Tools
Outage cost calculator
What do outages at your unmanned sites actually cost per year — and how much of that is recoverable if faults are identified and fixed remotely? Enter your own figures below. Nothing is sent anywhere; the calculation runs in your browser.
How it works
The arithmetic, in the open
There is nothing proprietary in this model. It is the calculation Sentor has used with customers for years, and you should be able to check every line of it against your own numbers.
What outages cost now
Outages per year is your monthly average multiplied by twelve. Multiplied by the average length of an outage, that gives total outage hours per year.
Those hours are then costed three ways: the cost of the outage itself, the technician time spent on it, and the additional per-outage costs — travel, vehicle, accommodation. The three added together are what outages cost you in a year.
What monitoring changes
A share of faults can be identified and cleared remotely. For those, the outage is shortened from its full length to the remote fix time, the site visit does not happen at all, and the travel cost goes with it.
If your service agreements pay rebates once a fault is notified, remote monitoring also makes those hours claimable, because you can evidence when the fault started. That is the optional rebate field.
What is the “share of faults fixable remotely”?
It is the proportion of your faults that can be cleared by a remote action — restarting equipment, switching to a backup, resetting a device — rather than by someone attending the site.
The default of 75% comes from Sentor's own model. It is the single most influential number in the calculation, so it is worth replacing with your own: look back over a year of fault records and count how many turned out to need hands on site.
Why does the outage still cost something after monitoring?
Because a remote fix is not instant, and because some faults genuinely need a technician.
The model shortens the remotely-fixable outages to the remote fix time rather than to zero, and leaves the remaining share of faults costed exactly as they are today. It does not assume monitoring prevents faults — only that it shortens and redirects the response to them.
How is the payback period calculated?
Annual monitoring cost per site, divided by the annual saving per site.
The original Sentor spreadsheet divided the annual saving by the monthly cost, which reported a payback twelve times shorter than it should have been. That has been corrected here, so the figure this page gives is more conservative than the one the spreadsheet gave.
Does this include the cost of the equipment?
Only through the “monitoring cost per site, per month” field, which you set.
How that lands depends on whether you buy the hardware outright, lease it, or take a monitoring service — so the calculator asks for a monthly figure rather than assuming one. Ask us and we will tell you what your configuration would actually cost per site.
Treat the output as an estimate, not a quotation. The result is only as good as the figures you enter, and the defaults are illustrative — they are not Sentor's pricing and not a claim about your network. The model also excludes anything hard to price: reputational cost, regulatory exposure, safety risk and the opportunity cost of technicians driving instead of doing skilled work. In most operations those push the real figure up rather than down.
Run your own numbers past us.
If the figure above looks large, the useful next step is checking the assumptions against what your sites actually do. Send us what you entered and we will work through it with you.