 Welcome back to Road Gear Reviews, I'm Tom from Morton's On The Move, and today I'm taking a look at the Fensense wireless parking sensor that utilizes an app on your phone. Stick around. So most modern vehicles these days have some sort of a backup obstacle avoidance sensor system, or even on the front of the vehicle, obstacle avoidance sensor system that will read up on the dash if you're nearing an object when you're parking. The Fensense is a product that provides that functionality utilizing a device that you install around the license plate of your vehicle and an app that you install that actually shows if you're near an obstacle. It seems like it may be a kind of complicated system, but Fensense has done their best to make it as easy for you as possible. First of all, it starts out with really great packaging. When you first open the package, everything is laid out really nice and neat. It comes with an instruction card and also an installation manual that are really straightforward and well written. In the package, you'll first find the sensor plate license plate surround and all the hardware that you'd need to install it on your vehicle. It also comes with batteries. The sensor uses AA batteries and they provide lithium AA batteries with the unit. That's something to consider when you need to replace them in the future though is that the lithiums are going to last much, much longer than your standard alkaline batteries, so lithiums should probably be used with this product. The packaging also includes some tools to install it on your vehicle and a phone mount because the second part of this is a phone app that you actually connect to the unit to see what it's seeing. In the box, you'll also find their tap button, which is a quick launch button that tells your phone to open the app and start communicating with the sensor. Installation I found to be very straightforward. You select whether you want it on the front or the back of your vehicle or you can use it on both so you have obstacle avoidance front and back. We chose to install it on the front of our vehicle because we already had obstacle avoidance built in from the factory on the back of our vehicle. During the installation, you may need to adjust the sensors a bit to tilt them up or down if your license plate is a little bit angled. You want those sensors pointed pretty much straight back from your vehicle and there's little screw holes and it comes with the tools to adjust them so you can adjust those sensors up or down to make sure they're pointed straight out and away from your vehicle. Once you get your license plate installed, you install the quick launch button inside your vehicle, set up your cell phone holder if you want. Once you get it installed, you download the app from Google Play or the app store and you're going to have to set up an account with FenceSense to connect your sensor. Once you get your account set up, you're going to have to make sure your Bluetooth is on and the app is going to find the sensor and connect to it. It's then going to walk you through a number of setup parameters, how high it is from the ground, if it's upside down or right side up, which you might have to turn it upside down if you install it on the back of a truck because there is the bumper at the bottom or any vehicle that has too much bumper and the sensors might sense the bumper, you might have to flip it upside down and that's an option in the app. Once you got it all set up and you're ready to use it, there's a couple different ways to actually use it. First of all, you can go into your phone and you can select the app and open it up and it's going to bring it up and I find that it brings up the sensor really quickly and starts showing how far away on screen obstacles are. It doesn't actually give you distance to it, it's just kind of green, yellow, orange, red and it's going to tell you whether you're close to something basically. The second way to turn on the app is to press and hold the quick access button or the tap button for three seconds. On an iOS or Apple device, it's going to give you a notification that the app is running in the background. You can select that and if your phone is unlocked, it'll quickly open the app or if it's locked, you're going to have to unlock your phone and then it will display the app. I've found that using it in the iOS devices that even when you press the tap button and it turns on the app that it's running in the background and if you get close to something, you're going to hear it beep even if you can't see it displayed on the screen. On an Android device, this button can actually unlock the phone just for that one app and start displaying the information immediately. You get a display that shows your vehicle and whether it's installed on the front of the vehicle or the back of the vehicle and the distance. And as you get close to something, it will start to beep, beep, beep and as you get closer and closer, it'll actually go to a solid beep, indicating that you're way too close to something. So initially, we installed this on the front of our vehicle and you can actually see the little vehicle indication and then it's on the front. And we've used it a few times when pulling into parking spaces where we've got a cement wall in front of us or something and it's really hard to see over the front of a large truck like this to see where that obstacle is and it really does help you get really close to something without hitting it. We did also try installing this on the back of our vehicle and comparing it to the factory built in obstacle avoidance sensors on our 2010 Dodge pickup truck. What we found is that this system detects objects much further away than the factory system. However, it's not near as wide of a detection area. You're pretty much only going to detect objects that are right behind the vehicle. So in my testing, I found that the unit worked really well if I opened the app through the phone and selected the device. However, I found that particularly on my Android device, I have an older Samsung S5 phone that's already a little bit finicky that when I tried to use the tap button, it would take an extremely long time to open the app. Sometimes in minutes after I selected the button, which isn't convenient to actually turning it on quickly when you're in a parking lot and wanting to use it. Turning it on on my phone through the app, it connected almost instantly every time and would display the information pretty accurately. For an iOS device, I found that it was much more reliable to open the app in the background. However, you do have to unlock the phone to see that information. You can, however, hear it beeping when you're getting close to an obstacle because it is open in the background. That beeping sound overrides any silence that you have on your phone, so you're going to hear it regardless. And the volume can be turned on and off on the side of the app screen or in the settings, but it is recommended to leave it at full volume. Bringing up the app itself, it will initially open up the obstacle avoidance screen showing you what the sensor plate is seeing. However, there's a home button that if you go to that, you can leave the app open and it gives you some quick links, maps, Spotify, Pandora, things like that on the front of the screen so that if you're going to leave it up on the dash of your vehicle, you can quickly access some of these apps while you're driving. The settings in the app provide all kinds of information. You can have it give you notifications of when the app's on and off. You can manage the devices, which are the sensor plates and the tap buttons. You can have multiple sensor plates attached to one app so that you can see front and back on the vehicle. The app overall, I feel like is relatively well built. I haven't had any issues with it. It hasn't crashed on me. What I don't like about the app is that it does require that login and that is a problem right now. We don't have any cell service and because of that, I can't make any changes to the devices. When we moved it to the back of the vehicle to test it against the factory sensors, I couldn't tell it that I wanted it to be on the back of the vehicle because it requires an internet connection to make that change in your account on the fence and servers somewhere. The good thing about having a login is that when we switched between different phones and we logged into the other phone, it automatically recognized the plates and the tap buttons on the second phone and it was ready to go. There was no more setup required on the second phone. So that was definitely a good thing about having an account is that if you get a different phone or you switch to someone else's phone, all you have to do is log in on that and it's going to remember all your devices. We found that if you have the clearance and height settings adjusted properly on the unit, that it can detect obstacles even like a curb pretty accurately. The unit also gives you left and right indication of where the obstacle may be. However, in comparison to the built-in vehicle systems, it is not near as wide. It's only a couple feet wide and if an obstacle was near the corner of your vehicle, it could definitely miss it and you could still strike that obstacle. Overall, from my experience, to use this every day as a extra safety step in your vehicle, it would definitely take some getting used to. You'd either have to figure out how to make that tap button work or you'd have to just get in a habit of setting up your phone and having the app on so that you can quickly access the app to get that information up on your screen. For me, it was a little bit of a hassle to actually get that on when I'm about to park. But if I did remember to press that button as I was pulling into the parking lot, it was typically ready to go and it could just be on while you're getting ready to park. We did not try this on the back of our RV, but we did test the range just by walking away from the unit and it seems like it has a pretty good range. I'm going to say maybe around 50 feet or so. So this might be a really neat option for small RVs that don't have a camera on the back or something and you just want an extra set of eyes, if you will, watching behind the rig in case you were maybe to run something over. This is also a great option for just vintage vehicles or older vehicles that don't have any obstacle avoidance and maybe don't have really good visibility because this is basically an extra set of eyes to help you park. One thing that's pretty cool about it is that in this big Dooley truck I can't see the tailgate of the truck and I don't know if I'm driving away with the tailgate down but with this app I can just turn it on and if it senses an obstacle and I clearly know there's no obstacles there then I've left the tailgate open. This unit is not for telling exact distances away to obstacles. The colored bars don't represent that but it'll definitely tell you if you're close to hitting something. We've used it for a couple months and the battery percentage on the sensor has only gone down a couple percent so I'm guessing it's going to last a good six months to a year of usage. They say not to submerge the device but we've definitely been through some really heavy rain. We've also driven through some streams and creeks where it's been splashed on the front of our vehicle and it hasn't had any problems yet. Overall I think it's a relatively well-built product. It's a US-based company that designs and sells the product. However, it is manufactured in China. I think overall it's a really sound concept. Getting it to integrate with everybody's phones especially when you've got some that are just overloaded and a little finicky like my own it can be a little bit difficult to use those apps but if you need this functionality the product itself works pretty well and it will definitely provide you an extra set of eyes on your bumper. This has been my thoughts and review on the Fensense Wireless Parking App and Sensor. Thanks for watching. Definitely be sure to tune in every week for new road gear review videos. We'll see you next time.