Power & connectivity
What keeps watching when something fails.
A monitor is only as good as the power and the internet it has when the campground loses both. Here is exactly how the hub behaves in every combination, and a two-minute wizard that tells you which one you have.
The short version
The hub needs two things, and they fail separately
Power keeps the hub reading your sensors. Internet lets it tell you what it read. Lose power and everything stops. Lose internet and the hub keeps reading, logs everything locally, and uploads it the moment the connection comes back – but no alert can reach you until it does.
In every case, our servers notice when a hub goes quiet and tell you. An offline hub is never silently offline. What you do not get is the reading that would have mattered during the gap, which is why the rest of this page is about closing the gap.
The hub has no battery of its own. It runs on whatever you plug it into, and it lasts exactly as long as that does. Every choice below is really a choice about which battery, or which grid, the hub is living on.
Power
Three ways to power the hub
All three ship. Which one is right depends on what is feeding the outlet, not on the outlet.
AC outlet
Plug it in like a phone charger. The catch is what feeds the outlet. Shore power: the hub dies with the pedestal. Inverter: the hub runs on the house battery until it is depleted, and the inverter’s own draw shortens that. Generator: the hub is online only while it runs.
Best for: a rig you live in with reliable hookups, or one on an inverter you trust.
12V accessory outlet
The “cigarette lighter” outlet. The hub runs on the house battery, so it survives a shore-power loss and keeps going until the battery is dead. No wiring. One check first: some accessory outlets are switched with the ignition or a disconnect, and a hub on one of those goes dark when you turn the key.
Best for: nearly everyone. The right default when an unswitched outlet is reachable.
Direct 12V wiring
Wired to the house battery through a fuse. Same endurance as the accessory outlet, with no plug to work loose and no switch to catch you. The longest-lasting option there is, and the one that lets you put the hub wherever Bluetooth range wants it rather than wherever an outlet happens to be.
Best for: a rig you leave for weeks, storage, and anyone comfortable with a fuse tap.
Internet
Three ways to reach you
The hub has Wi-Fi. It does not have cellular. That one sentence decides most of what follows.
Campground Wi-Fi
Free, already there, and nobody’s promise. When the campground network goes down, your link goes with it, on their schedule. The hub keeps reading and logging; alerts wait. Captive portals that expire daily will log the hub out daily.
Best for: a rig you are in, where a gap is an inconvenience rather than a disaster.
Your own connection
A hotspot, a cellular router, or Starlink. It runs on your power, so it lives and dies with the same battery the hub does, and the failure is yours to see coming instead of the campground’s. Put the router on the same 12V circuit as the hub and they share a fate, which is the point.
Best for: anyone leaving the rig. The part nobody sells you is the long version.
Cellular backup device
Sold separately, not bundled, and not required. It gives the hub a connection that does not depend on the campground or on your router. It is the answer for a rig in storage with no Wi-Fi at all, and the only way the hub reaches you from one.
Best for: storage, boondocking without a hotspot, and anyone who has lost campground Wi-Fi once too often.
Scenarios
What happens, combination by combination
Find your row. “Keeps watching” means the hub is reading and can alert you. “Logs, cannot alert” means readings are saved on the hub and uploaded later, but nothing reaches your phone until the connection returns.
| Hub power | Internet | Shore power fails | Campground Wi-Fi fails | House battery depleted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC, shore power | Campground Wi-Fi | Hub off. Offline alert, then nothing. | Logs, cannot alert. Uploads on reconnect. | Unaffected; hub is not on it. |
| AC, shore power | Your own | Hub off. Router likely off too. Offline alert. | Unaffected. | Router off if it is on the battery; hub keeps logging, cannot alert. |
| AC, inverter | Campground Wi-Fi | Keeps watching, on the battery, until it is depleted. | Logs, cannot alert. | Hub off. Offline alert first. |
| AC, inverter | Your own | Keeps watching until the battery is depleted. | Unaffected. | Hub and router off together. Offline alert first. |
| AC, generator | Any | Keeps watching while the generator runs. | Depends on the connection, as above. | Hub off whenever the generator stops. Every time. |
| 12V outlet or wired | Campground Wi-Fi | Keeps watching. Nothing changes. | Logs, cannot alert. Uploads on reconnect. | Hub off. Offline alert first, and a low-battery alert long before if you have a battery monitor. |
| 12V outlet or wired | Your own | Keeps watching. Nothing changes. | Unaffected. | Hub and router off together. Low-battery alert first, then offline alert. |
| 12V outlet or wired | Cellular backup | Keeps watching. | Unaffected. | Hub off. The last setup standing; everything else fails first. |
| Any | None | Depends on power, as above. | – | Logs only, always. The hub can never alert you. Add the cellular device or choose a different product for this rig. |
The setup we would build: hub wired to 12V, your own router on the same circuit, a shunt-based battery monitor so the battery warns you before it goes, and the cellular device if the rig ever sits somewhere with no Wi-Fi. Every failure in the table above then arrives as an alert before it arrives as a surprise.
Local logging
Do you lose the week the Wi-Fi was down?
No. While the hub has power but no connection, every reading is logged on the hub itself. When the connection returns, all of it uploads. The cloud accepts the whole backlog: nothing is dropped, nothing expires, and no plan tier limits it. We checked the ingest path for a cut-off and there is none.
The only ceiling is speed. The hub uploads in batches of 50, twenty batches a minute, so a backlog drains at 1,000 readings a minute. Storage on the hub is not the constraint – a reading is a few dozen bytes and the card is measured in gigabytes – so the number worth knowing is how long the catch-up takes, and that depends on how many sensors you have and how often they read.
What you do not get back: the alert. A threshold crossed during the outage is logged, and the app will show it happened, but nothing could reach your phone while the link was down. The backlog restores the record; it cannot restore the moment.
Wizard
Which setup is yours?
Four questions. Nothing you answer leaves your browser.
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