Hello Sailor – Boat Monitoring

Now, with all of these systems, once the novelty of checking your battery voltages from home has worn off, they settle down to being used a few times a month, to turn on the heating or warn you of a low battery or intruder, and it’s here where Hello Sailor becomes truly affordable. There are no ongoing subscription fees, just a Pay As You Go SIM card of your choice - once you’ve bought the unit it’s yours. A suggested SIM card is included but the makers are keen to hear of any new deals that customers find, with the latest deals from new companies like 1p mobile, this could work out to a few pence a year, bringing boat monitoring within reach of almost all of us.

With many systems keeping their basic units at a low price, they make up the shortfall on sensors, and on subscriptions that typically run at around £10 a month. This may be a price worth paying for those of us who love our boats and can’t keep them on a mooring at the end of the garden, but it seems a high monthly cost for something you hope will only be sending you a few messages a year. Hello Sailor say by using text messages rather than a cloud server they are able to remove any monthly costs to the user.

When asked if they’ll be building an app, they say they might if people really want it, but it goes against their ethos - it’s just a pretty way of displaying the same information. With app development costs running to tens of thousands of pounds, and a longer backline route for data through a cloud provider such as Amazon or Google, each wanting it’s cut for a message alongside the phone company, they say they don’t see the need to be reducing reliability and adding these monthly costs. Currently, by sending the message Status to the unit, it replies with a message listing what’s happening with each sensor, and whether any alarms have been triggered but not yet reset by the user. There are a few other messages for querying the signal strength, controlling a relay, and setting the number to text in the event of an alarm, but that’s basically it.

Until recently, the ability to control something onboard using your phone would have seemed like an unnecessary extravagance for most boaters. But as many of us get used to connected homes and the ability to know everything from anywhere, the option to turn on the heating before you arrive at your boat seems one worth taking. The unit itself has an onboard solid-state relay large enough to control the switches of most devices, but if you don’t want to hack into your heater wiring, using that output to control a standard automotive or AC relay lets you wire it the easy way. 

The goal has been to make a device that can be used on all boats and all moorings, even those that don’t have the perceived safety of a marina gate and staff to look after them. Drawing only 12 milliamps brings Hello Sailors power to within the range of an automatic bilge pump sensor, which typically draws around 8 milliamps when the pump isn’t running. The use of text messages rather than an internet cloud has been a deliberate move to use the method most likely to get the data from your boat to your phone. Even if you only have a tiny signal on your phone or mooring, an SMS text will get pushed through by the phone company, bypassing the alternative internet based route through that cloud service, and the costs incurred. By sticking with these initial goals, the makers seem to have created a boat monitoring system that we can all use.