A power outage alarm app for Android
OutagePing turns any Android phone into a mains-power alarm. Leave it on a charger where you want to be warned; when the electricity fails it sounds a siren there within seconds — and, if you want, wakes the people you choose on their own phones, wherever they are.
Why most power-cut alerts never arrive
The difficulty is not detecting a power cut. It is being told about one. A blackout takes out the router, the hub and the modem at the same instant as everything else, so the device that noticed has nothing left to report over. Most smart plugs and Wi-Fi sensors tell you what happened once the power is back — which is useful for a log and useless for a freezer.
A phone is different in one specific way: it carries its own battery, and with a SIM it carries its own connection. It can keep talking for hours after the lights have gone out.
What the free app does
- Detects the instant the charger stops delivering power — it watches the power feed, not the battery level, so it works at 100% charge.
- Raises a full-screen alarm with a countdown, loud enough to wake a room, that overrides silent mode and Do Not Disturb.
- Filters out momentary flickers, so a brief dip is not an alarm.
- Re-arms itself after a reboot.
- Includes a Test Drill that runs the whole sequence, so you find out it works before you need it rather than after.
- No ads, no advertising identifiers, no data selling.
What Pro adds: telling people who are not in the building
A siren in an empty house wakes nobody. Pro is the part that reaches people who are somewhere else. They install the same free app, type a six-digit code from your phone, and from then on your power failing wakes their handset — at alarm volume, through silent mode. A watcher needs no account and gives us no email address; the code is the whole setup.
It also adds the dead-man's switch. If the monitoring phone stops reporting altogether — battery flat, no signal, somebody unplugged it — our servers notice the silence and alert your watchers anyway. That is the case a device sitting in your house cannot cover on its own, because a thing that has died cannot tell you it has died.
Pro is $7.99 a month or $79 a year, covers up to three monitored phones, and has no per-alert charge and no monthly allowance. A storm that cuts the power four times in a night costs exactly the same as a quiet month.
How fast you find out
Worth being precise about, because it is the number that decides whether this is any use to you:
- The phone itself: seconds. The alarm sounds where the phone is.
- Your watchers, with mobile data in the monitoring phone: about three minutes. A cheap prepaid data SIM is enough.
- Your watchers, Wi-Fi only: about seventeen minutes. The blackout takes the router, so nothing can be reported directly and we are working from the phone's silence instead.
What it is not
We do not send SMS or place phone calls. Alerts reach watchers in their own copy of the app and everyone else by email. It is not a certified life-safety system — keep professional equipment where lives or livelihoods depend on it. And there is no iPhone version: the monitoring phone, and the phones being woken, must be Android 8.0 or newer.
Questions people ask
Is there an app that tells me when my power goes out?
Yes. OutagePing is a free Android app. A phone left on a charger detects the moment mains power fails and raises a full-screen alarm on that phone. With the optional Pro subscription, its servers also alert other people on their own phones, wherever they are.
How does it know the power failed?
It watches the charger's power feed rather than the battery level, so it notices within seconds even when the phone is sitting at 100%. Brief flickers are filtered out so a momentary dip does not raise an alarm.
How can it tell me if the power cut also killed my Wi-Fi?
Two ways. If the monitoring phone has mobile data, it reports the failure over the cellular network and your people are woken in about three minutes. If it has no way to reach us at all, our servers notice that its regular check-ins have stopped and alert your watchers anyway, which takes about seventeen minutes. The silence itself is treated as the alert.
What does it cost?
The app and the on-phone alarm are free for ever. OutagePing Pro, which alerts other people and adds the web portal and the dead-man's switch, is $7.99 a month or $79 a year. There is no charge per alert and no monthly allowance.
Does it send text messages or phone calls?
No. Alerts reach the people watching as push notifications in their own copy of the app, and anyone else by email. We say so plainly because some alternatives do send SMS, and if that is what you need, this is not the right tool.
Is there an iPhone version?
Not currently. The monitoring phone must run Android 8.0 or newer. People watching a monitored phone also need Android, because the alert arrives in the app.