GPS tracking offers a number of benefits, including increasing margins by reducing operating costs and increasing asset utilization with real-time visibility across your fleet. When the assets are unpowered, your tracking solution must rely on its own power source while still offering the same location and security benefits needed for your fleet.

What is an unpowered asset?

Industries like construction, field services, utilities, state and local government, equipment rental companies, and more use a wide range of valuable equipment that can be considered an unpowered asset.

Non-powered equipment can include:

• Shipping containers

• Dumpsters

• Tractors

• Water tanks

• Frac tanks

• Excavators

• Loaders

• Portable toilets

• Specialized construction or field equipment

• City maintenance equipment (such as snow plows)

These unpowered assets can all serve essential, often specialized, roles for your operations and they can be a fairly substantial financial investment. If an asset has no power and can’t move on its own, you may not prioritize installing a GPS tracking solution to track them, but the truth is that often unpowered assets are the ones that need tracking the most.

Since unpowered assets aren’t always in use, they are often either rented out (which can help offset the up front cost of purchasing the asset) or stored on-site, often out in the elements. Losing an asset because it was rented and never returned or returned late can be very costly, but even if it’s in your yard, tracking down one piece of equipment can hurt your bottom line. The time it can take to track down a snow plow—for example—that you haven’t needed from spring through autumn can cause delays, especially if there is an urgent and unexpected need for that asset. For these reasons and more, it is important to have an easy way to track down your unpowered assets in a timely and efficient way.

How does unpowered asset tracking work?

For assets that don’t have their own power source like rail cars, select construction equipment, dumpsters, containers, and portable toilets, you need asset tracking that can power itself. Unpowered asset trackers like the ones Samsara offers operate off of lithium batteries and perform scheduled check-ins through cellular networks. 

This is ideal for monitoring unpowered assets where real-time tracking would be unnecessary, especially for smaller assets that can be easy to miss in a yard with much larger equipment. By only sending daily updates, unpowered asset trackers minimize battery usage while promoting stronger asset management. This means that you will have battery power to find your assets when you need them. 

Here are some other ways that asset trackers can improve your operations:

• Partner visibility: For trailers specifically, being able to report the latest from your GPS asset provides your customers peace of mind.

• Asset protection: Geo-fencing — a virtual perimeter that you set — can help protect your assets from theft or unauthorized use by alerting you and anyone you designate if your non-powered assets go past the boundaries.

• Optimized asset scheduling: Managing inventory can be challenging with large fleets, but with GPS tracking metrics, dispatchers can easily see which assets are working which jobs and creates schedules of your leased assets so you’ll never accidentally double book machines you need.

• Automated, real-time data: Manual tracking is time-consuming and inefficient, but the right GPS tracker can save you time and money with a more efficient, data driven way to track assets.

• Asset utilization: Unpowered assets come with significant cost in terms of maintenance, insurance, and storage costs. Having GPS tracking information can let you know if your unpowered assets are being used so you can optimize for efficient utilization and maximize potential to drive revenue from renting out your assets for use.

How do Samsara customers track their unpowered asset inventory?

To get a better idea of how unpowered asset tracking helps streamline asset recovery, let’s look at one of our successful customers, Cable East. Samsara Asset Tracking was instrumental in daily location checks of Cable East’s 400+ assets, providing the fleet management team with crucial GPS location data. By tracking their fleet of equipment, Cable East ensured they had the assets they needed to complete each job.

Over the course of four years, Cable East recovered $2.5 million worth of assets, which would have been permanently lost without Samsara. "I can physically put my hands on $2.5 million in assets that we never would have seen again without Samsara," said Billy Porter, Director of Risk Management. “These recoveries were a direct result of the enhanced visibility and monitoring capabilities provided by Samsara.”

Cable East uses geofencing to automatically track assets that should only be used in specific geographic areas, and receives alerts if those assets leave that area. This automated approach to asset tracking saves the back office team time and streamlines the monitoring of expensive equipment. In addition to peace of mind, this asset recovery continues to pay off for Cable East.

“If we continued to pay Samsara in perpetuity and never recovered another piece of equipment, I think we’d still owe Samsara money. What we’ve already saved in recovered assets means our investment in Asset Tracking has already paid for itself several times over,” said Porter.

Improving efficiency and reducing costs with Samsara unpowered asset trackers

Organizations across various industries depend on heavy-duty, high-cost equipment on a daily basis, so losing even just a single piece of that equipment is not an option. This is why Samsara's unpowered asset trackers are built with:

• A durable, waterproof shell that will outlast the harshest conditions.

• Anti-theft screws and a custom screw bit.

• An easily camouflaged surface designed to bond with any standard spray paint.

• Cellular connectivity with purpose-built LTE-M capabilities to keep you connected in the most remote locations.

• Long-lasting lithium batteries that last between 3-5 years.

Our purpose-built hardware is coupled with all of the functionality you’d expect from a non-powered asset tracker and much more. Here are some of the benefits that the AG51 offers:

• Affordable asset tracking: Our unpowered asset trackers are available at a competitive price and designed to protect your mobile assets, even when they are left at public construction sites or leased out.

• Lost or stolen asset detection and recovery: In cases of theft or unauthorized use, our easy-to-use, customizable geofence alerts will contact you via email or SMS the moment your asset moves outside of designated areas.

• Automatic inventory and dormancy reports: Our tracker syncs with Samsara’s cloud-based dashboard, giving you automated inventory reporting and a visual map of all of your assets in one place, eliminating the need for manual inventory checks.

• Long battery life for unpowered use: The included batteries are replaceable and last between 3-5 years with 2 check-ins per day, enabling long-term monitoring of assets leased out or left on job sites for years at a time.

• Easy installation: With a weatherproof and water-resistant design (IP 67 and IP69K rating), Samsara Unpowered Asset Gateways can be installed on any mobile asset in less than 5 minutes using either durable, high strength tape or anti-theft screws.

If you’d like to learn more about how Samsara can help you protect and optimize your unpowered assets, dive into our Asset Tracking solution and reach out to our team today.