Waggle Pet App-RVing with Ease 4+

We bought this app and the associated monitoring unit in Spring, 2018 for a 13,000 km trip, much of it in the southern US, from California to North Carolina. We were worried about exposing our small dog to high temperatures, and boy, was it hot. The unit is small, well built and easy to use: it’s based on a commercial unit used in walk-in freezers and refrigerated trucks. It connected us automatically to cell networks across Canada and the US as we travelled. Your annual subscription fee pays for that cell service. If the temp in the vehicle goes above or below the threshold you set, it begins firing off text messages and/or emails to warn you. Bonus in winter: if you leave your vehicle outside in the cold and plugged in, you can call the app up and get a reading of the temperature in your RV as well as ensure that the interior power is on, since the app shows whether the unit’s rechargeable battery, which only lasts 24 hours, is charging from shore power. I have found that outdoor GFI outlets can sometimes trip unexpectedly, and I enjoy being able to use this as confirmation that shore power is live, rather than find out potentially weeks later that my house batteries are dead.

It’s great in principle, but not useful for traveling because you can’t turn it off. The battery lasts only about three days. It’s a very poor design choice because you don’t need it 95% of the time, but you can’t power it off to save battery.

Also the subscriptions are quite expensive considering it is only a remote thermometer. No option to use it one month (as most trips fit into a month); they force you to buy a longer subscription that you may not need. Look forward to more competition in this space.