Testo Smart Connect: two things I wish I had known
If you are still running the original Testo Saveris 2 platform, you will have to migrate to Smart Connect whether you particularly want to or not. Having just been through the process myself, I thought it worth documenting the two practical points that would have saved me a considerable amount of time – and a modest amount of swearing.
This is not a review of the system. I have written about Saveris 2 before, and several years of continuous use have not fundamentally changed my opinion of it. If anything, they have reinforced it.
The reason is simple. A few years ago, in the height of summer and when I just had started a vacation, the system alerted us to the failure of one of our –20 °C freezers. We were able to rescue our bacterial strain collection before the freezer thawed completely, avoiding what could easily have been years of lost work. It remains the single best demonstration I can offer of why continuous temperature monitoring is not a luxury but an essential piece of laboratory infrastructure.
So, the system stays. That was never in doubt.
The catch
The migration to Smart Connect does introduce one significant change: the original free Saveris 2 cloud service has been replaced by a subscription. In my case this is an ongoing expense that comes directly out of my own pocket rather than from any institutional budget – a sentence I find myself writing rather too often these days. Also, I if the system was adopted a few years back, as I have done, you might find that the older generation of data loggers is not compatible with Smart Connect any longer and will stop working. Testo warned me well in advance of this problem, and as it turns out I was able to purchase two new data loggers well in time and via a Grant, so at least the new data loggers were covered, while the subscription fee will not be.
Nevertheless, weighed against the value of a freezer full of irreplaceable strains, the subscription is one of the easier decisions I have had to justify to myself. A freezer full of dead bacteria is a considerably more expensive outcome than an annual fee.
Two things I wish I had known
The migration itself was not entirely without surprises. The Smart Connect platform is clearly still evolving, and I ran into a couple of issues while commissioning my two replacement loggers and migrating an existing unit. To their credit, Testo support proved responsive once I reached the right person, acknowledged that the issues were already known, and confirmed that fixes are being rolled out. I greatly appreciate the attitude, which stands in great contrast to other companies, as described here and here.
Rather than narrate every twist of the process, here are the two points that would have saved me the most time.
First: if you are commissioning a new Testo 162 logger, connect a temperature probe before you attempt to configure the device. This sounds obvious in hindsight, but it caught me out, because the older Saveris 2 loggers could be commissioned quite happily without a probe attached. The new logger will accept the configuration, appear content, and then quietly refuse to complete commissioning or connect to the cloud until a probe is present. Knowing this from the outset would have spared me a good deal of pointless troubleshooting.
Second: if you are migrating an existing logger that previously had two probes but now needs only one, the platform may continue to expect the second probe and report a sensor fault indefinitely. Testo confirmed this is a known issue with fixes planned. The workaround is straightforward: remove the logger from Smart Connect entirely and re-register it with only the required probe connected. In my case this resolved the problem immediately.
One incidental observation: when I re-registered one of my older compatible loggers, it received a firmware update, after which it adopted the same commissioning behaviour as the new generation. That also explains why the behaviour of my older logger suddenly changed after its firmware update. Testo, it seems, are gradually bringing both product generations onto a common platform.
Has my opinion changed?
Not really.
The migration exposed a few rough edges, and parts of the onboarding process could certainly be made more intuitive. The arrival of a subscription fee will understandably disappoint those of us who enjoyed the free cloud service for years. Both fair criticisms. But then I must confess that I always wondered how they were able to survive: buy a number of logging units for a few hundred pounds once and use their cloud service for free for years. It did not seem to make sense, really, so from that perspective I am not surprised by the introduction of a subscription service.
The reason I use the system has not changed. Reliable remote monitoring protects valuable samples, provides reassurance outside working hours, and prevents expensive losses when equipment inevitably fails – and in my experience, it does inevitably fail. That was true when I wrote the original review, and a rescued strain collection later, it remains true today.
If you are an existing Saveris 2 user preparing to migrate, I hope the two points above save you a little of the detective work I had to do.
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