My sensor is offline. What can I do?

There are several reasons why a sensor may suddenly look offline. Here are some of the most common ones with tips on how to fix it.

Range issues

There are two main indicators that will tell you that your sensor is either too far away from your gateway, or it's being blocked by too many obstacles.

The first indicator is the wireless signal on your sensor card. If you only see one little painted line at the base of the wireless indicator on your card, that means your sensor may be having issues finding your gateway signal.

The second indicator is the way your graph looks. The screenshot below is typical example of a sensor that is having issues connecting to a gateway. In order to get this view, go into the Analytics tab for the sensor you are interested in, pick No aggregation and check the Show Dots box. This will show you all the readings your sensor is sending. A sensor with a good signal will show so many dots, so close together, that they will look like a thick, uninterrupted line.

How to solve range issues

There are only so many ways to improve range issues:

1. Move your sensor closer to the gateway.
2. Move the gateway or sensor to a place where obstacles between the equipment will be minimized. Remember that floors are sometimes less dense than consecutive stacks of mobile storage, so some customers find that putting a gateway directly above a group of sensors on a different floor is better than trying to keep the gateway on the same floor. Other obstacles that we have seen to interfere are fire doors that open and close or elevators that move up and down shafts and stop at the exact worst possible place. Look for gaps in your data that match up with certain movements of your furniture or infrastructure, and you may have a culprit.
3. Maybe you just need another gateway. Sometimes, buildings are set out in such a way that no rearranging of your equipment will help you reach certain areas. In that case, reach out to us to see how we can help you.

Battery issues

Battery is running out

While our sensors have been designed to last until they are due for subscription renewal, there have been certain cases, especially with some of our older sensors (with serial numbers roughly around c001200-c001600) where the sensor was using up batteries more than normal.

How to identify battery running out issues

Fortunately, it is possible to see what a battery running out looks like. In your analytics tab for the graph for the problematic sensor, select No aggregation and in the checkboxes below that, check the box that says Show dots. This view will allow you to see every single reading taken as a small dot in your graph.

When batteries start to go, you will see that your dots used to be very close together, almost showing as a continuous line and, slowly, they start getting further and further apart from each other until there are noticeable gaps.

Here are some other screenshots of graphs taken from real data that show batteries dying out.

If you notice that you are having battery issues, you may buy your own replacement batteries, or you can open up a support ticket with us, and we will get them for you at no extra cost. It just depends on whether you are in a hurry or not.

Battery is the wrong way around

In some rare cases with our newest batch of sensors (serial numbers starting with c006--), the batteries have been put in the wrong way around. Some customers trying hard resets have noticed that misbehaving sensors had batteries facing the wrong way.

There is also a chance that someone performed a hard reset and accidentally put batteries in the wrong way round. Please check to make sure your batteries are facing the correct orientation based on the sensor version.

Sensor just needs a reset

Sometimes, a sensor just needs a little reset to get going again. If you know you are not having range or dying battery issues, try a soft reset. If the soft reset doesn't work, you may try a hard reset.