Ting Sensor, apparently they predict electrical fires?! Anyone use one?

[rwgast_lowlevellogicdesin]

I just read this article a few minutes ago

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/smart-home/the-99-gadget-that-prevents-electrical-fires-by-doing-nothing/

I had never hear of this thing, apparently there data was usefull in Hawaii fire, and a major outage in spain. Im not sure if they have a bunch of people testing them for free to collect all this data or what? To me it just looks like a power monitor with a web app. As an electrician and fire alarm tech I would like to know more about how its built and how you can "predict" an electrical fire. Seems like a cool idea, maybe even a niche enough product for a small entrepreneur to break in to.

I had put some thought a while back in to using something like a few cheap Panasonic Grid Eye installed in a panel door to monitor temperature changes in breakers..

[Stray Electron]

  It looks like it monitors your house's line voltage and reports every time that there is voltage drop due to anything in the house turning on. Which is pretty much any time of the day or night!  But it looks like they're claiming that they can some how predict fires with that data.  I suppose that they're only talking about electrical fires here but they insinuate any kind of fire! So that narrows down it's usefulness considerably to start with!

   But to me the problem would be how do you tell the difference from an intentional electrical load "due to a print head coming" (his example) in the middle of the night or from an electrical fault. And believe me I've seen plenty of faults in electrical wiring that weren't heavy enough that they didn't even tripped the breaker, so I don't think their monitor could tell the difference either.

  I think that it's theoretically possible that this might catch some electrical faults and report them in time that someone might catch it in time and they might prevent a fire but IMO the odds are very, very, very remote!   I think this is more about convincing a lot of people to buy a cheap device and then pay a never-ending monthly monitoring fee than a useful application.  And it doesn't prevent fires!  It only monitors conditions where it thinks a fire could start and then reports it to the home owner and it's up to them to physically check and determine if there is a dangerous condition.  Yeah, like that's likely to happen after the fifth false report!

   Just to start with the critiques, houses in the US are supplied with TWO 110 VAC circuits (the outputs of a center tapped 220 VAC transformer) not one so a single monitor would only monitor half of the circuits in the house!  Actually even less than half since a lot of the larger appliances are powered directly by 220 VAC. 

   Invest your money in a couple of good smoke detectors and and in a Carbon Monoxide detector!

   Anything published by Ziff Davis (the one time publisher of Popular Electronics) ceased being honest or useful about 45 years ago!

[rwgast_lowlevellogicdesin]

I had the same thought about the two 120vac phases being split. Also if the graph did show a pattern of obvious faults/arcs there is no way to figure out what the device causing the issue is besides correlating it in the time domain, this couldnt even tell you what circuit the fault is on. This is litterally a killa watt with a graphing app minus the ability to monitor a single device pluged in.

[themadhippy]

This is litterally a killa watt with a graphing app minus the ability to monitor a single device pluged in.

with an added afdd by the sounds of it

It looks for indications of electrical arcing events,

[rwgast_lowlevellogicdesin]

Butt in order to monitor all arc faults you would need two, plugged in to breakers attached to opposite phases in the panel? And what about phase to phase issues?

[mikerj]

  It looks like it monitors your house's line voltage and reports every time that there is voltage drop due to anything in the house turning on.

Its looking for arcing according to the article, but everything else you said is quite true.  I suppose it's possible that it could prevent a fire if app was working, the owner's phone has internet connectivity, they pay attention to the notification and most importantly act on it, but it doesn't give the safety of a proper AFDD.

I also wonder how many domestic fires are caused by actual arcing as opposed to high resistance connections that get hot.

[ConKbot]

I wouldn't be surprised to find "we harvest your power usage information, feed it to an AI model to correlate your activities during the day, and sell that to anyone willing to pay" in the fine print.

[indeterminate]

Why not just do it properly and install arc fault detection devices in your switch board
 https://www.clipsal.com/arc-fault-detection-devices

[chasnc]

Why not just do it properly and install arc fault detection devices in your switch board
 https://www.clipsal.com/arc-fault-detection-devices

I was just about to write the same thing. In the US, we are required by electrical code to use an AFCI (arc fault circuit interrupter) breaker for most circuits and a GFCI outlet in bathrooms and kitchens, and in all outdoor locations. Both of these devices can be a PITA because they can trip on electrical noise that the load is making (EX: circular saw), or noise that is entering the home from the grid (your neighbor with an arcing contactor in their HVAC system). The newer ones operate much better though. You can actually by inline filters to help stop these devices from tripping. Kind of nuts.