Winnebago Connect App ‘Brings RVs Into the 21st Century’ – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
Apps that allow you to remotely monitor and control various functions on your car have been around for years, and now the RV industry is catching up, according to a report by Motor Trend. Industry heavyweight Winnebago has now entered the fray with its new Connect in-vehicle system that—you guessed it—connects to the Winnebago smartphone app, and you’ll never want to go RVing without it again.
What’s So Connected About It?
RVs, if you’re unfamiliar, have a lot of features that require your attention and care. Everything from lights to water pumps to climate control, kitchen appliances, slide-outs, and holding tanks. Nearly all of them are used every day while traveling, and every one needs to be monitored. In the past, checking the amount of fresh water left in your tank or the electricity left in the battery meant finding one of several tiny panels (often one for each system) with LED lights indicating levels. It all works, but it’s not a particularly smart or modern system. These days, like so many other things, there’s an app for that.
Winnebago Connect links every major system and even a few minor ones together and lets you monitor and control them through a touchscreen in the vehicle and on the Winnebago app on your phone. Linked electrical systems include interior and exterior lighting, heating, air conditioning, and ventilation, the fresh water pump, the instant water heater, slide-outs (if equipped), powered awnings (if equipped), door locks, and the pet mode (runs the heat or A/C to keep your pet safe while you’re away).
You can also control the inverter that powers all these systems, monitor the charge of the 4.1-kWh lithium-ion battery that powers them, start and stop the onboard propane generator, monitor instantaneous power usage, and monitor incoming power from the solar panels (optional) and shore power, if connected.
The system also allows you to check the state of all your liquids. On the water and waste side, you can see the fresh water level, gray water level, and black water level in both gallons and percentage of total capacity. For the generator and single-burner gas cooktop (complemented by a single-burner induction cooktop), you can see the level of the propane tank.
The phone app is intuitive and well laid out, with a dashboard that lets you see the status of all the major systems, toggle them on or off, and adjust the climate control. The connect screen gives you granular access to every system connected to the app, letting you control everything from individual lights to the awning, slide-outs, door locks, water heater, and more. It’ll even let you see the exact amount of power being used and an estimate of how long the battery will last based on that draw.
