Please protect your pet when you travel. Just like a car, a travel trailer can turn into an extremely hot environment within a few minutes. Even on an 80 degree day a travel trailer can quickly exceed 100 degrees within an hour.
Travel Trailers are not as safe as your stick and brick house if the power goes out. Regular homes are much better insulated and would take a very long time to become uncomfortable for your pet. With an RV simply leaving the air-conditioning running in your travel trailer does not guarantee that your pet will be safe.
Air conditioners often fail; many RV Facebook pages talk about AC issues and outages. In addition, no campground is immune from power outages. Fortunately for the RV community there is a solution to keeping your pet safe; a pet temperature monitor! There are many different models and types to choose from.
I did a lot of research before I purchased my temperature monitor. Temperature monitors fall into basically two categories; those that use a cellular network or those that use an internet connection to communicate any issue to you. I knew I did not want to rely on the internet because it’s rare that you will find a decent internet connection at campgrounds; and I didn’t want to spend a fortune on an internet system for my travel trailer. So, it made perfect sense to me to seek out a unit that used a cellular network.
Once I knew I wanted a cellular unit, I began doing research on the units available. I spent hours reading reviews and blogs. I finally settled on the MarCell Remote Monitoring System. Not only did they have the highest reviews of any system I researched, their support is based here in the USA. My personal opinion is that having support here at home is a big benefit.
In the case of MarCell you can choose between AT&T or Verizon as your cellular provider; We chose Verizon.
There are several different cellular plans that you can choose from with the yearly plan (paid up front) being the cheapest. You can also pick a monthly or a seasonal plan.
So what will having a MarCell Monitor do for you? It will constantly watch for power outages and deviations in the temperature set points that you create on either your “Sensored Life” App (that you download to your smart phone), or on the Sensoredlife.com web page.
Although your dashboard is only updated every 8 hours, you will get instant text, call, or email updates should something go wrong with your temperature or power. If you really have a desire to view real time information, you can purchase instant update bundles. To be quite honest, the alerts should give you enough peace of mind that you really don’t need instant updates on your dashboard; but that is just my opinion.
If you are worried about the water leaks in your travel trailer you can also buy a remote sPuck water sensor for your MarCell. You could place this under a sink, shower etc, and it will notify you of any leak that occurs.
Once you take this unit out of the packaging, it really is just plug and play:
1: Plug the unit in
2: Register the unit on-line or with the APP and pay for whatever cellular plan you like.
3: Set up your limits for temperature and humidity. Then set up your email, text, or call notifications. The MarCell is unbelievably easy to set up in just a few minutes.
4: The Unit transmits data.
We have tested it for no power, out of temperature rage, and high humidity. It sent us both text messages and emails alerting us to take action. In addition we received alerts when power was restored. Our opinion so far is that this unit works flawlessly. If anything out of the ordinary happens, we will know immediately.
The cost of the unit on-line is typically $199.00 USD, however I bought directly from MarCell via their site www.meetmarcell.com for $179.00. If you are interested in purchasing a MarCell Remote Monitoring System you can use the code TTN20 and you will save another $20.00 off the purchase price, and that is a great value!
The Verizon cellular plan was $99.00 for the entire year. There are so many things we buy for our travel trailers that cost much more than $99.00 but fail to provide as much peace of mind. I think for the sake of our pets, a temperature monitor is a necessity and this one is a great value. Please remember to keep your pets safe!
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