Field notes
The RoamVitals Blog
Setup guides, sensor teardowns and what we learn taking Bluetooth devices apart so you do not have to. Written by the people decoding them.
-
What we are actually building, and why
We built this because we kept driving back to check on the dog. Everything about how the product works follows from that, including the parts that look like missing features.
-
The temperature check you cannot make from a trailhead
A parked RV on a mild day can reach a hundred degrees inside an hour. This is the maths of that, and what monitoring does and does not solve.
-
Nobody at the office can reset your thermostat
Whether the pedestal still has power decides everything: the campground can fix one of these in five minutes with a breaker, and cannot touch the other. How to know which you have before the thermometer catches up.
-
Two thresholds and a clock
A rig at 82 and holding is a different animal from one that was at 74 twenty minutes ago. Nothing measures a slope, so two thresholds and the gap between them are how you read one.
-
Setting up a Govee H5075 for RV monitoring
The cheapest way into RV monitoring is a sensor you can buy anywhere. Here is what the H5075 broadcasts, what we read from it, and the one setting that stops it working.
-
How to tell the power went out
Six ways to know the pedestal died, what each one costs you in delay and false alarms, and the pairs that tell you what actually happened rather than just that something did.
-
104 volts, and nothing tripped
Surges get the attention and low voltage does the damage. What a sagging pedestal looks like on a chart, what a miswired one looks like on the first poll, and why the EMS rather than the alert is what protects the rig.