Xcel Energy ITron Gen 5 Riva

Just to add to the comments here, I live in Aurora, CO (an Xcel region), and over the past few months that I’ve been accessing the Itron Riva Gen5 I’ve had a mostly positive experience, with some issues:

  • It’ll go weeks producing readings every 5-10 seconds, which is nice
  • Sometimes it’ll inexplicably stop producing readings, at which point I visit the “Manage Meters and Devices” page
    • I’ll find invariably that it reports it’s not connected to my wireless network
    • I’ll submit my network info again, to which it responds “Connection Unsuccessful” but will usually start working again within 5 to 10 minutes
      • From inspecting the “aura” requests the page makes, it doesn’t report the actual error that the backend is producing; often the error will be “the device has a pending HAN (home area network) request”, which it just reports as “Connection Unsuccessful”
  • For a week in July, it was producing readings that were stuck at 9am July 21st, 2025. I curl’d the device with the certs created by the add-on and got a response, but the timestamp was just that one from July 21st.
    • I contacted Xcel and they eventually did something to fix it; I assume they rebooted the meter but I’m not sure.
    • It’s been working since then, though, with some occasional hiccups maybe weekly as mentioned above

In order to get the thing to connect at all, I had to mount an outdoor wireless access point right next to the meter, then extend one of the antennas and literally drape it over the meter.

Questions for others:

  • do you find that it’s flaky and you have to reconnect to the network?
  • anyone ever got the “stuck readings” issue?
  • do you all need to have a WAP right next to the meter, or can it access your home WAN?