Who presoaks their dexcom g7? I always presoak g6 so was just wondering what others do. Thank you ahead of time.
I stopped presoaking, after testing, when moving from the G6 to the G7 and ran both in parallel for several weeks and saw no benefit to presoak the G7. The G7 right out of the box with 30 min warm up time closely mimicked the results of my presoaked G6’s
3 Likes
Thank you for your reply.
1 Like
I have horrible Day 1 results with G7, just as I did with G6, G5, and G4. No memory of how the 7+ was. Dexcom calls it insertion trauma and for sure that is my experience.
With G7 I try to insert the new sensor when the old sensor enters the 12-hour grace period. The main issue comparing G7 to G6 is that G7 starts the 10.5 day countdown when inserted while G6 didn’t start the countdown until you officially started the sensor. So if you preinsert 24 hours ahead of time, you will only have 9.5 days of sensor use.
I unfortunately have had lots of startup failures with G7. So I would presoak the sensor for 12 hours and then have it fail immediately when started. So I would have to insert and start a new sensor with lots of jumpiness and false lows. The one good thing about G7 is that you can silence all alarms on the phone app for 6 hours and I do that. And then put my Tandem pump in a Faraday pouch so it doesn’t get false CGM numbers.
Most of my startup failures were from the same batch that Dexcom sent me to replace my non-Tandem-compatible sensors. I hope that this batch was defective since I had 4 sensors where the sensor wire didn’t insert. My last couple of sensors have been from another batch and have inserted okay.
I am mostly okay with G7 but don’t find it to be an improvement over G6 except in size. Maybe a bit more accurate but not a lot. I did better with the angled filaments of G6 and find many of my G7 sensors to be mildly painful with the 90-degree filament.
2 Likes
This touches on something I’ve been thinking of posting on for a while. I haven’t switched to G7 yet but over the last 6-8 months I’ve been noticing that my day-one results with my G6’s are considerably less flaky than they used to be, even on those times when I’ve missed the session-ending alert or for whatever reason neglected to pre-soak. They almost always come out of warm-up a bit high, and I just throw caution to the wind and calibrate them, and they seem to be fine after that. Maybe it’s just me…?
To a certain extent, that may be true. All manufacturers that produce millions of the same unit know that there is a certain part of the population for which their product and service will not work. There is always a part of the population that will be unhappy with a company regardless of the efforts put in by the company.
Companies do their best to accommodate all customers; however, at a certain point, a company has to determine how much staff they devote to fixing issues for the small percentage of problem customers versus how much staff they devote to developing their next better, shiny new object that everyone wants ASAP, while still servicing their huge happy customer base.
All midsize and large companies have a number of customers they “fire” every year that can not be satisfied. The problem with that is that many of these customers are just chronic complainers who take the attitude of “how dare the company with the only good product on the market no longer deal with me”.
My company has decades of experience with the few chronic complainers who beg to return as customers after they try all the competition and find it even worse.
The bottom line is that companies always want to know about bad experiences and will do their best to correct repeated bad experiences to satisfy as many customers as possible. Satisfying 100% of customers 100% of the time, which is what both companies and customers want, is not realistic or logistically and financially possible.
I’ve had the same experience for a while now. I usually do a pretty short presoak — 1 to 4 hours. Mine read a little low in the first 12-24 hours. But I’m not getting really prolonged false lows the way I remember having quite regularly earlier. There are still false alarm lows, but they don’t seem as low or as enduring. I generally don’t calibrate and the readings improve without intervention.
I’m looking forward to G7’s short warmup, but I’ve always had pretty good experiences with the G6 and, oddly, they recently seem to have gotten better.
Thank you to all those who replied. I appreciate the input from all. I inserted my first g7 yesterday and ran a short presoak for 4 hours whereas with the g6 I always did an overnight presoak. I ran both the g6 and g7 for about 6 hours. There was consistently 17 points difference between the two. I never did anything but “no code” on the g6 but unless I missed something you don’t have that option and have to use the algorithm that is used with the code of the sensor. Today the g7 is within 17 points of a fingerstick, sometimes as close as 5 points. I have yet to calibrate.
I do have one negative comment, I could not get the insert button to engage after several attempts. It was on the recommended back of my arm. Finally I got my husband to do it with success. I read other comments concerning this issue. Next time I will push harder before pushing the button.
Thank you all again. Diabetes is definitely a journey.
1 Like
you’ve probably already read the manual, but in case you haven’t, you have to push the inserter into your arm, then push the button…only once though, as the adhesive sticks as soon as you put pressure on the inserter…i have also used the g7 for about a year now, and although i never pre soaked, i have noticed the bluetooth signal is a little weaker(distance wise) and placement is more important because it is so much smaller than the g6…you might be tempted to try different areas of the arm, etc, but be careful, as any blood will probably throw the readings off…also online replacements only…much faster right now(although it might take a week to receive a response) they seem to have some bad batches going around, but this might be temporary