Showing Demand during Power Outage

[mitrules]

I am curious why the Xcel Irton 5 Instantaneous Demand value shows a positive number during a power outage. I had a power outage this morning between 8:30AM and 9:28AM. During this time I showed a fairly consistent 854W of demand. Should this not be 0W if the power is out? I do have a whole home battery backup system for 12 of my 18 circuits but this should not impact the reading at the meter.

---

Add-on: Xcel iTron MQTT
Bridge from Xcel iTron smart meters to MQTT

Add-on version: 1.6.0
You are running the latest version of this add-on.
System: Home Assistant OS 16.3 (aarch64 / raspberrypi5-64)
Home Assistant Core: 2026.1.2
Home Assistant Supervisor: 2026.01.1

Please, share the above information when looking for help
or support in, e.g., GitHub, forums or the Discord chat.

[wingrunr21]

Immediate thought is your meter is out of calibration. I would expect that to go closer to 0 (my demand will go negative if I am putting energy back onto the grid). Otherwise, I'm not aware of anything that would cause it to stick at 854W. Did your meter log any energy in/out in the same time period (it should if that wattage was actually being drawn).

Other idea would be that only 1 of your 2 lines was out. I've also had that happen where half of a panel was out. Depending on your wiring, you could still be drawing power.

[drako824]

my assumption is that when the power goes out, the meter disconnects and the integration just continues reporting the same value until the meter reconnects and reports a new value, i think the fix for this is to have the integration drop its reported value to 0 if it doesn't change over a certain period of time, indicating a dropped connection

[wingrunr21]

Unless it's a sticky MQTT message, that's not how the underlying code works. it's querying the meter at an interval and converting the IEEE2030.5 XML response into MQTT payloads. There's no memory of the last value. It's a transform.

[drako824]

if its unable to get a new value, such as when the meter is offline or even the wifi being down, does its start reporting 0 or does it just keep the same value?
If I turn off my wifi the addon log reports a communication failure, but the "Total Home Power" entity just keeps the last value rather than reporting 0 or an error of some sort, so during a blackout when the meter has no power to run its wifi to be queried the value reported for demand just stays at the last value reported before the blackout.

[wingrunr21]

Are you seeing repeated statistics or just the last reported statistic? I haven't seen this behavior on my meter and I've done quite a bit of work on the raw stats being sent. I don't get data reported when the meter can't be communicated with.

[drako824]

just the last reported statistic, I think. but i suspect the energy dashboard doesn't check if the statistic is stale,
note this isn't a problem for me, I only have a few min of UPS not a whole home backup., I'm just trying to explain what I think happened to mitrules.
during a blackout his backup shouldn't be backfeeding into the grid, so there would be no power at all to the meter
as I said I think the only thing that could be done about this is to change the addon to report 0 power when there is a communication error, or unavailable, I think thats what ZHA reports when my smart plug is offline