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Hardware & power

Winter and long-term storage

Keep an asset tracked through the off-season without coming back to a dead battery.

4 min read

An asset in storage has the opposite requirements to one in service. You do not need a position every thirty seconds for a boat that has been shrink-wrapped since October — you need to know it is still where you left it, and you need the battery to survive until spring.

Reporting cadence in normal and storage modeIn normal use the tracker reports every 15 to 30 seconds while the ignition is on and every 60 seconds while it is off. In storage mode it reports about once an hour regardless, which greatly reduces battery drain while still reporting position, voltage and tampering.Normalin serviceevery 15–30s while moving · 60s while parkedStorageoff-seasonabout once an hour, ignition or notPosition, voltage and tamper detection all keep working — they just arrive less often.
Storage mode trades resolution for battery life. Nothing is switched off — reports simply arrive hourly instead of every half minute.

Storage mode

Turning on storage mode for an asset drops it to roughly one report an hour, regardless of ignition state. Position, voltage, and tamper detection all keep working; they simply arrive on a slower cadence. The result is a large reduction in power draw and cellular chatter.

  1. 1
    Open the asset in Assets

    Find the storage-mode toggle in its settings.

  2. 2
    Turn storage mode on

    The change is sent to the tracker over its live connection, so it takes effect within a minute or two while the unit is online.

  3. 3
    Confirm the cadence changed

    Check back an hour later and confirm a report arrived. Do this while the asset is still accessible, not after it is wrapped.

  4. 4
    Turn it off in spring

    Before the first rental, not after.

The rest of the winter checklist

  • Put the asset battery on a maintainer if you have power at the storage location. A tracker on a maintained battery is a non-issue.
  • If there is no power, expect to check voltage once a month in the dashboard — that is the whole point of leaving it connected.
  • Draw a storage-yard geofence with entry and exit alerts. An asset leaving the yard in January is not a false alarm.
  • Shrink wrap does not block GPS. Metal winter covers and indoor racking in a steel building can, and an asset that goes quiet the day it is stored indoors is almost always this.
A silent stored asset is still an alert

Set an offline alert with a generous window — 48 hours, say. In storage mode a genuinely healthy unit still reports hourly, so silence means something.

NextTamper and wire-cut alerts
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