Recently Tandem replaced my pump because it kept losing connection with my G6 Sensor. I received the replacement and shortly thereafter it too disconnected with the G6 Sensor. I decided there was a glitch and I would try to deal with it. Over the last two weeks it has become unbearable. On August 17 I had heart bypass surgery and simply cannot continue with this.
Dexcom deferred to Tandem, stating the problem is the fault of the pump. This time they do not want to replace the pump. First they advised that my pump’s warranty expired on June 28 this year. Now they tell me it is caused by Bluetooth in the area interfering with my equipment. I agreed to change the sensor and transmitter and try again. I did both today. Tonight the lost connections started. Now I am getting messages that I need to change the transmitter immediately. I used my last sensor and transmitter today. I can do neither until I get replacements.
Has anyone else had this problem and resolved it? In
Kinda late to this party but I don’t see an answer to my main question, which would be: are you relatively new to the TandemX2, or a longstanding user and this problem has only cropped up recently?
The reason I ask is that I am a new user (started last April) and reports about the weakness of the Bt connectivity were one reason I was apprehensive. And the reports were correct! But as I’ve become more familiar with the system I find them much less of an actual problem than I was concerned about. I was thinking in terms of dropouts with the Dexcom app, which can be a major PITA, what with stopping/restarting Bt in your settings, making sure to delete old connections, deleting and reinstalling the app, having to call tech support if nothing works. But with these pump dropouts I’ve invariably found that I just have to move the thing right next to my sensor for a couple minutes and it reconnects at the next transmission interval. I’ve never had it persist beyond that fix, plus it doesn’t affect the Dexcom app so I still have data on my phone during the interval and I’m not left at sea.
I have had to adopt some new habits around the issue, particularly overnight (inevitably the most likely time for this to happen is what at my house we call stupid-o’clock in the morning). If my sensor location is on the opposite side to my t-shirt pocket, where I usually keep my pump at night, I just leave it out next to me on the mattress and move it when I roll over. Getting tangled up and strangled by the tubing turns out to be much less of a problem than I imagined. If I do get alerted I just grab the thing and hold it right up against my sensor while I go back to sleep. Still kind of an annoyance, but less of one than the cat deciding 4:30 a.m. is a good time to jump up on the bed and complain about people sleeping WAY too late.
I wear my G6 sensor on the outside of my upper right arm. I keep my Tandem pump clipped to my right side waist during day and night. (I sleep on my left side and back.) During the day I usually keep my iPhone on my right side pant’s leg pocket. The BT connections between sensor, pump, and iPhone all work well.
However, when I tried moving the sensor from the outside of my arm to the back of my arm, my pump would frequently lose BT connection with the sensor. But, my iPhone continued to maintain the BT connection with the sensor in this new location.
I was very surprised because the new sensor location still had a direct line-of-site between the sensor and the pump.
I finally gave up trying to figure out why I could not get the BT connection to work with the new sensor location. After I returned the sensor to the outside of my arm the BT connections all worked fine again.
