I have two Electrons supporting a critical application. I am nervous about the consequences of a failure of either Electron or damage thereto. If I were to purchase one or two maintenance spares, what would I have to do to swap in a new unit for a bad one (other than flash my application code, of course)? Would the $3/month cellular fee apply to the new units from the outset or only if/when they are placed in service?
You can swap the SIM over from one device to the other, but you want to claim the new devices to your account in order to have the cloud communication be linked to it.
As long you don’t activate an additional SIM no extra cellular fee will be applied - or you activate the SIMs to claim the devices (if you can’t currently swap an active SIM in) and immediately pause/release the SIM when you are done.
Thanks ScruffR (and Happy New Year)!
Just curious: have you ever become aware of an Electron just quitting for no apparent reason, i.e. how concerned should I be about the potential of such a failure?
Nope, all my Electrons that died on me can all blame their fate on my own actions 
But environmental conditions can cause issues (e.g. SIM “warping”).
I've also never had an Electron fail unless it was my fault.
+1 on environmental.
Moisture also seems to be great at finding a way to sneak-in over a long time period, which isn't the Electron's fault 
What if you setup the spare Electron on your account, activated the SIM, and then paused it.
@blshaw45, The spare could be ready to land the Wires and Un-Pause it's SIM.
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Excellent idea. Thanks Ryan!
Hey Ryan,
Since you’re obviously active on this forum as well as NCD’s, perhaps you can answer a question completely unrelated to my original one here about maintenance spares:
As I suspect you will recall from the ongoing dialog over at NCD, my Electron code has been embellished to log into a Google spreadsheet any loss of continuity between sites that lasts longer than 10 minutes (well, 10 minutes and 10 seconds, to be precise). Today I saw something in the spreadsheet that I can’t explain. If you look at the attached screenshot, you will see two examples - at 6:55 PM yesterday and 6:15 AM today - when the code running on the Electron at the tank logged a link “Up” status without having been preceded by a link “Down” status. For the life of me I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my code that would allow that (unless the linkage from the Particle cloud to Google via IFTTT had a brain cramp of some sort). Can you look at the code (https://go.particle.io/shared_apps/5c2ba47f77cc9f89200001f8) and let me know if you see an explanation that is escaping me?
Many thanks.
My guess is that the Electron sent the message, but something went wrong (Webhook/IFTTT) before it was logged to Google Sheets.