Sorry that you experienced that, ddutta07.
Yes, it’s possible that a Wi-Fi connection timeout after the brownout is causing some of these outages.
Ben - in my case, my entire local network has a few hours of battery backup so the brief outages or surges I experience aren’t due to a wifi disruption.
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Thanks for letting me know! I’ll pass that along.
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Sense needed another reboot after a brownout. Lost a day or so since I didn’t know about it.
Like dgreen everything network wise is on battery backup…
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Currently my location is in the middle of a heat wave with frequent brownouts. I had my father put his router/modem on a UPS to further rule that out.
We both lost our sense devices in the last brownout with no network issues.
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Hi @BenAtSense and other interested parties,
I’ve had a completely reliable Sense connection since mid-Jan, without any dropouts or issues. Then suddenly in the past two days I’ve had my Sense go offline twice without any brownout or power outage. What happened ??
I’m fortunate to have some monitoring of devices on my intranet and spotted something suspicious. The IP address of my Sense changed twice in the the past two days after being the same for 159 days in a row ! Why ? Because my son was tweaking our home router to enable port forwarding of a couple of games, then for some reason, the router was not able to allocate the same IP address for the Sense when it reset. It looks like the Sense and data servers can’t maintain the app session or initiate another app session once the private intranet IP address has changed.
A reboot of the Sense hardware via the circuit breaker eventually fixed things each time and very little data was actually lost. But this is clearly one mode of connection failure.
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Thanks Kevin. This is really great information. I’ve passed it along to our engineering team!
Any update on this issue? I had a brief power outage last night and had to cycle the breaker that Sense is on to restore connectivity as it was offline for 7 hours. Network never went down as it is on an UPS. I didn’t see any indicator lights on the unit nor heard any beep after it was powered back on. Too bad that the buffer is lost when you have to power cycle the unit 
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Sorry that happened, Jeff. It seems like there may be a few causes of these outages. Investigating the root causes unfortunately have taken a while.
We are planning on working on a notification for when a monitor offline goes offline as that will at least help prevent a data gap. I don’t currently have a specific timeline for that, but it is on our radar.
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When SmartThings goes offline, you get a push notification (“your hub is offline”). Something like that would be excellent!
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I know y’all have a lot on your plate.
But what’s the status of this issue? Thanks
(No led pre-reboot)
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@joshuawingate, we’re doing some hardware testing around this issue to help narrow things down. In the mean time, we’re working on an offline monitor notification, that we hope to release in the near future (early fall)
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I made my own “offline” notification by setting a custom on my fridge. If that hasn’t run for an hour either I have a problem with my fridge or the monitor. One is more likely than the other.
Will the notification still trigger though if the sense really doesn’t have internet connectivity? I would assume that for the app do handle that it would need to run constantly in the background on your mobile device and periodically sending/receiving keep-alives to/from the monitor. So I guess the question is, are the notifications processed via the app, since it does have background refresh, or pushed from the monitor itself – my guess would be the latter.
I would assume neither and that it will be a watchdog running in the cloud. I assume like most watchdogs, it would ping the Sense every X time units, and after Y unsuccessful pings, the cloud would then push a notification to the Sense App alerting you to the possible outage. That covers internet or power outage as in either case, it means the sense isn’t connected to the cloud. I don’t believe that the Sense and the Sense app are communicating directly as this would require something like a WebRTC connection, and the app loads too quickly to be opening that connection each time you open the app.
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Yeah, I forgot that the monitor does not have a direct connection to the app (outside of initial setup) but instead uploads all data to Sense’s AWS Cloud instance.
Hmm… was flipping breakers to try and see if an unknown device would go off-line and accidentally power-cycled my WiFi router. Now I can’t get Sense to connect to the WiFi. It can see the network, and I can input the WiFi password, but then it fails to bind. I tried powering off Sense, and then power cycling the WiFi router and cable modem, followed by restoring power to Sense, but nothing. It just sits there blinking orange. I noticed that when I installed it the first time, this step of binding to the network took absurdly long (2-3 minutes). Nothing I’ve tried has reconnected the device. I should add that the Sense box is continuing to blink orange at the moment.
Sorry to hear that @claran. Have you gotten that cleared up? In the future, best to reach out to support@sense.com if you’re having an issue like that so they can dive right in.
I’ve now joined the crowd of having Sense go offline. Was not in the mood to troubleshoot it’s current state, so just flipped the breaker to reset and it’s back.
Yeah, Brian in support has been dialoging with me.
Ciarán…
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