Xcel Energy ITron Gen 5 Riva

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Overview

I’m going to log what I’m doing to try to read the new smart meter that was installed on my house a few weeks ago. The point of this post is a work-in-progress and may-never-work. So sorry if you have the same meter in the future and were hoping I had solved it.

Meter

The meter was installed by Xcel energy (xcelenergy.com) and it is made by “ITron”.

The model on the bottom says “Gen :tm: 5 Riva Itron”.

There is other information on it, including:

  • FCC ID: SK9G5R1
  • Model: G5R1
  • 240V FM2S 3W TYPE R2SID 1.0Kh
  • Xcel Energy

There are a bunch of other numbers, but I’m not sure which ones would give out personal information. But I’ll describe them here:

  • CONTAINS: and then a 10 digit hex number
  • A bar code then *1NI, a 9 digit number, *. e.g. *1NI123456789 *
  • The same 9 digit number, broken into 3x 3 digit values. e.g. 123 456 789

Links

Some quick googling showed me:

Initial Thoughts

  1. I am not discouraged enough that my meter isn’t on the rtlamr compatible devices list :slight_smile:. Maybe I should be. But this is a new meter. Maybe no one has tried it?
  2. The fact that this unit has wifi in it. And also some references to “Gen5 network” and “OpenWay Riva”, along with the fcc id data, point towards this device using a mesh network in the wifi band. That would make sense to me, since my utility doesn’t want to drive around the neighborhoods reading meters every day.
  3. The green button alliance stuff looks promising, if I can’t figure out how to read the data directly.
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Today, I am playing around with a usb sdr and the rtlamr tool. I am currently just recording everything nearby and I have found quite a few things, several of which claim to be electricity meters.

The other images I’ve seen of smart meters make it pretty easy to find the ID. I am looking at the meter, and I don’t see any 8-10 digit decimal number that could be an id. There is the 9 digit decimal number, and a 10 digit hex number (converted to decimal). But I don’t see either of those in the logs (so far).

Here’s what I’ve basically done:

  1. cloned https://github.com/ragingcomputer/amridm2mqtt . It has a dockerfile which has the rtlamr installed. It would be nice if I could use this mqtt package eventually anyway.
  2. docker build -t amridm2mqtt in that folder
  3. Plugged the SDR into the computer and started the docker image for rtl_tcp:
docker run --rm -it --entrypoint rtl_tcp --name rtlamr --privileged  -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb amridm2mqtt
  1. In another terminal, I started the data log:
docker exec -t rtlamr /root/go/bin/rtlamr -msgtype=all -format=csv | tee meters.csv

(The first log was actually for about an hour and was msgtype=idm. That only showed electricity meters. I’m still poking through the other meters).
That spit out a bunch of entries. They look a bit like this:

2021-10-14T15:49:30.333869817Z,0,0,0x555516A3,0x1C,0x5C,0xC6,0x04,0x07,1234567890,173,0xBC,1234567890,0x00,000000000000,1472094,9,7,7,10,8,6,5,5,6,5,4,4,5,4,5,5,4,4,2,1,2,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,3097,0xDB82,0x7528

I am trying to anonymize this data a little. I hope I didn’t reveal something I shouldn’t have. I am pretty sure these aren’t my meters :frowning:

The format of these messages is detailed here.

For the one I pasted. One interesting thing is that the “type” (the 9th column) is 0x07. That seems to be for electricity. The smart meters are being installed currently. I wonder if maybe the old meters are actually the only ones that are reporting now…

There are consistent IDs. They are all in decimal. They are all at least 7 digits long. None of them match the 9 digit decimal, or the 10 digit hex, converted to decimal number on my meter. The consumption seems to be consistent too. There are 47 entries for the last 47 instantaneous measurements. They are consistent (for one id, consecutive entries have the same data in [1:47] and [0:46], if that makes sense).

I’m reading somebody’s meter. I have no idea where these are coming from, or if they are some other kind of infrastructure (there are green electricity boxes around, maybe some of those are reporting?).

There are 23 unique ids (I logged for about an hour). I live in the suburbs. How many houses can I reach with this $25 antenna and dongle?

Other things

There are also clearly other devices. Even if I can’t read my electricity meter with the SDR, I have found my gas meter, and I am hoping to find my water meter. They are not the IDM like these electricity meters though.

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Currently with xcel energy as well, and have been using rtlamr for a while prefectly. Got a note from xcel earlier in the week that they are about to change my meter to what you have as well. Hopefully i don’t lose the ability to monitor it.

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Yeah. I think I really misunderstood what was possible with the previous meter.

Maybe you should take a long data collection with -msgtype=all before and after the install to see if there is anything new. If you find anything, let me know :slight_smile:

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Following - xcel here as well

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I’m interested in my meter too. Xcel just installed mine today.

I’ll note that they have some sort of rest API on the website for showing monthly usage that we might be able to use as well. I haven’t played around with it too much, but it seemed like it might be an alternative to reading the meter directly.

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Just had mine installed by Xcel today. Have been using rtlamr for years to get near real-time electricity usage, but so far also can’t figure out this new Gen5 Riva Smart Meter. I will say I haven’t even checked on the specs to make sure it transmits in 900MHz band.

Following this thread in case anyone can figure it out (or if I do, will post back)

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Ditto. Installed today in Denver. Nothing in rtlamr either. Hoping that i can screenscrape or use Greenbutton, but my xcel account seems to be still referencing my old meter. Will check in the morning.

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I was really hoping these new meters were just configured to use the same ID as the old one. Sort of like a MAC address clone. I can see a lot of electric meters on SCM+, but I can’t tell if any of them are mine. Maybe I will track several of them and plot them against my furnace or something. Sorry neighbors.

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Also in Denver and I just had this meter model installed as well. I’m pretty new to this and don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’m willing to help however I can.

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Hi @jeffeb3 I’m also in Denver and recently had this meter installed. I tried scanning and haven’t been able to pinpoint which meter is mine (live in Denver proper). Have you had any luck with this?

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You are unable to scan the new ones. Need to do something like extracting data from Greenbutton - PhracturedBlue/smartmeter_greenbutton: Python code to read smart-meter data from utility company (github.com) The Xcel site seems to do everything to make that difficult though when i tried.

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There Is a REST API in there. I can pull data from my browser once logged in. Problem I had was their auth mechanism. Looks like it could be an OAuth implementation, bit it could also be some non-standard token-in-cookie auth.

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Xcel - Denver, CO Gen 5 Riva here. Does anyone know how to interpret the numbers on the display? What I find frustrating is that the previous reading on the bill shows “0”. Not like the bills for the old meters where you could see the previous reading and do a visual reading and sort of keep track from day to day. On top of that, they now have a peak, medium and off peak rate. I am finding that my bill is higher than before the smart meter. I know that it could also be because of the price increases. They can also shut your power down with the click of a mouse miles away. Don’t want to get political here, but just hate these trends where I see big corporations and government having total control over the people. Can you say “New World Order”?

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I can’t interpret anything on mine, nor can we read it at this point. I agree with you, I despise the big brother effect – I’ve had mine a few months now. We have had some increase in rate if I recall, but, my bills appear to be higher despite not even being home generally during peak hours.

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Any movement here? After having been collecting electric meter readings for about a year using rtlamr, our provider swapped out our meter with the Gen5 Riva today and now I’m not seeing the broadcasts anymore :frowning:. I’m in SLC with Rocky Mountain Power.

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Since Xcel updated their website recently – you can now view your usage by peak/mid peak/offpeak including up to increments of 15 minutes and download into xml. I did notice there is also a “connect to Green Button” option as well.

This is beyond the scope of my skills, but, to the extent we could pull this in somehow, I suppose it could help replace the annoying loss of our 433mhz meters.

Found at: https://myenergy.xcelenergy.com/myenergy/usage-history

Screenshots:

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Screen Shot 2022-04-02 at 9.21.38 AM
Screen Shot 2022-04-02 at 9.21.38 AM1876×1272 190 KB

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ugh, I had my data before with SDR and now I can’t get it. There should be a law…

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Anyone happen to make progress on the green button integration? Looks like there’s the start of a framework built perhaps (https://github.com/PhracturedBlue/smartmeter_greenbutton. I am able to test, but don’t have the ability to program, unfortunately.

@bachya had built a python library years ago to pull data in https://github.com/bachya/pyxcel

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I couldn’t find any information on the greenbutton stuff on the actual xcel site, not sure if that partnership ever went through.