How often a cellular unit reports, and why it changes

Cellular units hand over readings faster while a store is open and slower while it is closed. Wi-Fi units are unaffected — they report continuously.

This is about cellular units only. A Wi-Fi unit posts every reading as it takes it, so none of the scheduling below applies to it and there is no data cost to manage.

A cellular unit measures constantly and keeps a record every five minutes whatever else is happening. What is scheduled is how often it hands that record over the mobile network — and that has a real per-message cost, which is why it is not simply set as fast as possible everywhere.

When	How often it hands over	Why
While the store is open	Every 15 minutes by default	There are people in the heat. Half an hour is a long time to find out a room crossed into Danger.
While the store is closed	Every hour by default	An empty kitchen at 3am gains nothing from frequent hand-overs.
Out of heat season	The closed rate, all day	Only applies if a season is configured. By default there is no season and nothing slows down.

Two things override the schedule upwards, and both are automatic. A unit hands over within a couple of minutes when the heat level changes or conditions are climbing fast, and a unit put into elevated reporting stays fast until it is calm again. The schedule describes the quiet case, not the urgent one.

Open and closed come from the store's operating hours, which you set on each store — so getting those right is what makes the fast window line up with your actual shifts. A unit can also carry its own hours, for a walk-in cooler on a different schedule from the kitchen it opens onto.

In the dashboard: Stores & locations — Your sites, their store numbers and hours, and who to contact at each one.

You never set a timezone on the device. The server converts your store's local hours into something the unit can compare without a clock it can trust, and recomputes it when the clocks change — so a shift window does not drift an hour twice a year.

Heat season is configuration, never an assumption, and the default is all year. That default is deliberate: indoor process heat has no season, and a foundry, bakery or laundry in January is hotter than a restaurant in July. If your sites genuinely are weather-driven, ask us to set a season for the company or for individual stores — Phoenix and Minneapolis do not share a summer, and a franchise spanning both needs to say so per store.

Every mistake in this configuration resolves to reporting MORE often, not less. An unrecognised season, an unparseable set of hours, a timezone we don't know: all of them fall back to the fast schedule. That costs a little more and is the only acceptable direction to fail in.

How fast you may go is bounded by your plan, because faster hand-overs cost more every month for every unit. Asking for something faster than your plan allows does not fail silently — you get the fastest rate your plan does allow.

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