You’ve signed up online for your CarePenguin subscription, you’ve received your sensor in the mail, you’ve downloaded the app, you’ve installed the sensor in your loved one’s house…now what? How do you know if it’s working correctly and what should your CarePenguin data look like?
Tips to get the most accurate data
To get the best data of water usage events (activity) attach the CarePenguin sensor on the hot water pipe output from the water heater, but remember to attach it as far away from the water heater as possible on that pipe, but before it starts branching off to other areas of the house.
What your CarePenguin data should look like
After you’ve installed the sensor, give it about 30 minutes to start detecting water usage events. Water usage events are displayed on the sensor screen by blue bars on a bar graph. The bar graph shows the number of water usage events in each hour of the day. If you switch the toggle to “Analysis,” you will see the temperature of the pipe itself. Water usage events are displayed on this graph as green lines or spikes in temperature, indicating that someone turned on a faucet, requesting hot water, and the temperature of that pipe spiked up.
Here is what an average day of activity should look like in the CarePenguin app.
What your CarePenguin data should NOT look like
CarePenguin is NOT compatible with water heaters with recirculation pumps or on-demand water heaters with a recirculation pump activated. If you’re unsure of what those are or if you have one, check out these blogs…
CarePenguin and Hot Water Recirculation Systems
Will CarePenguin Work with Tankless / On-Demand Water Heaters?
If there is a recirculation pump on the water heater, your CarePenguin data will either show a saw-tooth pattern of constant increase and decrease in temperature or it will show a constant line of high temperature. Here is what you don’t want your CarePenguin data to look like:
As highlighted in this blog about tankless systems, if you do have a tankless/on-demand water heater with a recirculation pump activated, you can actually deactivate it, and it will work with CarePenguin just fine. There’s also a lot of perks to turning off your recirculation pump, including saving energy.
Set up Activity Zones to receive alerts
Once your CarePenguin sensor is installed and the data is looking good, take a minute to set up “Activity Zones” located in the three dots in the top right corner of the location card. Activity Zones are set for times of the day when you think your loved one will be active such as waking up, lunchtime, and dinnertime. During these times, CarePenguin “watches” for water usage events, and if there is a lack of activity, we notify you, encouraging you to check in. We recommend setting up two or three activity zones for the day that are at least two hours long to get the best results. More details on Activity Zones and alerting here.
Once you get the sensor and the app set up, you should find it to be intuitive and easy to use! But if you need any help, just email help@carepenguin.com and you should hear back soon.