Ting maker-Whisker Labs CEO talks smart home tech

February 22, 2024 6:08 AM

Bob Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Whisker Labs, the makers of Ting spoke with Digital Insurance about smart home technology, what a resilient electrical grid looks like and partnering with insurance companies.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you tell me about yourself, your background and how Whisker Labs was started?

I have an engineering background. We started the company several years ago, after my sister-in-law's house burned down from an electrical fire, they lost a pet, they lost everything, it was a terrible fire. I didn't really know anything about electrical fires at that time.

We had some technology from a prior company that I co-founded. I challenged the lead engineers and chief scientist to come up with a product to prevent electrical fires. So we did, and we came up with a product called Ting. It's a super simple plug that the homeowners plug into any outlet but don't let the simplicity of it kind of disguise the fact that it is super sophisticated.

Our business model is partnering with insurance companies. We partner with State Farm Insurance, Nationwide, Liberty Mutual, Erie Insurance, Pure. They basically give our product away for free to their customers to help protect their families and homes. And obviously, we're preventing the claims that they would otherwise incur.

How does Ting work to identify and prevent electrical issues?

We take 30 million electrical measurements every second of every day, we do machine learning and artificial intelligence on the device. It's connected to WiFi, we stream data to the cloud and we do additional machine learning and AI in the cloud.

The primary purpose and the value proposition for insurance companies that we partner with and the homeowners, is preventing home fires. So the thing about this sensor is that it detects electrical problems. We detect a problem in the home. If we need an electrician to come in, if we've detected a problem, you would hear from our fire safety team that we scheduled an electrician. If needed, they would come in and we would find the problem and fix it before it can start a fire.

One sensor monitors the electrical grid of the home, because your home has a lot of circuits and wires. The network of sensors monitors the grid. So, in the network whenever many sensors detect a problem at exactly the same time, then that's not a problem in a single house that's a problem on the grid.

So inside the home what we call a save is when Ting detects a problem in a customer's home, and then we find it before it can start a fire. And we have about 15 of these every day now.

You can look at it like this, outlets, for example, are notorious. These are inside your walls. The wires are loose on the outlet terminal inside the wall, and it's arcing, sparking essentially. The same thing happens in the breaker panel and it can happen in wires up in the attic and to devices that are plugged in, if the power supply has an electrical problem that we can detect. We have saved about 8,000 homes from what would be potential electrical fires. And this is the kind of stuff we find, and we fix it or discard it if it's an appliance or device before it can start a fire.

When it comes to preventing fires, we detect arcing. No matter where Ting is plugged in, in the house, we can detect that arcing anywhere in the house. And those little tiny arcs are the temperature of the sun. I mean they're tiny. So in this case, we detected it early so we have time to schedule an electrician to come in and find that arcing. And then fix it before it can start a fire.

Outside the home, we detect faults on the grid. In addition to detecting arcing, we measure voltage in the United States. The voltage should be 120 volts all the time, plus or minus a little bit.

We have a video with data from 10 sensors on Maui synced in time with a camera. This is actually the ignition of the very first fire on Maui, it is not the Lahaina fire, this is the one in the middle of the island. But basically, you can see all of our sensors detected a fault. So, the voltage dropped down to near 70 volts on a couple of them. And what that means is when we detect a fault on the grid, either a tree limb has touched a wire, or two wires have touched each other flapping in the wind, or a wire has broken loose, if a car hit a telephone pole, and knocked down the wires. Anytime we detect a discharge of energy that makes the voltage go down like this, that means a bunch of energy went somewhere. In this case, it was an arc flash.

Those faults were occurring for many, many, many hours prior to ignition of the Lahaina fire and if the utility knew that these things were occurring, they could have shut off power. But they don't know. One of the shocking things we realize is that utilities do not have sensors to understand smart meters.

What does a resilient electrical grid need?

I think, first the grid has to be resilient to the weather and climate conditions. The consequences of not being resilient are catastrophic. They can be. We saw it in Texas a couple years ago, we see it in some of the California fires. The consequences of poor grid resilience can be catastrophic and you can't manage what you don't measure. If the buildings are unaware where their grid has problems, then how can they manage it? How can they direct resources to the right places to make sure that safe and reliable and quality power is delivered to customers? They can't.

What we've shown is that the grid, the grid is 20%, less resilient. In 2023 it was 20%, less resilient than 2022. I mean, that's an objective measurement. It's just taking hundreds of 1000s and 1000s of sensors, and measuring how many problems are occurring on the grid. It was 20% worse in 2023 than 2022. That's not good. The other thing that's causing the grid to get stressed is solar, wind, EVs, storage, all of these things are adding tremendous complexity to the grid. And it's stressing, the grid was not designed decades and decades ago to have wind and solar and batteries and storage and all this complexity. Obviously, we rely on a resilient grid for literally everything, everything really would cease to exist if the grid didn't kind of sustain itself.

We're all about the data. The data is the data. There's multiple independent measurements, all we do is kind of present the facts about what's going on with the grid. It's about leveraging sensors, and IoT in data, for good. So we have no other use other than to prevent home fires, prevent wildfires, and help make the grid more resilient. I mean, that's all we do with the data we have.

Anything else you would like to tell me about the future of IoT or Ting.

Being an engineer, I would want to know everything about my grid so I know where there's problems. Because once you know you can detect things early with data science and machine learning. It doesn't take many cases before you can predict when the failure is going to occur in the future. That's the beauty of machine learning and AI, is that all it takes is one or two events for the system to then say this data means this event and we can predict that event in the future.

Data scientists are taking all of our fault data and building a model based on the weather so we can predict based on the wind, the temperature, the rain, the snow. So next time a storm comes into Chicago, we will predict the faults are going to start to occuring at this time. In the future, we can take that single event and say, for utility, when the winds reach 40 miles an hour (I don't know what the number is, I'm making that up) but for example, when the wind reaches 40 miles an hour, your grid is going to start to experience faults that could cause a wildfire. So shutdown your power before the winds get to 40 miles an hour. As an example, that's how you use data and sensors to help prevent things like that in the future.

We're super excited by the grid stuff. The grid has caused unbelievably catastrophic CAT losses for insurance companies and it ends up being subrogated if it's the utility's responsibility, and there's a big fight and legal battle. But in theory, this is an opportunity where both the insurance companies and the utility companies could come together and say, look, it would just be better for everybody, the insurance companies, their customers, the utilities and their customers, which are all the same, if we prevented these terrible things from happening.

I'll give the insurance sector credit from a leadership perspective. They're focused on predicting and preventing. How do we predict when a fire or water loss is going to occur? How do we prevent it from happening, because that's better for our customer. And it's better for the economics of our business, if we can prevent the claim. The utilities don't think like that, they operate their grid as they have for decades, until it fails. They wait for a problem. They wait for a problem and then address it after the fact. That's an antiquated mentality. To predict and prevent is the future. And that should be in the utilities' interest, too. Yes, it may cost some money. I mean, you have to invest. But why wait until there's some disaster that happens, right?

We're excited about leveraging technology and data to help insurers help homeowners first, help insurers and then help utilities. It's going to take a village, as they say, to get the grid in a position where it can handle what it is facing, from a complexity, weather and climate perspective.