This thread has a lot of comments. What I am seeing are numerous opinions, speculations and theories. What I need to see is data, testing and documentation (with diagrams). I am not saying anyone is incorrect with their statements, just that I would prefer for all this discussion to be backed-up with hard data results and testing by the SENSE support team.
@kevin1 makes a good point about brown-outs. What we typically experience is a power outage that is followed up with several other brief power outages. I’m guessing that the power company is rerouting power when all this occurs. By delaying the SENSE monitor reboot, I avoid all the additional power surges that occur when the power is restored. If the problem is a brown-out, then my relay will drop the power input connection until full voltage is restored.
I also have SmartThings installed at my home. I don’t have to manually reset any breakers or manually intervene on SmartThings behalf. It always successfully reboots and connects to the internet without my help. I live in Texas near the coast where hurricanes are always interrupting power. We have short outages and long outages. A UPS may solve the problem of a brief power outage, but that still doesn’t address long power outages.
What I have asked the SENSE software team to develop is a feature that allows each customer to set their own value that delays the WiFi reconnect process (‘no delay’ to 99-minutes). That allows the internet to be fully functional before SENSE attempts to reconnect. If the SENSE data is being stored for 6 hours, then a delay of 10-minutes before restarting the WiFi connection should not be a problem.
@RyanAtSense - This is the reply I received from ‘Support’. None of this information is documented on your website.
Ticket # 66962
Julia (Sense)
Feb 14, 2018 16:10 EST
Good Afternoon,
Thank you for your patience. Unfortunately, this issue you have been experiencing is a known issue that we are currently working hard to address. Due to this issue, Sense is unable to reconnect to a network when it loses connection due to a power failure. At this time, only a reboot of the Sense monitor will allow it to reconnect to the network.
Regarding the use of phones to reconnect Sense, Sense requires a Bluetooth connection to tether to the phone. Sense only enables its Bluetooth connection during the first 15 minutes of being powered on. As it should be connected to WiFi after that point, Sense shuts the Bluetooth connection completely off. Pressing the WiFi button from the Settings Menu sends a ping to the monitor to enable the Bluetooth, but if the monitor is offline at the time, it cannot receive this ping. As this is the case, you would need to manually reboot the monitor to bring Sense back online.
To answer your specific questions, when Sense drops offline, it will automatically try to reconnect around every 10 seconds, increasing in time by double of the previous attempt, until it reaches 5 minutes per attempt. There is an internal log file in the Sense monitor that records these attempts, but these are unavailable to the user. While I am unable to provide an exact number for the amount of attempts the Monitor will make in each time interval, or the total number of attempts, I hope that this additional information helps in understanding Sense’s reconnection process. We are currently working on a reliable solution for these issues, and will be sure to let you know when this is available.
About the offline monitor notification, the Sense servers perform the check for offline monitors every hour for monitors that have been offline for at least 30 minutes. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the individual Sense user to set custom time intervals to check the status of their monitor. Theoretically, it can take up to 1 hour and 29 minutes before an alert is triggered, but it will more often then not be much sooner than this.
As the issue you are experiencing is an due to an error in Sense’s network chip itself, rather than the speed of your network, the two suggestions you have provided will not resolve the issue or allow Sense to reconnect without manually rebooting the monitor. One possible way to avoid issues with your network is to try attaching an uninterruptible power supply to Sense, but even with this we cannot guarantee that Sense will be able to reconnect without manual intervention following a power outage.