Working offline

Your Sensa system is built to run without an internet connection. Vans spend a great deal of time out of signal, and a system that only worked with a connection would not be much use in a lay-by in the Highlands.

Everything that matters day to day happens inside your vehicle. Your lights, heating, water, power, battery, levelling and every screen you use to control them all run on the box in the van, and they carry on exactly as normal whether you have a connection or not.

A handful of features do reach out to the internet, and this page explains what happens to each of them when they cannot.

The three connections

"No internet" is rarely one single thing. There are three separate connections, and they often differ:

Connection	What it carries	Notes
Your tablet or phone to the van	Every Sensa screen	This is a local connection over your van's own Wi-Fi. It needs no internet at all
The van to the internet	Journey uploads, nearby places, the map, updates, remote access	Your vehicle router, Starlink, MiFi or phone hotspot
Your phone to the internet	The mySensa app	Independent of the van

The first is the one that runs your vehicle, and it is the one least likely to fail. If you can reach your dashboards on the tablet, your system is working, whatever the signal is doing.

The second and third are genuinely separate. You can be standing outside the van with four bars on your phone while the van itself has nothing, and the reverse happens just as often.

What keeps working

With no internet at all, you keep:

• Every device in the van. Lighting, heating, air conditioning, water pumps and tanks, relays and switches, solar, batteries and the BMS, levelling, engine and OBD2 readings, your router and dish. All of it is read and controlled over your van's own network.
• Every dashboard. Habitation, Cab, Mobile, Intelligence and Settings all load from the box in the van, artwork and all.
• Scenes and Instincts. Activating a scene, editing one, and turning routines on or off all work.
• Alarms and the Log. Alarms raise, re-sound, snooze and cancel as normal.
• Adding and changing devices. Discovery, registration, renaming, removing and re-running setup are all local.
• Backups. Your nightly and manual backups are written to the van, and putting one back works offline too.
• All your settings. Passwords, units, timezone, themes, images, restart and reboot. Sensa never withholds your settings, whatever else is going on.
• Your licence. Once your system has been registered, it checks its own licence without asking anyone. A licence with no end date will keep your system running offline indefinitely.

That is the great majority of what your system does.

What changes when the van is offline

The navigation map goes blank

The map on your Cab and Mobile dashboards is drawn from map data on the internet, so it cannot be shown without a connection. It returns on its own as soon as you have signal again.

Nearby places stop updating

The nearest fuel, water, toilets and other amenities are looked up online. Without a connection, the last answer your van received stays on screen.

This is worth knowing, because that answer will quietly go out of date as you drive. If you have been travelling for an hour without signal, the "nearest" fuel station shown may be an hour behind you. There is nothing on the card to tell you so.

Journey recording carries on, uploading waits

If you have Tracking switched on, your van keeps recording where it has been perfectly well with no connection. The record is held in the van and sent up the moment you have signal.

The van holds roughly three days of driving. If you are out of signal for longer than that, the oldest part of the journey is dropped to make room for the newest. Once you reconnect, everything still held is uploaded automatically, and nothing you have already sent is ever sent twice.

Your journeys appear in mySensa only after the van has uploaded them, so a trip recorded in a dead zone will not show up until you are back in range.

Schengen day counting keeps working, country detection does not

The Schengen day count itself is worked out in the van, so the tracker, the calendar and the totals all keep working offline.

Working out which country you are in needs a connection. Sensa handles this in the way least likely to mislead you:

• While you are parked, the last country it worked out is carried forward, so a week in one spot after a single successful check is counted correctly.
• If you cross a border with no signal, Sensa will not notice, and will keep counting you in the country you left. You can correct any day by hand on the calendar.
• If a day passes with no country ever established, that day is left blank rather than guessed at.

Sensa deliberately does not guess your country from an offline map. Border regions and enclaves are too easy to get wrong, and on a count that has legal weight a confident wrong answer is worse than a gap you can see and fix.

Updates cannot be checked or installed

Software updates are downloaded from the internet, so neither checking nor installing is possible offline. If a check fails, your system says it could not check, rather than telling you that you are up to date. Nothing that is already installed stops working. See Updates.

Remote access is unavailable

Reaching your van from outside it, and letting Sensa support in when you ask them to, both need the van online. Getting to your dashboards from a tablet on the van's own Wi-Fi is unaffected.

Family members from mySensa

On the People tab you can always add people by hand, take their photo and link their phone, with no connection at all. Offering your mySensa household members as people to add relies on a list your van fetched earlier. If your van has never been online, that list is simply empty, which is not a fault, and you add people yourself as normal.

Dealer branding

If you bought through a Sensa dealer, their logo, theme and any home screens they provide are downloaded once and then kept in the van, so they carry on showing offline. A system that has never been online since registration shows standard Sensa branding.

What you cannot do until you reconnect

Six things genuinely need a connection and have no offline alternative:

1. Register a licence code. Entering your registration code is a one-off online step.
2. Start a trial. The 14 day trial is set up the first time your system reaches Sensa. On a Sensa-supplied appliance your dashboards come up regardless, and the trial starts itself once you have signal.
3. Move your licence to replacement hardware. Re-registering after a failed board or card is done online. See Recovery.
4. Clear a read-only lockout. If your system has gone read-only, only a successful check-in can release it.
5. Check for or install updates.
6. Reach your van from outside it.

The first four are all to do with licensing, and all of them clear the moment your van gets any connection at all, even briefly. A phone hotspot held up to the van for a minute is enough.

Using mySensa while the van is offline

The mySensa app runs on the internet, not on your van, so it needs a connection on your phone. Installed to your home screen it will still open without one, but there will be nothing in it.

The more common situation is that your phone is online and your van is not, and it is worth understanding what you are looking at:

In mySensa	What you see
Your vehicle	Your vehicle and its licence, with its status as of the van's last check-in. Version numbers and device counts are from that moment, not now
Journeys	Every journey your van has uploaded. Anything recorded since it lost signal is still in the van
Tracking on or off	The last state your van reported, which may not be what the switch in the van says now
Saved Locations, Community	Fully up to date. These are your own account, nothing to do with the van
Orders, Subscriptions, Account, Household, News	Fully up to date

mySensa does not talk to your van directly. Your van sends its news to Sensa, and mySensa shows you what Sensa has. So mySensa can look perfectly healthy while showing you information that is several days old, and no amount of reconnecting your phone will refresh it. Only the van reconnecting will.

For the same reason, mySensa is not a remote control. It will not switch anything on, activate a scene, change a setting or acknowledge an alarm. That is what your dashboards are for, reached either on the van's own Wi-Fi or through remote access.

What comes back on its own

When your van gets a connection again, all of this happens without you doing anything:

• Recorded journeys are uploaded, within an hour at the outside
• Your licence checks in, releasing any lockout that no longer applies
• Your mySensa household list is refreshed
• Nearby places start giving real answers again
• The map loads
• Schengen resumes working out your country
• Any waiting update is noticed
• Remote access re-establishes itself

If you would rather not wait, the Check in now button on the Settings, System tab forces a licence check-in straight away. It is the quickest way to clear a lockout after renewing.

Things that look like faults but are not

Your system has not gone read-only because you lost signal. Being offline never causes a lockout. A read-only system is one that has been told something specific by Sensa, or whose trial has ended. If your system is locked, look at your licence and your support plan, not at your aerial.

A trial does end offline. The end date is built into the trial itself, so going out of signal does not extend it.

Old readings do not look old. Nearby places on the van, and your vehicle's status in mySensa, both show the last thing they were told without flagging it. If your van has been out of signal, treat both with a pinch of salt.

mySensa working does not mean your van is online. They are different connections, and mySensa is served from the internet rather than from your vehicle.

If something still looks wrong once you have a solid connection, Diagnostics is the next place to go.