Device shows offline
Devices report a heartbeat every 5 minutes by default. After three missed heartbeats (~15 minutes) the dashboard marks them offline.
Quickest checks
- Is it just this device or all of them? If every device in a yard goes offline at the same time, the cause is almost always a regional cellular outage, not a hardware fault. Check your cell carrier’s status page before climbing the bin.
- Look at the LED. Climb the bin and pop the lid. The status LED tells you most of what you need:
- Solid green — connected; the dashboard is the problem, not the device.
- Slow blue blink — searching for cell signal.
- Fast red blink — battery critically low.
- No light at all — battery is fully dead, or the power switch is off.
By symptom
Slow blue blink that never resolves
Cellular signal is weak or absent. Causes:
- Bin steel shadowing the antenna — make sure Chester X1 is mounted with the antenna above the roofline.
- Carrier outage — try again in 15 minutes.
- Sim card not provisioned — happens to brand-new devices that were activated less than an hour ago.
Fast red blink
Battery voltage is below the cutoff. Usually after a long stretch of cloudy days with snow on the panel. Brush the panel clear and give it a sunny day; it will recover automatically. If it persists for more than a week of decent weather, the battery is at end of life — contact support for a replacement.
No LED at all
- Check the power switch inside the lid. It is easy to bump during install.
- If switched on with no LED, the battery has fully discharged below the recovery threshold. Disconnect, charge externally for an hour with a 12 V supply, and reinstall.
When to escalate
If none of the above resolves it within an hour, file a support ticket from Settings → Support → New ticket and include the device ID and the date the issue started. We can often see diagnostics from our side that aren’t visible to you.