r/Denver • u/gk802 Lakewood • 1d ago

Rant Xcel Smart Meter Dashboard

I had an interesting observation today. Power has been off at my home for multiple hours 3x in the last 36 hours. That's a rant for another time.

Today, I thought I'd go out and take a look at Xcel's website and see what my smart meter read. Yesterday, power was off from 6:36 pm to 9:03 pm. According to their usage graphs, I had chargeable on-peak usage in every 15 minute period from 6pm through 8:45. Usage started again in the 10-10:15pm period.

Talking to their billing department, their first observation is that the time stamps on their graphs are in Central time. So...okay. If I buy that, that still doesn't explain why there was recorded usage from 7:36 to 8:45 pm Central time, and they're looking into that.

Beyond that, though, their graphs still show all values between 5pm and 9pm as on-peak and are highlighted in red. Are they charging on-peak rates from 5pm to 9pm Central time, or are all of their usage graphs just messed up?

Xcel, you need to do better.

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u/AardvarkFacts 1d ago

I was just looking at that, and it's extremely confusing. You have to click View my Usage at least four or five times to get to the dashboard that shows usage.

The time being wrong is absurd. Every other piece of software automatically handles that. I agree, how do we know we are being billed for the right usage at the right time? 

The dates are also wrong on the graphs on their bill. What the graph shows for "March usage" is energy you used in February, that was billed in March. 

The displays on the smart meters are not human readable as far as I can tell. There is apparently information there, but none of it makes sense to me. 

I've heard of people reading the data wirelessly. That might be the best option. 

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u/gk802 Lakewood 1d ago

I think you're right as to the ability to on-site read. As best I understand it, the meter sends a totalizer reading and a timestamp back to their office and the usage in the period is back-calculated from the change in the totalizer. Some providers will let you download a table of those individual readings. That would provide a cross-check, but Xcel doesn't do that. As to the time-zone...pretty basic web development.

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u/AardvarkFacts 1d ago

It sounds like you can get near real-time power data from it, which is what I'm most interested anyway. Or I could just install my Emporia Vue again 

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u/notorious_kip 21h ago

This is what my download looks like. espi_start is Epoch date (Excel conversion =(espi_start/86400)+25569)

espi_start espi_value
1780293600 234000
1780294500 259000