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Battery monitor
- Thread starter Rottman
- Start date
Hi John, I thought great my van has a tracker but alas doesn't have that feacher it's tracker uk which us yours
I had a Phantom, which came with the van when new. I stopped it after a few years as I felt it was no longer value for money.
Like others, I thought I would rely on my insurance in case of theft.
I would have liked a tracker to record my trips when we did them. You can download each and every trip. Even zoom in to see what side of the road you went on.
Worth looking at, I bet they have reduced in price a lot by now. Popular with the transport industry.
John
We have the Phantom tracker which notifies you when the battery drops below 12v. Also can see monthly mileage. Able to rack the caravan from my laptop. We think it is worth the subscription for peace of mind.
How do you use the laptop to track? Domyou mean entering manually?
Thats the sort of thing I was refering to in#6. Most of them are sold as trackers first, but a lot will also monitor voltage.
Two things to look out for are monthly sim charges, and subscriptions.
Refresh rates (how often they record your position). This will vary. From 20 seconds to 4 hours so far as I can see. Delivery companies will use the much faster rate for example.
John
I log into my account and can see the location of the caravan which is how I know when the dealer moves it from their storage area into the workshop which cna be helpful. LOL!
I thought you meant tracking your journeys across Europe. Something I feel would be useful but is not something that Phantom offers. There are phone apps that can do it. But they require lots of intervention.
There are a lot of trackers that can do this very well, and they monitor the battery and give an alarm if moved without permission but they can be costly in subscriptions.
Each time I look there seems to be more choice and better value. If I still had the caravan I would get this one. (or similar). £35 up front and £70 per year.
Theft, vibration, battery, and the journey taken.
If they existed 40 years ago, I would now be able to look back on every caravan holiday we had had. I think that is the appealing thing for those beginning their caravaning life. Phantom has the technology to provide this extra service, I asked them once and they had no intention of doing so.
John
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Most satnav scan do it too.
Not sat navs I have had!
Apple maps and Google maps can but extracting historical journeys is something I would not know how to do. Apps like ‘track my tour’ can enhance the experience by allowing comments and photos. But, so far as I know. These all require intervention. Maybe pre-planning, waypoint adding, etc.
The tracker I suggested works in the background and will do theft and battery monitoring as well. Each journey is recorded on the cloud and can be extracted and/or archived.
I see this as being ideal for caravaning as caravans move more often than not, for, hopefully, a meaningful reason.
‘Map my walk’. If it worked for vehicle journeys, would work very well. Only requires pressing start and stop.
When I could walk. We usually remembered to press start when it was far too late. I know that that is not just me.
John
the best way to protect the battery would be to make sure you have everything turned off and have a small solar panel to keep it charged. … but read on
if You have a battery monitoring system its really useful not just to have the voltage, but graphs so you can see the downward trend. Also automatic alerts to give you warning by text or email. some Graphing systems are better than others. This is one I got from phantom tracker while caravan was at a dealers. You can see the voltage decline. I was following this and had to tell the dealer there was a battery drain and to plug the caravan in. They did this a couple of times, but didn’t look for the source of the drain (Alde heating circulation pump). the phantom system didn’t use much battery power and a 20w solar panel kept everything going, as long as something wasn’t on (we had problems with the radio turning on)
the spikes are due to solar panel charging the battery, you can see the sudden rapid decline in battery voltage so you need alerts below a certain voltage. After the sudden drop it was plugged in for 7+ days, voltage was steady (no sun spikes). Then a slow steady decline.
the graph auto ranges so normally just shows the voltage from 14 to 10 volts, expanding the scale if needed. Really good.
this second graph from my current van, this was supplied with the van. Not very good. The pinch to zoom in should read “unpinch” or “stretch”. It doesnt show more detail. Why do the need a battery scale from 0 volts to 20?
Yes it’s really useful to measure voltage. My current van drains a constant 0.2 A. (According to the remote monitoring.)it’s has 80W solar and for a month it couldn’t supply enough power to keep eveything going. I had to go and plug it in to the mains and then turn off all power till the suns intensity was higher.
Phantom offered a great service, contacting you when alarm went off, battery disconnected and email alerts. and battery monitoring was great. However the annual cost never went down (I had the service over two vans for 16 years.). And the cost of the device didn’t seem to get cheaper. When I had problems with it then sent engineer to van when I was in scotland and he made proper connections, soldered, unlike the twisted wires done when the unit was swapped between caravans by the dealer. . he had 100 mile round trip.
So sorry to hear you are no longer towing … I have not done much this last 12 months.
We had to give up last year. After 39 years. Van sold but new owners not yet used. They text me today to ask for annother lesson as they have forgotten my previous instructions. I am meeting them at the van tomorow.
John
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