I was in Florida when I got the alert. My house, it said, was in danger of catching fire due to an electrical problem. Not news I wanted to receive while 1400 miles away from home. Ting, an internet-connected device plugged into an outlet, detected a problem. Whisker Labs was reaching out to warn me.
I called Whisker Labs and was told their heuristics were detecting a floating neutral. The representative was insistent that 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. Upon informing Whisker Labs, they doubled down, insisting there was an issue.
Ting provides real-time monitoring and a history packaged in an app on my phone. Looking at the history, the voltage plot was variable but consistently within range, both high and low. I didn’t know what it should look like, but being in range made me think it was okay. I called the utility again. Again, the crew did their tests and deemed everything good, this time more aggressively stating that I was wasting their time. Whisker Labs was having none of it. Insistent that I had an issue, 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 inspect the overhead line visually. With binoculars in hand, we walked from the termination at the house toward the power pole on 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 dangling 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, internet-connected device detected what trained crews couldn’t. A flyer from my insurance company was the first time I’d heard of Whisker Labs or their product, Ting. My insurance company would give me one. Free was compelling, but it also set expectations low. I wanted to learn how Ting works and why my insurance company was giving them away.
Checking the statistics on house fires was illuminating. Cooking is the number one cause of fires, accounting for 44% of home fires. They lead to around 500 deaths per year.. Electrical fires account for only about 15% of all house fires, but they are responsible for about 500 deaths. About the same as the far more prevalent cooking fires. The reason given is that cooking fires are generally attended. Electrical fires from shorts and arcing occur silently in the walls, undetected until a fire breaks out.
Whisker Labs provides information and testing data on its website. I also reached out to the company when some questions persisted, even after I scoured their site. I interviewed Bob Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Whisker Labs. The inspiration for Ting came from a family tragedy, the loss of a home to an electrical fire. Bob was working in lightning detection, the mother of all earthly arcing events. He challenged his team to detect arcing events in home wiring. It they could, it would prevent one of the major causes of house fires. Bob said, “We were on the wrong side of the impossible line for a long time”. Eventually, they had a prototype that would detect arcing anywhere within a house. Ting is a small, unassuming device that plugs into any outlet. It has no controls, only an indicator light that says it is on. Unlike a smoke or CO monitor, there is no test button.
Bob terms Ting a “super-sophisticated power quality analyzer.” It samples at 30 MHz because it is the frequency of arcing. I asked Bob how a device that sits on only one leg of the supplied power warns about events occurring on both legs. “That is the trick,” he said. “We wouldn’t have a product if it didn’t work for both legs.” Above 10 MHz, according to Bob, Ting receives signals from any event. Arcing is a signal source, a bit like a radio transmitter. Heinrich Hertz’s experiments proving the existence of electromagnetic waves relied upon a spark gap transmitter. Hertz intentionally made sparks to generate signals. Ting listens for unintended signals. The signal from the arcs radiates throughout the house wiring. Ting picks it up from a distance, across different circuits, and different legs. As we’ll see soon, it can also detect faults outside the home.
There are warnings in the Ting manual about noisy power. If there is a noisy load on the circuit with Ting, the signal-to-noise ratio can be degraded. The data center will detect such conditions, and the app will notify you. Moving Ting to a different circuit is required for less than 5% of all installations.
In many jurisdictions, arc fault breakers are required for new construction. I asked Bob about whether Ting was redundant when arc fault breakers were present. The simple answer is they are complementary. Ting detects small arcs well before they would trip an AFCI. It also detects faults outside the home, as I experienced. AFCIs can’t do that.
Ting sits on my wall and monitors at 30 MHz, reporting back to the mother ship what it is seeing. The action takes place in Whisker Labs’ data centers. When Ting detects a fault, Whisker Labs calls it a “save”. Most are arcing, small arcs caused by a loose connection. My case is less common. In testing, the machine learning algorithms employed demonstrated they could detect floating neutrals. In the couple of years they’ve been on the market, they’ve identified about 5000 floating neutrals like mine. Ting sensors have now been distributed to over a million homes, identifying 25 saves a day, over 9000 per year. Their analysis suggests that it can prevent over 80% of electrical fires in homes equipped with Ting. 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.
I probed Bob about false alarms. He indicated it was a big concern as they rolled out the product, but it hasn’t proven to be an issue. Over 99 percent of the time, if a fault is detected, it is real. Being curious about my experience, I asked about both the response from the utility and what happens when they pay to send an electrician. They are working to partner with utilities to illustrate the benefits of Ting better. Until there is better understanding among utilities, skepticism will persist. Bob wouldn’t say electricians they sent found issues 100% of the time, but he said he couldn’t recall examples where nothing was found. He is confident in Ting’s capabilities.
Bob is also excited by new capabilities being realized. 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.” Whisker Labs proved and continues to prove that wrong. Now that they are collecting a lot of data, they’re finding many innovative ways to use it. They have now built a large, likely the largest, grid monitoring system anywhere. They continue to evolve their algorithms, both in their software centers and the software that is updated quarterly on Ting.
A phone alert illustrates one benefit of the grid monitoring network Whisker Labs constructed. I was away from home. At 8:57 PM, I received the alert: “Ting detected a Community Power Outage… This outage was also experienced by 25 Ting homes in your area.” The neighborhood texts started flying. “We just lost power. Did you?” Thanks to Ting, I already knew it was a community event. I also got an alert 2 hours later when the power was restored. None of these alerts came directly from my Ting. In a power outage, it wouldn’t work. The alerts are only possible because my Ting and other Tings in my area all report in regularly to Whisker Labs. The distributed network of sensors and a common data center give Whisker Labs insights.
Bob shared one very exciting aspect of having a distributed sensor network. They’ve analyzed their data around the start of the recent, devastating Eaton Fire. Using video footage, they were able to show their network detected arcing events concurrent with the start of the fire. Sensors as far away as Salt Lake City were signaling grid stress. The network of Ting sensors gives utilities something they don’t have today: a way to identify grid stress. In areas where wildfires are a concern, the network may one day provide direct measurement of the impact of winds and other forces on the grid. It can provide signals to trigger power safety shutdown events in high-risk areas.
Ting is a device born out of tragedy. It’s a brilliant idea that saves homes and lives. 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. I’m still amazed that a little device plugged into the wall detected a dangerous electrical fault at my house. Talking with Bob, I became more excited by what Ting offers. A network of Tings may one day prevent devastating fires, like the ones that just struck California. It is a great innovation story.
