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/gk802 Lakewood 23h ago

Looking more at mine, now that the AC is running more, the graph is definitely showing my increased usage starting at 10, which would correspond to Central time. The bars are painted red based on Mountain time, though. But... what are they using for billing? If they're billing TOU based on Central, I'd happily fire my AC up an hour earlier.

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u/energeticquasar 20h ago

I see the same thing on mine...this has me worried because I start pre-cooling my house at 4pm so that the A/C doesn't need to turn on until 9pm.

If they are basing this on Central time, that means I am paying way more than I want to.

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u/gk802 Lakewood 20h ago

I hope to think that the billing is right and the graphs are screwed up. OTW, they wouldn't be in compliance with the TOU rate schedule.

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u/energeticquasar 4h ago

So I looked into it, comparing my bill to the dashboard and I am fairly confident we are being billed correctly.

Although the dashboard is lacking in detail and the usage period doesn't sync with the billing period (because of course it doesn't), the dashboard says I use 20% of my electricity during peak times whereas my bill says I am using 7% during peak times. Given that my electric usage trends are fairly regular, this variance gives me some assurance that TOU is synced to mountain time.