By Mark Jones
I was in Florida when the alert came telling me my house was in danger of catching fire due to an electrical problem. Not news I wanted to receive while 1,400 miles away from home. An internet-connected device plugged into an outlet detected a problem. Whisker Labs was reaching out to warn me.
A flyer from my insurance company was the first time I’d heard of Whisker Labs or its product, Ting. My insurance company would give me one. Free was compelling, but it also set expectations low.
I called Whisker Labs and was told their heuristics were detecting a floating neutral. The representative was insistent I had an issue. I called my wife and then my utility. The utility, having never heard of Whisker Labs or Ting, seethed with skepticism. A crew took a couple of hours to get to the house, checked everything, and said nothing was wrong. But Whisker Labs doubled down, insisting there was an issue.
Ting provides real-time monitoring and history in an app. In looking at the history, the plot of voltage was variable but consistently in range both high and low. I didn’t know what it should look like, but being in range led me to think it was okay. I called the utility again. Again, the crew did their tests and deemed all was good, more aggressively stating I was wasting their time. Whisker Labs was having none of it. They offered to pay for a certified electrician to check it out. He repeated all the tests I’d watched the utility do, again finding nothing. Before leaving, he said the last thing was to visually inspect the overhead line. With binoculars in hand, we walked from the termination at the house toward the power pole at the street. We didn’t need the binoculars. Close to the street, there was an obvious break in the neutral line. It was completely severed, the ends over a foot apart. My house had a very dangerous floating neutral, exactly what Whisker Labs detected.
I can’t say for certain Whisker Labs saved my wife, me, or my house. I wanted to learn how a tiny little internet-connected device detected what trained crews couldn’t.
I chatted with Bob Marshall, the company’s co-founder and CEO. I experienced what they call a “save.” Most are arcing. My case is less common. The innocuous-looking Ting hanging from an outlet is a “super sophisticated power quality analyzer.” The inspiration came from a family tragedy, the loss of a home to an electrical fire. Marshall was working in lightning detection, the mother of all earthly arcing events. He challenged his team to detect arcing events in home wiring. If they could, it would prevent one of the major causes of house fires. “We were on the wrong side of the impossible line for a long time,” Marshall said.
Eventually, they had a prototype that would detect arcing anywhere within a house. In testing, the machine learning algorithms they employed demonstrated they could detect floating neutrals. In the couple of years they’ve been on the market, they’ve identified about 5,000 floating neutrals like mine. Ting sensors are now in more than a million homes, identifying 25 saves a day. Their analysis points to preventing more than 80% of electrical fires in Ting-equipped homes. It is the reason a growing list of insurance companies are supplying them and why more homeowners are buying them when their insurance companies don’t.
Their little device probes power quality at about 30 MHz, reporting back to the mother ship. They have built what’s likely the largest grid monitoring system anywhere. They continue to evolve their algorithms. I’ve frequently adhered to the adage, “data is like garbage, you better know what you’re going to do with it before you collect it.” They’ve proved that wrong. Now that they are collecting lots of data, they’re finding innovative ways to use it.
The Ting is a device born out of tragedy. Thinking about the small number of ideas that become products and the even smaller number that exceed expectations, I’m happy the folks at Whisker Labs got on the right side of the impossible line.
Filed Under: Commentaries • insights • Technical thinking
