Ting Electrical System Protection plugin Device

[infinity]

Has anyone heard about these devices? They claim to be able to monitor your electrical system by plugging in the device to a receptacle and monitor through an app.

How Ting Works

Ting is designed to smartly identify unique signals generated by tiny electrical arcs, the most common precursors to imminent fire risks.

www.tingfire.com

 

[synchro]

Has anyone heard about these devices? They claim to be able to monitor your electrical system by plugging in the device to a receptacle and monitor through an app.

How Ting Works

Ting is designed to smartly identify unique signals generated by tiny electrical arcs, the most common precursors to imminent fire risks.

www.tingfire.com

There were a few earlier threads about the same Ting (pun intended).
For example:
https://forums.mikeholt.com/threads/ting-electrical-system-monitor.2567272/

It would be interesting if anyone has any updates about it.

 

[don_resqcapt19]

I think it is 100% snake oil and data harvesting....but one major insurance company has bought into this device.

 

[electrofelon]

It is certainly very plausible and reasonable that a device could pick up severe arcing events - but note the word "severe". Obviously at the "small" level we get into AFCI type stuff and clearly those seem to be having great difficulty at differentiating these from non-issues or intended arcing. BUT without a current sensor and just relying on voltage seems to be very very limiting.

 

[texie]

Has anyone heard about these devices? They claim to be able to monitor your electrical system by plugging in the device to a receptacle and monitor through an app.

How Ting Works

Ting is designed to smartly identify unique signals generated by tiny electrical arcs, the most common precursors to imminent fire risks.

www.tingfire.com

Also see this thread: https://forums.mikeholt.com/threads/ting-arc-fault-device.2574896/#post-2879036

 

[ggunn]

Has anyone heard about these devices? They claim to be able to monitor your electrical system by plugging in the device to a receptacle and monitor through an app.

How Ting Works

Ting is designed to smartly identify unique signals generated by tiny electrical arcs, the most common precursors to imminent fire risks.

www.tingfire.com

Snake oil, IMNSHO.

 

[infinity]

It is certainly very plausible and reasonable that a device could pick up severe arcing events - but note the word "severe". Obviously at the "small" level we get into AFCI type stuff and clearly those seem to be having great difficulty at differentiating these from non-issues or intended arcing. BUT without a current sensor and just relying on voltage seems to be very very limiting.

Yeah are talking about a device that just plugs into the wall in a receptacle. How that will monitor the entire electrical system of a house is beyond me.

 

[electrofelon]

Yeah are talking about a device that just plugs into the wall in a receptacle. How that will monitor the entire electrical system of a house is beyond me.

There are home energy monitors, such as "sense", that have CT's around the mains and they can actually identify individual appliances by their electro signature, and things they don't get you can "teach" it. So yeah it is very plausible it could identify unknown things which might be problems - but yeah without CT's I don't buy it at all, no way get real.

 

[__dan]

Electrical arcing can be expected to contain broad spectrum noise. That is sinewaves all the way through the AM radio band and possibly more. That means it is a very easy job to sit on the bus and 'listen' for characteristic high frequency noise just as a radio receiver does, by filtering for a narrow sinewave target and amplifying. Japanese transistor radios used to be $9.

I would guess the same principle is at work. Listening for a radio frequency sinewave, characteristic noise, and alarming.

The fine print.

"When purchasing here online from us, the service is $49 annually after the first year; you will receive an email reminder regarding the need to renew as your service anniversary nears. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO RENEW SERVICE AND WILL NOT BE BILLED if you receive Ting for free through your insurance company."

This is where the money is made, the annual monitoring fee. Likely it has to connect to the cloud and then call you from there so it may not work as a standalone device with no annual service fee. That would be the business model.

Note their marketing story "the lights blinked but we did not know what that was", "but the Ting device told me there was a problem". Huge market for idiot customers who don't know the lights blinking is a problem.

What is cannot detect or the false positives would be huge. Claiming to protect against would be false advertising. Claiming to detect something sometimes would be true.

The insurance company tie in would only prove the insurer is an idiot also. But then there's the backdoor undocumented monitoring. It ties in to the cloud and reports your data, what else does it collect. One of the big business models is collecting and reselling customer data.

It is primarily a spyware device and the big money is made on the cloud data service fee, which may be necessary for any functioning at all. Would be a hard product to sell if the advertising depended on all true and extensive statements. Pay us to spy on you and also, we may detect your lights blinking. And if you don't know blinking lights is a problem, we have you covered for that.

 

[ggunn]

This is where the money is made, the annual monitoring fee. Likely it has to connect to the cloud and then call you from there so it may not work as a standalone device with no annual service fee. That would be the business model.

Sort of like printers where the printers themselves are cheap but they get to you with the ink/toner.

 

[ramsy]

Listening for a radio frequency sinewave, characteristic noise

Good explanation why AFCI's can trip from noise in all directions, including LED dimmers on unrelated circuits.

Also seen OBCD's trip from utility excursions, and power lines blowing in the wind.

This is where the money is made, the annual monitoring fee.

How useful can monitoring be without differentiating upstream from downstream signatures?

In the absence of experienced technicians, doing that requires a time domain reflectometer (TDR), which cost thousand$ as a stand alone instrument.

 

[__dan]

How useful can monitoring be without differentiating upstream from downstream signatures?

In a quick read of their ad, they do not claim to be useful.

It all points to just signing up zombie customers for the annual subscription fee. People who will pay the bill even after the house burns down (they forget what that bill is for or does).

I would guess they tune away from false positives rather than going for highly sensitive detecting all sorts of stuff going on. They not claiming to know when your fridge runs all the time and you need a new one. Just that if your lights blink, they'll tell you that is a problem with your electrical.

In a total flying guess, I would also guess the insurance company tie in is also a marketing gimmick. They probably signed up one with some backdoor sweetheart deal just to claim the insurer's stamp of approval, regardless of the actual contract details. They could have offered a free trial run just to get in the door. I doubt the insurer pays a dime for the gimmick device. They get the deal in exchange for the insurer appearing in their ads (did not see the insurer named, just "ask your insurer if they participate). They're willing to seed the market with a few free devices.

 

[don_resqcapt19]

In a quick read of their ad, they do not claim to be useful.

It all points to just signing up zombie customers for the annual subscription fee. People who will pay the bill even after the house burns down (they forget what that bill is for or does).

I would guess they tune away from false positives rather than going for highly sensitive detecting all sorts of stuff going on. They not claiming to know when your fridge runs all the time and you need a new one. Just that if your lights blink, they'll tell you that is a problem with your electrical.

In a total flying guess, I would also guess the insurance company tie in is also a marketing gimmick. They probably signed up one with some backdoor sweetheart deal just to claim the insurer's stamp of approval, regardless of the actual contract details. They could have offered a free trial run just to get in the door. I doubt the insurer pays a dime for the gimmick device. They get the deal in exchange for the insurer appearing in their ads (did not see the insurer named, just "ask your insurer if they participate). They're willing to seed the market with a few free devices.

I would assume some fast talking marketing guy convinced the insurance company executives that this would save them on payouts.

I am aware of something like that where a major industrial company in the US was sold some snake oil energy savings equipment. One of the items they were sold and that I installed was a device that was said to change the spin of the electrons and reduce the motor current. We installed it at the motor like you would do for a motor power factor correction capacitor....I asked the energy saving company what I had to do with the motor overloads as I assumed if it saved energy it would reduce the current...he told me it does not reduce the current. The industrial company had me install power monitoring on that motor and we could not see any reduction in power usage.

 

[texie]

I'll restate my comments from the previous thread on this:
In addition to my previous comments, I have to wonder why an insurance company would be involved in this given that the physics of this are some what questionable and this is not a the kind of thing that most would buy into with their own money. If this device is so great, why is it not something everyone is clamoring to buy at the local big box store or Amazon? And given that the insurers bean counters would want some tangible evidence of the value in this, it makes me wonder what the interest really is for State Farm.
There must be something here that I don't get.

 

[retirede]

I'll restate my comments from the previous thread on this:
In addition to my previous comments, I have to wonder why an insurance company would be involved in this given that the physics of this are some what questionable and this is not a the kind of thing that most would buy into with their own money. If this device is so great, why is it not something everyone is clamoring to buy at the local big box store or Amazon? And given that the insurers bean counters would want some tangible evidence of the value in this, it makes me wonder what the interest really is for State Farm.
There must be something here that I don't get.

I suspect the insurance company gets a cut of the subscription revenue?

 

[jim dungar]

I have State Farm insurance, they have never told me about this Ting device.
Maybe it is a regional or state thing as well. Could be they use it more for 'recovery from a wide area voltage loss' monitoring as tool to go back to utilities with evidence

 

[__dan]

Electricians see quite a few failed hot connections on main service equipment, meter sockets and main breakers. Before they fail they typically run hot, hot enough to nearly burn your touching the panel door when it's closed looking for heating. I learned that early on, touch the panel door with it closed, first, to see if that runs hot. On occasion they do.

Usual trouble call is the customer's bill is 3 or 4 times normal.

I would guess that's I^2R loss without arcing mostly, 60 Hz sinewave and not something Ting would claim to detect. Usual call is high bill but not the lights blinking, with some bad neutral utility connections on occasion.

Utility would get the call and test it with their "beast of burden" and it would pass that. You would think they have a better quality engineered (solution, detection tool).

Back to square 1. If it was a onetime purchase standalone device for the $99., over a base of 1 million installs I am sure it would detect something. That would be 99 million in sales. If it does not function without the subscription fee or insurance promo deal, my opinion would be that the customer has to train the company to produce what they want, and to decline the spyware subscription service that is what they actually offer.

It is the customer's responsibility to train the market producers by declining the bad offers. it probably works on the same tech chips as arc fault breakers, meaning the chips inside are already mass produced at very low additional cost. It is at heart a very cheap device to put into production and to market. The cloud service is all expensive fluff. Possibly, because of the business model, the subscription fee, it may need that fluff to work.

That is the problem. It is at heart a good cheap device that could be useful over a large install base for detecting some problems that do happen. Over a sample of 1 million users it will see some problems. Using it as a backdoor way to sell a spyware subscription service is something to be denounced.

 

[bschlosser]

I'll restate my comments from the previous thread on this:
In addition to my previous comments, I have to wonder why an insurance company would be involved in this given that the physics of this are some what questionable and this is not a the kind of thing that most would buy into with their own money. If this device is so great, why is it not something everyone is clamoring to buy at the local big box store or Amazon? And given that the insurers bean counters would want some tangible evidence of the value in this, it makes me wonder what the interest really is for State Farm.
There must be something here that I don't get.

My take on this is it is similar to the OBD2 sensors that auto companies are using in vehicles to gather data on driving habits. More data equals better statistical models for their actuaries to set insurance rates. The Ting privacy policy states it shares anonymous data with third party partners. I take this as they are sharing data with insurance companies which would include at a minimum your location, voltage levels, and any events like voltage spikes or fluctuations during storms. All this data can be used to set rates such that your block may be higher than the block over if it is connected to a transformer that has issues.

 

[ggunn]

I have State Farm insurance, they have never told me about this Ting device.
Maybe it is a regional or state thing as well. Could be they use it more for 'recovery from a wide area voltage loss' monitoring as tool to go back to utilities with evidence

Why should anyone believe them when they make the claim that insurance companies are endorsing their "product" when their claims about what it does are so obviously fraudulent?