Umbrella tracker: Britain's most abandoned possession

Why umbrellas get abandoned rather than lost

There is a mechanism here, and it is worth naming because it explains the whole problem.

You pick up an umbrella because it is raining. You put it down somewhere, a pub, a train, a meeting room, the lip of a shop counter, and by the time you leave, it has stopped raining. Nothing in your environment reminds you the umbrella exists, because the reason you were holding it has disappeared. Keys, wallets and phones get patted for at the door. An umbrella does not, because there is no pocket it belongs in.

That is the essential difference between an umbrella and everything else people tag. A wallet is missed within minutes. An umbrella is missed the next time it rains, which might be a fortnight later, by which time the pub has thrown it in a bin bag with forty others.

What a tag can and cannot do about it

The map is nearly useless here, and it is worth being blunt about that.

By the time you notice the umbrella is gone, the last reported position will be days old, the venue will have cleared its lost property, and no amount of pin-staring will produce a black folding umbrella that is now indistinguishable from thirty other black folding umbrellas. Distance recovery is not the answer to this problem.

The left-behind alert is a different matter. It fires while you are walking away, in the minute that actually matters, the one where you are still twenty metres from the door and could turn round without embarrassment. For an object whose failure mode is specifically forgetting rather than losing, this is the entire value proposition, and it is why tagging an umbrella is not as silly as it sounds.

The speaker helps in the third case, the one people forget: the umbrella that is not abandoned at all, but has fallen behind the coat rack in your own hallway.

The attachment problem

Physics sets the limit. A coin tag is around 36 millimetres square and 9 millimetres thick, and there is exactly one place on an umbrella it can go: threaded onto the wrist strap, or clipped to the zip pull on the sleeve of a folding one.

That is a workable attachment, and it is also an exposed one. The tag swings, knocks against things, gets wet constantly and is visible to anybody who picks the umbrella up. IP67 sealing deals with the water. The visibility is a genuine drawback, and it is a reason to use a tag you are relaxed about rather than an expensive one.

What you cannot do is put a tag inside the canopy, tape it to the shaft or thread it onto the ribs. All three either fail mechanically or stop the umbrella working.

When it is worth doing, and when it plainly is not

Worth doing if you own one good umbrella, a proper wooden-handled one, a gift, something you would actually be annoyed to lose, and you are the sort of person who leaves it in places. One tag, one strap, left-behind alert switched on.

Worth doing if the umbrella lives in a bag that is already tagged, in which case you have got it for free and should stop reading.

Not worth doing for a supermarket telescopic umbrella that cost less than the tag. The arithmetic is obvious and the honest answer is to buy two cheap umbrellas and accept the churn, which is what most of the country does already.

Not worth doing if you have only one tag and have not yet tagged your keys or your bag. Priority matters more than coverage.

The general rule this illustrates

An umbrella is the clearest example of a broader principle, and the principle is the useful thing to take away: tag by frequency of loss multiplied by consequence, not by value.

A cheap thing you abandon monthly can be a better candidate than an expensive thing that never leaves the house. But the consequence has to be real, annoyance and an eight-pound replacement is not much of a consequence, which is precisely why the umbrella sits right at the borderline and most people should tag something else first.

Run that calculation across your own belongings and the list usually comes out the same way: keys, the bag, the wallet, then a considerable gap, and then the argument about the umbrella.

Where a Homing Tag comes into it

If you have decided the good umbrella is worth covering, the practical points are the attachment and the weather. The key ring hole is moulded into the Homing Tag's shell and two rings come in the box, so it threads onto a wrist strap without an accessory, and the IP67 seal means a season of being rained on is uneventful.

It joins Apple Find My as an Other Item, so the left-behind notification, the feature that matters most for this particular object, is the one Apple builds into iOS rather than a paid extra. Indoors, the speaker runs between 80 and 100 dB and can be triggered from as far as sixty metres, which is how you find the one that fell behind the coats. Beyond that, passing Apple devices refresh the position quietly, encrypted, without anyone being involved.

The limits apply here as everywhere: no Ultra Wideband, so no arrow, and no Android support at all, meaning an iPhone or iPad on iOS 14.5 or later. The tag is 36.3 millimetres square and 9 millimetres deep, weighs about 10 grams, and runs up to two years on a CR2032.

Boxes hold two tags for under £15 with free UK postage, so realistically, one for the keys and one for whatever you have decided is worth it. Have a look.

Not sure which things deserve the tags you have? The household arithmetic is here.