Boondocking Made Easy -> The Basics

The beast sits pretty at our boondocking spot on the coast near Sabine Pass, TX

So, we’re in our 3rd day boondocking here on the gorgeous TX coast. Yesterday it started off cloudy and ominous, but by 10AM the skies had cleared and our solar panels were cranking out more than 430W and 30Amps of power (even without tilting), and by early afternoon our batteries were fully charged. So far, everything is working perfectly and all this with an open view of the ocean and noone else in sight (there’s one other RV here, but he’s off on the beach where we can’t see him). This is such a serene and relaxing experience that I can totally see how boondocking can become addictive, but there are a lot of RVers who never do it simply because they either don’t have the experience or are too worried to try it. Well, here’s hoping I change your mind!

Boondocking is just so....relaxing...

Now, first things first RV’s are really ideal pieces of equipment for getting “out there”. Anyone who’s ever backpacked knows there’s very little you need to survive in the wild and with an RV you’ve got everything you need (and more) with you. Yet you can cook like a gourmet, sleep in luxury, and spend the day relaxing on your sofa completely protected by the elements. Your biggest threats are running out of water, gas, propane, or electricity. The first are easily handled with a little conservation, while the latter can be taken care of with a generator or solar panels.

There’s actually very little that we’ve done to prepare for boondocking. Last year we dry-camped many times without any “extra” prep work using simple conservation and the generator to top off our batteries daily. This winter we added a few extra boondocking luxuries, but none of these are really essential. Here’s what I consider the basics of the business, and I hope you’ll agree they’re all pretty harmless and easy to take care of:

1/ Conserve Water – RV’s come handy and ready with self-contained water tanks, and with just a few basic conservation tips you can get those tanks to last for a good long time. Our fresh water tank is 100 gallons which (these days) will last us 2 weeks. We keep portable water jugs handy for extra water too.

The "Big Buddy" Heater

2/ Conserve Propane - We really don’t use alot of propane. Cooking and the refrigerator only use a small/minimal amount. The only thing that can draw down your propane tanks in a big way is running the furnace for extended periods. When you’re boondocking this really isn’t practical (the furnace draws too much power), so we bought a portable “Big Buddy“ heater that we use to warm up the interior whenever we need to. Some RVers prefer the Olympian Wave Catalytic Heaters.

3/ Make Sure Your Batteries Get Recharged Regularly - When you’re off-the-grid all your electricity draw comes from your batteries. RV deep-cycle batteries can handle getting slowly discharged and recharged (that’s what they’re made for), but you don’t want to overdo it since that can age your batteries prematurely. The voltage on your batteries will drop as they discharge (for typical 12V wet-cell batteries, 12.7V is fully charged, while 12.2V is ~50% charge). Learn how to check the voltage, and before the charge gets too low (ideally before it gets below 50%), make sure to charge them back up to full power. Back when we only had the generator we would run it ~once/day to recharge our batteries. Now, our solar panels take care of business. We like to enter each evening with a happy, full set of batteries or (if it’s cloudy) we aim to get a full re-charge before we hit the 50% level.

LED lights => Huge power savers!

4/ Conserve Electricity- This is basic stuff. Since you only have limited juice in your batteries, make sure you turn off lamps that you’re not using and avoid “big draw” items (like aircon or electric water heaters) unless you’re ready to use the generator. This winter we enhanced our electricity usage by switching all our most-used lamps to LEDs, dropping our power usage from lighting by a factor of ~10. I’ll write another post on LEDs sometime for those who want more info on them.

5/ Watch Your Tanks - All the water that you use goes into either your grey or black tanks, and you’ll want to move and find a place to dump before they get full. Again, basic water conservation will go a long way to extending those tanks. We find our grey tank fills up first, well before our black tank is even half way there so we plan our boondocking stays around that.

Wouldn't you like to be here?

And that, as they say it, is pretty much it! Not that frightening, is it? The only missing piece of the equation is finding that perfect spot to go park the rig. I’ve covered a few key tips in a previous post and over the next months I’ll share our spots and methods (how we found them) on the blog too. 

Here’s hoping we see you, or rather hoping we’re far enough away that we don’t…out in the boonies someday

Going “Water-Green” = Conserving Water on the Road

Water, our most precious resource

Water = the giver of life, liquid of the Gods, precious gem of the universe. We tend to take it for granted, especially when it’s so easily reachable by the handy tap that magically purveys it into your house.

All that changes when you move into an RV, especially if you “dry-camp” or “boondock” (i.e. camp without direct water hook-ups) for any length of time. We’ve developed a renewed appreciation for this wonderful resource over our past year of RVing and although we started off as relative amateurs we have now become avid water-conservationists and Masters of the Tap. No longer do we blow through our 100 gallon water tank in a few days, but find that it now easily stretches to 2 weeks and could probably go longer with a little extra effort. In going RVing we’ve gone “water-green” and here’s the low-down for others looking to do the same:

How Much Water do you Really Need?
The average westernized person uses ~123 gallons (466 liters) of water/day at home (per The World Almanac). That’s an astounding amount of water and you wouldn’t last a day as a dry-camp RVer with that usage. Most of the waste goes to flushing the toilet, long showers and washing dishes. In reality a gallon/day of water will cover essential needs while 2 gallons/day should cover basic needs. We use just a couple of straight-forward conservation methods and run ~3.5 gallons/person/day. If we’re feeling luxurious and going all-out (full showers and all) we’ll use ~8 gallons/person/day. Any RVer should be able to do just fine on 4 gallons/person/day going down to 2 gallons/person/day for the more conservative lot.

Conservation Tips
Water conservation is really pretty basic stuff. Don’t let the taps run, use less to flush the loo, use any local camp facilities  and so forth, but here’s a few extra tips that help the mobile mover as well:

1. Dishes -> Wipe before you wash. When you wash your dishes, do a quick wipe with a paper towel to get off excess grease & bits before you put them in the sink, then save up your dishes so you only wash once/day. When washing do a sponge-on in a tub, and quick rinse off after. Never let the tap run.
One Step Further: Some people go further on this one by using disposable paper plates & cups which they trash at every meal (and thus avoid clean-up altogether). We prefer our real china and don’t like the excess trash, but it’s another idea for those who need it.

2. Loo Flushing -> Less is more. When flushing out the toilet a quick flush does just as well as a longer one. Some people keep a pail of external water handy and use that. Others only flush for #2′s. If you’re at a campground that has an on-site toilet, using the camp facilities obviously  helps to save your tanks.
One Step Further: If you’re way “out there” using the great outdoors and pooing in the wild (as long as it’s done properly) can also be a big saver. You don’t need much to cut back on this one.

Bathing with a washcloth can be...well...almost exotic

3. Bathing -> Go Navy-style or get out the sponge. If you’ve ever backpacked any length of time you know it doesn’t take much to get you clean. If you use the shower in the RV, the simplest thing is to go Navy-style and turn off the shower while you’re “lathering up”. Then, just rinse and dry. If you want to conserve further ditch the shower and use a sink/pail of water with a sponge or wash-cloth. Sponge, lather, sponge and dry. If you’re out boondocking in the wild it can be quite romantic to do this outside with your partner .
One Step Further: For the ultra-conservationist, baby wipes will do the job on all the “necessary bits” and they’ve kept me usably clean while backpacking many-a-time.

4. Washing Hands -> Switch to hand sanitizer. We waste a lot of precious water by washing our hands. So, instead of running the tap, buy a hand sanitizer dispenser and use that instead.

5. Brushing Teeth -> Use a cup. Instead of letting water run for brushing teeth, put some water in a cup and use that instead.

6. Drinking -> Get a portable container. Drinking water is the one area where you don’t want to conserve unless you’re absolutely forced to. So, drink as much as you fancy and supplement it with an external, portable container. We have a plastic 5-gallon jug that we fill-up before we go off. You can buy collapsible containers too.

7. Recycle -> Re-use your grey water. For those folks looking to extend even more you can re-use your grey water. When you wash the dishes, cook your veggies or brush your teeth, save that water and use it to flush the loo.

As you get more savvy in water-conservation you’ll find yourself limited much more by your grey tank (your waste water) filling up, than how quickly you use the main water tank. There are lots of ways to “stretch your tanks”, as we’ve covered previously, but in the end good water conservation is good for everyone, and with a little bit of creativity it can even be fun too.

A Crack in the Silver Lining

“There’s no way I can fix that” said Montie, looking skeptically at the RV
“It was bound to happen” thought I, rather dejectedly

Or rather, to put it more precisely, it was bound to happen just as we entered one of the least populated States in the country coasting along into no-man’s land to stay at a remote State Park, having just put 150 miles between us and the full-service RV repair center we’d used the day before.
 
Yes, it was a lot to think about all at once.
All in all, it really just served to prove the point that Murphy’s Law has a way of finding you when you least expect it, and as much as I like being right, this was a bummer of a situation.

So, this was the scene.
A deserted Wyoming road in the pouring rain, one lone car coming towards us and one large rock ejected into the air. The rock did a perfect interpretation of Newton’s Laws of Motion following a beautiful parabola right smack into our unsuspecting $2,500 windshield and  leaving a sharp and crystal-clear 1-foot crack as a souvenir. “Drat” and other stronger expletives are really the first things that come to mind. Then, you frantically try to wipe the thing in the ridiculous hope that it’ll erase away, followed by more swearing and finally a hollow acceptance than the darn thing is really cracked.

But, as the great philosophers always say (at least some of them), everything in life is a learning experience and so it was with this. Cracked windshields are, for the most part, covered by insurance (depending on your State & your insurance). So, a quick call to our agent followed by a chat with a windshield repair facility (Safelite came highly recommended on the RV forums) sent a man out to our State Park site the next day.

The repair people either fill the crack with a resin or they have to replace the whole windshield. In spite of the initial gloomy comment, Montie was a man of persistence and decided to try the resin even though cracks longer than a dollar bill usually don’t take them. We were ridiculously lucky and ours took…sort of. We’ve got a small bit at the end which may or may not hold, but we’re willing to take the chance instead of a full replacement (which our deductible would have us pay out-of-pocket).

Also Montie, as it turns out, is a 5-star man and wouldn’t accept payment since he couldn’t guarantee the crack would stick. He’s also a local and we chatted about the State Park, fishing and his band Broken Road (go check them out in Cheyenne at Little America if you’re in the area). So, if you find yourselves in the same situation as us do not fret…Safelite and Montie are here to save the day.

More on windshield repair in this excellent post:
http://rv-roadtrips.thefuntimesguide.com/2010/01/rv_windshield_glass.php

The foot-long crack that won't erase away. My finger is in the middle of the crack.

Safelite at our site in Curt Gowdy

Montie works his magic on the windshield

A Weighty Matter – RV weights, tire pressure and such

“How much do you weigh” is not thought to be the best way to start a conversation. In fact, with the female populace it could be an outright dangerous proposal. Amongst RV’ers, however, it can be a relaxed and accepted topic of conversation and indeed, a rather important one too. You see, how much you weigh can lead to other exciting topics such as tire pressure or loading options which will not only add years to the lifetime of your home, but can improve gas mileage and “save your butt” on the downhills. An overloaded RV can even void an insurance claim, so that’s all the more reason to know your numbers. So, how does one actually do this with a behemoth such as ours?

Well, the easiest way to weigh something is to place it on a scale. As it turns out that’s exactly what you do with an RV. You just need really, really big scales and a wide area to drive the monster onto. In to save the day come the truckers. These folks have been weighing for years, and their scales are actually open to anyone. Many of the major truck-stops such as Flying J’s or Pilots will have them (or you can look up your nearest CAT scale location here) and most of them will weigh front and rear axles independently. So, just mosey on in between the truckers, squeeze your rear wheels onto the scale and ask to be weighed. $9 and 5 minutes later you’ll have your poundage in all it’s glory.

As it turns out we weigh 11,820 lbs on our front axle and 20,400 lbs on our rear axle and that’s with 3/4 tank full of fresh water and LP and a full load of gas….almost fully-loaded so to speak. A quick reference to the RV manual lets us know we need to keep 105 psi  of pressure in in our two front tires and 92 psi in each of our 4 rear tires for optimal performance. So, that’s how we keep our butts in shape, RV-speaking.

Our svelte 32,220 lb monster in all her glory

Our weight certificate from the CAT scales in Quartzite, AZ