Can Sense store data during a network outage?

Technical Questions
1

We recently had a looooong network outage, around 24hrs straight of no internet access. Obviously Sense was offline (according to the app) during this period. I was hoping that Sense would store the data during that period and sync it all as soon as the ISP fixed the connection, but unfortunately it did not, and we have a large gap in our data now. My concern is that this now throws off our ability to predict future power bills, total solar credits gained over the year, and so forth. I know I could connect Sense to a dedicated 3G/4G hotspot, but I donā€™t think thatā€™s worth the expense long term.

Iā€™m curious if Sense has the ability to store data for a certain period of time, and if not, has anyone else come up with a solution for this? For example, could Sense push data to some other location on my LAN even if the internet connection is down?

My only fallback source of connectivity is the 4G hotspot on my phone, which I donā€™t have Sense connected to. A small hack on that front - if I set my 4G hotspot to have the same WIFI SSID and password as my home WIFI network, would Sense connect and continue syncing data normally during an ISP outage?

2

Please see this article: https://help.sense.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022456993-What-happens-if-Sense-loses-Wi-Fi-connection-

If Sense is unable to reconnect, the monitor can hold at least six hours of device-specific, per-second data. After that space is exhausted, the data may be lost, but the monitor will try to preserve per-minute data for whole home consumption and solar production for a minimum of three months.

Note that in cases where multiple power outages occur while Sense is disconnected from Wi-Fi, further data loss can occur.

3

Hmm, so based on that article it seems like my whole home data (solar production and total consumption) should have been retained? Thatā€™s all I really care about, so it would be great if that worked. It doesnā€™t seem like that happened in this case, as days later that section of my ā€˜trendsā€™ page is still blank.

Also, to be clear, my WIFI network and LAN were still active this whole time, only the Gateway (connection to ISP) was inactive.

4

Is it possible you had a power outage or brownout during this time? That will clear the memory. Note the line:

1 Like
5

No power outage, only a network outage. I have Google WIFI, so it would have told me if the APs went offline at all, which they didnā€™t. Only the gateway was down.

I wonder if Sense was still sending the data to your servers, but Sense never knew that the packets were being dropped, so it never knew that the gateway was down? Does Sense wait for a handshake with your servers before sending data?

6

Iā€™ve lost data from a power ā€œflickerā€.
The outage was so brief that none of the clocks were reset but was just enough for Sense to lose data.
Iā€™ve also had Sense store well more than six hours of data and catch-up later.

7

If you didnā€™t experience a power outage concurrent with this, then something does sound off. If you write into the Support team, they can take a look. https://sense.com/contact

8

Thanks, will do.

9

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