.collect_data HinckleyandBosworthBoroughCouncil "https://www.hinckley-bosworth.gov.uk"
{
"bins": [
{
"type": "Black Bin",
"collectionDate": "26/08/2026"
},
{
"type": "Food Caddy",
"collectionDate": "26/08/2026"
},
{
"type": "Brown Bin",
"collectionDate": "02/09/2026"
},
{
"type": "Blue Lidded Bin",
"collectionDate": "02/09/2026"
},
{
"type": "Food Caddy",
"collectionDate": "02/09/2026"
},
{
"type": "Black Bin",
"collectionDate": "09/09/2026"
},
{
"type": "Food Caddy",
"collectionDate": "09/09/2026"
}
]
}

I get a notification about which bin day it is again! 🎉

[robbrad]

Dug into this properly and found the real root cause — it's bigger than a quick fix, so documenting what I found rather than guessing at a rewrite.

The scraper builds its feed URL as bin-collection-feed?round=<UPRN>, but that's based on a wrong assumption about what round means. Traced the site's actual live flow (postcode → select address → redirect): the round parameter is a round code like REFUSEW2THU (refuse, week 2, Thursday), not a UPRN at all — completely different identifier space from the national UPRN this project uses everywhere else. Confirmed directly: hitting the feed URL with a real round code returns 200 text/calendar but with a genuinely empty body (0 bytes) — so even with the right parameter, this particular endpoint looks to have been deprecated/retired on the council's end rather than just needing the right value.

The site now surfaces collection dates a different way entirely: postcode search → select your address → land on a page showing "Current collection dates" as a plain HTML list (no separate iCal feed link anywhere on that page), plus a /alldates?round=<code> page and a PDF calendar download. For the address I tested, that page only ever showed one undifferentiated list of Thursdays — it wasn't clear from a single address which specific dates were refuse vs. recycling (this council runs a combined weekly round covering refuse/recycling/food together, alternating fortnightly), so I couldn't confidently work out how to split them back into separate bin types without more example data.

This needs a proper rewrite (postcode+address search → resolve the round code → parse the new HTML page) rather than a patch, and I don't want to ship something that gets the bin-type split wrong. If you (or anyone hitting this) can share your postcode/house number plus a note on what bin types actually show separately on your own "Current collection dates" page (e.g. do refuse and recycling ever appear as distinctly dated entries, or always lumped together?), that would make it possible to get this right.

[robbrad]

Fully fixed — the old scraper's whole approach was built on a wrong assumption. It passed the UPRN as the iCal feed's "round" parameter, but round is actually a round code (e.g. REFUSEW2THU), a completely different identifier space from a UPRN. Confirmed live that the feed endpoint has been retired — it returns 200 text/calendar with a permanently empty body regardless of what's passed.

The site now surfaces dates through a session-based flow instead: postcode search → select address → a plain HTML "all collection dates" page spanning a full year, with each date's bin type given as an icon (black bin, blue lidded bin, food waste caddy) rather than text — which cleanly solves the bin-type differentiation problem I'd flagged as blocking a rewrite. Rewrote as pure HTTP (session cookies, no Selenium).

Verified live end-to-end: 106 bins across a full year with correct year rollover, zero past dates. This does change the required input from UPRN-only to postcode + house number, since there's no longer a direct UPRN-based lookup endpoint on the site. Included in the September release PR.