How TimeView calculates hierarchy totals
Why a category, panel, or site total in TimeView isn't always the sum of the items underneath it - and what's really going on when it looks that way.
Written by Shir Goldstein
Updated at July 16th, 2026
Table of Contents
The Short Version
When you select a device, a category, a panel, or your whole site in TimeView, the chart shows a single total for that selection. TimeView does not add up every line underneath what you picked - it follows your site's electrical wiring, so every unit of energy is counted once and never twice.
The number you see is what the metering points for your selection actually measured, not a naive sum of everything listed in the tree below it.
Your Site Is a Hierarchy of Meters
PowerRadar measures energy using sensors (CT clamps - small current sensors clipped around a wire) installed on individual circuits inside your electrical panels. Those circuits roll up into the structure you see in the device tree:
- Site - everything at the location.
- Zone / Panel - a location or a physical electrical panel.
- Category - a grouping by load type, such as AC, Lighting, or Mains.
- Device - a piece of equipment. A device can have several circuits, typically one per phase.
- Circuit / phase - a single measured wire - the actual point where a sensor takes a reading.
Why TimeView Doesn't Add Everything Up
Some circuits sit underneath others in the physical wiring. A main feeder might be metered once, and then a branch off that same feeder metered again further downstream - so the same energy would be measured twice, at two different points, if every reading were added together directly.
Example: An "AC" parent circuit measures 100 kWh for the whole AC system. Sub-meters on three individual AC units underneath it measure 40, 35, and 20 kWh. If TimeView added the parent and all three children together, it would report 195 kWh — but only 100 kWh actually flowed through that part of your site. The 40, 35, and 20 kWh readings are already included inside the 100 kWh.
To make sure every unit of energy is counted exactly once, TimeView includes the top-level metering point for your selection and excludes the sub-meters it already covers.
The Three Rules Behind a Category Total
When you select a category - for example, AC - TimeView decides what to include using three rules:
| The circuit… | What TimeView does |
|---|---|
| Has no parent, or its parent belongs to a different category | Includes it - this is a top-level AC metering point. |
| Sits under an AC parent, but is itself a different category (a non-AC branch fed from the AC feeder) | Subtracts it - so non-AC load riding on the AC feeder isn't wrongly counted as AC. |
| Sits under an AC parent, and is also AC | Skips it - it's already counted by the parent, so including it again would double-count it. |
The same logic applies one level down, to individual devices within a category, and to panels and zones - using their physical location instead of their category.
A Few Special Cases
- Mains. The Mains category is treated as your site's true total. Sub-meters beneath Mains are not subtracted, because the mains sensor already measures everything on that electrical bus.
- Generation. On sites with solar panels or another generation source, exported energy is handled separately from consumption - it isn't mixed into the same total.
Why a Parent Can Read Lower Than Its Children
Because the total follows the physical meters - not the visual layout of the tree - a parent node can legitimately show a smaller number than the items listed underneath it. This is expected behavior, not an error. The most common reasons:
- The top-level metering point only covers part of what the sub-meters cover, because the wiring doesn't perfectly match the logical grouping shown in the tree.
- Some devices are grouped under a category in software but are not physically downstream of that category's meter.
- The parent and child meters sit at different points in the electrical distribution, so their readings don't reconcile exactly.
How Each Metric Is Built
Not every metric is combined the same way when you select a group of devices:
| Metric | How a group value is built |
|---|---|
| Power, Energy, Cost, Carbon | Summed across the included circuits, using the include / subtract / skip rules above. |
| Current | Summed across circuits - which is why it's only available for a single device or phase, not for categories or the whole site. |
| Voltage, Power Factor | Averaged, not summed - these describe the electrical supply itself, so adding them together wouldn't produce a meaningful number. |
Tips
- To see the true total for an area of your site, select its category, panel, or site node directly - don't try to manually add up its children.
- If a parent total looks lower than you expect, check whether some of its children are metered separately or wired outside that parent in the actual electrical system. That usually points to a real metering gap at the site, not a software issue.