Low on a wall in your rig, near the fridge or under the dinette, there is a small plastic box with a green light on it. You have walked past it a thousand times without looking at it. Take it off the wall tonight and turn it over: there is a date on the back, and if that date has gone by, nothing else here matters half as much as replacing it.
That box is why people ask us, regularly, whether RoamVitals will support carbon monoxide and propane detectors so a gas alarm turns up on the phone like everything else. Two questions are folded into that one, and they get opposite answers.
We are never going to be your carbon monoxide detector. That is a decision rather than a gap in the roadmap, and most of this page is the reasoning. Telling you that your detector has gone off is a different job, additive to your safety rather than a substitute for it, and yes, we want it. It does not exist yet because the alarms people own have no radio in them.
Three different things get called “gas sensing” and only two of them are life safety.
Carbon monoxide and propane leaks are alarms. They exist to wake you up in the dark, immediately. We support neither, on purpose, and the rest of this page is why.
Carbon dioxide is not an alarm, it is air quality. Nobody is killed in their sleep by the CO2 level in a camper; they wake up foggy, which is a ventilation problem with a five second fix. That one we do read.
One job, no dependencies
A certified CO or LP alarm is built around a single promise. When there is gas, it makes a loud noise, immediately, on its own power, without needing anything else in the world to be working.
Everything we do depends on other things working. The sensor has to be in Bluetooth range, the hub powered, the internet and our servers up, your phone in signal and somewhere you will look at it. That chain is fine for “the rig is getting warm” and completely unacceptable for “there is carbon monoxide in the bedroom”. A late temperature alert is a worse outcome; a late CO alert is not an outcome at all.
Every device page on this site carries the same line, and it is worth repeating: RoamVitals is a monitoring and convenience product. It is not a smoke, carbon monoxide, LP gas, security or medical device, and it must never replace certified life-safety equipment. We would rather lose the sale than have somebody quietly downgrade their smoke alarm to a phone notification.
The second reason is about people rather than radios. A phone that occasionally shows a gas notification teaches you, quietly and over months, that gas notifications happen and are usually nothing. Nobody should have that habit about carbon monoxide. An alarm ought to be startling every time, and staying startling means staying rare, loud and in the room with you.
The unexciting shopping list
Three things, and not one of them is clever. Two are cheap and the third is free.
Check the date on the one you already have
RV gas alarms expire. Typically five to seven years from manufacture rather than from the day you bought the rig, because the sensing element degrades whether or not it has ever seen gas. A used rig can easily be running an alarm that went out of date two owners ago, and it looks exactly like a working alarm the whole time.
It will still show a green light. The green light means it has power, and that is the only thing it has ever meant. If yours is past its date, replacing it is the highest-value thing on this page, and it costs less than any sensor we sell.
Height is not a detail
Propane is heavier than air and pools low, so an LP detector belongs near the floor. Carbon monoxide mixes fairly readily and is generally mounted at or above head height. A combination unit is a compromise between the two, which is why plenty of rigs ship one of each instead. An alarm in the wrong place is a decoration, and moving it costs ten minutes and two screws.
A second CO alarm where you sleep
Most rigs ship with one, usually in the main living area, and most rigs also have a bedroom door that closes. CO poisoning happens overwhelmingly to people asleep, and a closed door puts more acoustic distance between you and that alarm than the floor plan suggests. A battery CO alarm in the sleeping area is cheap, goes up with one screw, and is independent of the rig’s electrics entirely. That independence is the point.
Relaying an alarm is not the same as being one
Everything above is about why we will not be the detector. Relaying one is a different job, and a good one, so it is worth being clear about what that would look like.
Picture a CO alarm sounding in a rig at a campground with nobody in it and the dog inside. It screams into an empty kitchen for four hours while you are up a trail with no signal. The alarm did exactly what it was built to do.
Nobody heard it.
In the version we would build, the certified alarm stays exactly what it is: independently powered, UL and RVIA listed, sounding whether or not anything else in the world is up. We would add nothing to the detection chain and take nothing out of it. There would simply also be a message on your phone.
So why is it not built?
Because there is nothing to listen to. The certified RV alarms people actually own, the MTI, Atwood and Safe-T-Alert units screwed to the wall of almost every rig, are deliberately standalone. No radio is a feature: nothing to pair, nothing to update, nothing extra to fail at two in the morning. It also means the alarm cannot tell anybody anything beyond making noise in the room.
Our side has been ready for a while. Alarm state is a first-class decoded reading, the same as leak or motion, listed with everything else we read in the compatibility database. Any device broadcasting BTHome v2 with an alarm flag would be read today, with no change to our software. What is missing is a product broadcasting it.
Two ways that gap closes, and we are interested in both:
- A bridge on the alarm’s own output. Many certified alarms have relay or signal terminals meant for an external siren or an automatic gas shutoff valve. A small board watching those contacts and broadcasting BTHome would work the day you switched it on, because that path is already decoded. Anybody comfortable with an ESP32 can build it today.
- A wired input on the hub. The same idea with the radio hop taken out, the alarm’s output going straight into the hub on a pair of wires. Under consideration for a future revision.
If this is what you want, say so on the request board. It is one of the few features where the number of people asking changes the decision, because the answer involves hardware rather than a decoder rule. What will not happen is an uncertified BLE gas sensor sold as a replacement for the box on your ceiling.
What we can see today
Not the gas. The conditions that tend to produce it, which is a smaller claim and a real one.
- A generator running when it should not be. Shore power monitoring shows the rig drawing from somewhere, and a generator left running while everyone is asleep is the classic CO story. It shows as a power reading long before it shows as gas.
- A furnace short cycling or failing to light. Interior temperature against furnace runtime tells you the appliance is misbehaving, and a misbehaving combustion appliance is worth investigating before it produces anything.
- Propane going down faster than the weather explains. Usually that is an appliance running more than you thought. Occasionally it is a leak, and a leak is a job for a technician and a bottle of soapy water.
That is the honest shape of it: we can help you notice a situation developing, and the box on the wall is what protects you when it does. We do also read carbon dioxide, the measurement people most often mean when they ask about gas sensing and not a safety alarm at all. If the real question was stale air in a sealed camper overnight, that is a different post with a happier answer.
If you smell gas
Leave. Take everyone and the animals with you. Do not operate switches, do not light anything, do not go looking for the source first. If the tank valve is on your way out, shut it as you pass; if it is not, keep walking.
Then call somebody qualified. Nearly everything else in RV ownership rewards having a look yourself before you phone anyone, and this is the one that does not.
Which brings it back to that box on the wall with the date on the back. Go and turn it over tonight. It is the cheapest five minutes of safety in the rig, and the one piece of equipment in there that needs nothing from us, the internet or your phone to do its job.
