Long-term measurement of cardiovascular variables by telemetry in laboratory animals has become indispensable in recent years. However, limited battery life and management of large volumes of recorded data are major drawbacks. These limitations can often be overcome by intermittent sampling of data. The question is, how much data does one need to collect to accurately reflect the underlying average value? To investigate this, 24h continuous recordings of rabbit heart rate, arterial pressure and integrated renal sympathetic nerve activity were resampled using a variety of protocols that differed with respect to the number of individual sampling periods used and the total amount of time that was sampled. The absolute percentage errors of estimates of the daily mean, standard deviation and inter-quartile range were calculated for each sampling protocol. A similar analysis was repeated using arterial pressure data from rats. The results show that the number of sampling periods spread throughout the day had more effect than the total amount of data recorded. For example, just 2 hours of total sampling time spread over 12 evenly spaced ten minute periods gave estimates of the daily mean of blood pressure and heart rate with <1% error and renal SNA with <3% error. We show that accurate estimates of the daily mean of arterial pressure, heart rate and renal SNA can all be made using scheduled recording and we recommend recording a minimum of 2 hours per day spread over a number of periods throughout the day.