So last week we had an event which I’d assumed would be exactly what Sense was made for:
I get a text from my neighbor saying their lights are flickering, their AC shut off, and there’s a loud electrical noise. “Great!” I think and jump to sense to see what’s going on. It’s offline
Fast forward eight hours and our utility get it back online. I spoke to the line worker and they said it was a failed (and very old) connection in the pole.
Hilariously my heat-pump water heater was able to send out a text message to warn me something had gone wrong, but not the device specifically designed to.
Anyway, just wanted to rant. Seems like lack of battery backup and/or tolerance to bad power is a bit of an oversight…
@dukedave ,
Not sure what you wanted out of Sense unless you had a battery backup for your house. Sense traced out pretty much what your house saw, though in arrears (after the incident). And if the outage was fro more than an hour or so, you should have gotten a message from the Sense mothership that your Sense was offline-that’s my biggest indicator of an internet or power outage. Of course some of my IoT devices report in earlier.
Hi @dukedave - Thank you for sharing your story with us.
Sense is an energy monitor. It was designed to measure energy that comes in and uses machine learning to know what is on and when therefore helping you save on your utility bill or gain more insight into what’s going on in your home.
Regarding not receiving notifications, last week we did experience an issue with some users not receiving emails when their Sense monitor was offline. Our team is currently working on a resolution, but please feel free to submit a ticket to our Support team. sense.com/contact
It’s more just an observation: we didn’t lose power completely, it was browning out and it would have been nice if Sense could have detected it and got the message away.
Maybe a dumb question - but was your network online? Even if Sense was able to stay online for a short time, it would need a way to get a message to you. I have a battery backup on my router, modem and any critical network switches, but I don’t know if this is very common.
