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.
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The charger stops, and you find out next spring
The converter, the solar and the alternator all fail the same way from the battery’s point of view. Why “alert when current goes negative” fires every night of your life, and the rule that works instead.
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Set the floor where morning is soon enough
A battery threshold is a decision about when you want to be told, not about when the battery is unhappy, and almost everybody sets it too low the first time. Where the floor goes by chemistry, and the ten-second sum that turns a percentage into hours.
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The generator started. The transfer switch did not.
Nothing we read knows a generator exists, so every method here is inference. One pairing still catches the expensive failure: the set ran for four hours and the coach was never connected to it.
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The pedestal is fine and the rig is dead
Three readings, in order, and the answer is usually immediate: is the post alive, did the EMS choose this, and how much of the rig is still drawing. What they decide is which direction you walk.
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The motorhome that would not start in April
A motorhome has two batteries and they fail differently. The house bank gets emptied by something that switched on; the chassis battery by things that never switch off, over months, with nobody looking.
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The only battery fault that gets hot
A charger that stops announces itself in a day. A charger that never stops takes a season and costs the bank. The current beside the voltage splits one alert into two very different afternoons.
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Your hub went offline. Was it the power or the internet?
A hub cannot report its own death, so both failures arrive as the same silence. Four ways to tell them apart after the fact, and the wiring that stops the question being ambiguous in the first place.
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Why the hub goes offline every time you pull out of a site
Usually it is only the campground Wi-Fi falling behind you. Occasionally it is a socket switched with the ignition, which makes every drive a blind gap and every winter a write-off. A two-minute test tells you which.
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A sensor went quiet, and the card already knows why
Out of range, out of battery, or somebody picked it up: three causes, one symptom, three different Saturdays. Every clue that separates them is already on the sensor’s own card, in the last frames before it stopped.