A rental contract can tell you when a trailer or portable heater should come back. It can’t tell you where that equipment actually is.
That’s been the story for unpowered equipment. Trailers, job boxes, tanks, welders, and similar assets don’t have a practical power source for wired telematics, so they’re often the part of the rental fleet with the least data.
Trackunit Spot S300 closes that gap. It’s a battery-powered tracker that installs without wiring, connects directly over cellular, and brings that equipment into the rest of the connected fleet.
Spot S300 is a battery-powered cellular tracker designed for unpowered asset tracking.
The first challenge is simply getting enough of these assets connected. Installing one tracker is easy. When installers need to repeat that process across hundreds or thousands of assest, that’s different kind of challenge. One where installation time, configuration, and battery maintenance start to matter as much as the tracker itself.
Spot S300 needs no wiring harness or gateway. An installer mounts it with a screw or magnet mount, activates it on the spot, and it reports directly over LTE Cat 1 bis into Trackunit Manager, the same fleet management system already covering the rest of the fleet.
Battery life is dependent on reporting frequency. At the default rate of four reports a day, spot S300 batteries last up to seven years. Reporting frequency can be easily adjust in Trackunit Fit or Manager.
When a battery does need replacing, it swaps out in about five minutes without tools, and Device Health flags a battery nearing end of life so replacement can be planned rather than a tracker just going dark.
Once equipment is connected, one of the simplest benefits appears at the end of a rental. The contract says it’s ended, but the rental coordinator still needs to know where the physical asset is.
For an unconnected trailer or welder, finding out can mean contacting the customer, checking with the branch, or asking a driver to confirm its location. With Spot S300, the coordinator can find it in Trackunit Manager and start the collection process from its reported location.
Spot S300 provides the location. Trackunit IrisX can turn that into an exception automatically. The out-of-contract usage Blueprint surfaces equipment still checked out after its contract ends, instead of waiting for someone to notice.
The tracker answers “where is it?” The platform helps answer “does somebody need to do something about it?”
The same connection helps at the other end of the journey. A branch may know which assets are expected back, but the physical yard doesn’t always match the system, and for unconnected equipment, resolving that gap has meant checking the yard by hand.
Bringing trailers, heaters, and other unpowered assets into Trackunit Manager gives branch teams another way to verify what’s actually on site and flag anything that hasn’t returned as expected. It also means those assets don’t disappear from the digital fleet every time they move between a customer site, a truck, and the branch.
Location is useful, but a tracker can tell you something else too: Whether an asset is moving. Spot S300 uses movement data to help rental teams tell active equipment from equipment that’s sitting idle. This can help foster customer loyalty (and potential savings) with proactive knowledge on what a customer may need more of, or if an asset can come off rent
That isn’t the same as engine-runtime utilization, and it isn’t meant to replace wired telematics where that detail matters, but for equipment that previously produced no data at all, movement is still a useful signal.
Across a larger fleet, IrisX can turn that signal into a wider operational view. A fleet manager can use the site-optimization Blueprint for idle cost to flag equipment that looks underused and check whether it could be redeployed instead of buying more. None of it works, though, without the asset being connected in the first place.
Spot S300 connects the equipment that was previously too impractical to wire. Trackunit Manager and IrisX let rental teams to see Spot S300 units alongside the rest of their fleet, from finding an off-rent message board to flagging idle equipment before it costs money.
That’s the difference between adding another tracker and bringing another part of the rental fleet into the same operating system.
Learn more about Trackunit Spot S300 and how it brings hard-to-wire equipment into the connected rental fleet.
More visibility can lead to better fleet decisions. Learn more about how Trackunit Spot S300 connects the equipment your jobsites depend on.
About the author:
Martin Roath is Director of Product Marketing at Trackunit, where he leads go-to-market for Spot S300 and Trackunit’s other connectivity devices. Martin has spent more than two decades in industrial IoT and telematics, including nearly 20 years at ZTR Control Systems working with rental, OEM, and fleet customers, before joining Trackunit in 2021.
Is Spot S300 a GPS tracker or a cellular tracker? Both technologies play a role. Spot S300 uses GNSS satellite positioning to determine its location and LTE Cat 1 bis cellular connectivity to send that information to Trackunit Manager. It doesn’t need a nearby gateway or a wired data connection.
What equipment can Spot S300 track? It’s designed for equipment without a practical power source for wired telematics, including trailers, job boxes, light towers, tanks, welders, containers, and similar mobile assets.
How long does the Spot S300 battery last? Up to seven years at four reports a day. Reporting frequency can be adjusted in Trackunit Fit, and the battery can be replaced in about five minutes without tools.
