Boondocking Made Easy -> The Basics
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
you are going to love the freedom of boondocking also called dry camping…we certainly do….
Yeah, I definitely think this is going to be the way forward for us (more and more). I just love getting “out there”! Nina
We adore boondocking out in the boonies – and it’s amazing how many places are accessible, even to rigs that aren’t designed to go off-roading (like ours is).
Another tip we’ll share for when you’re in dry climates that are hot – is using evaporative cooling to keep cool. Great way to save needing to turn on the generator to run the AC. We just put the exhaust fans on ‘in’ mode, and attach a wet towel underneath them. We also use a water mister (like the Misty Mate) to spread cool vaporized water around that immediately evaporates after cooling you down about 20 degrees.
Cherie, What an awesome little idea! We’re definitely going to do more boondocking as we get further out West, and going into dry/hot climate your tip will definitely come in handy. Cheers! Nina
Hi guys,
I’m extremely curious about the solar panels you have. Could I trouble you to share with me the kind of panels you have, where you went to have them installed, and what the total cost was?
Todd
Todd, No problem! Actually I wrote a 3-part series on our whole Solar Panel experience back in Jan, so I’ll route you to that. We went through alot of thinking both about what we wanted, what we bought and how we installed them. Here are the links:
RV Solar Part I – The Discovery Process
RV Solar Part II – The Equipment
RV Solar Part III – The Installation
Lemme know if you have anymore questions! Nina
Hey Nina — another great post. It sounds like your boonie time is most constrained by the grey tank, did I read that right? If so, can you get more time by transferring some of the grey to the less full black tank? Or, are you out of water at that point so it doesn’t really matter? When we used to take long boat trips with the kids we were usually constrained by running out of water at about the 2 week point (~100 gallons, 4 people). On boats, the grey just goes overboard, so it’s a race between black filling and fresh running out. At 2 weeks, we were pretty much ready to move anyway, so it wasn’t too big of a deal. =)
100 gallons for 2 weeks w 4 people. That’s pretty darn good water management! You’re definitely an expert there. In our case the grey does limit us the most. We have 100 gallon fresh, 60 gallon grey and 40 gallon black. The black lasts forever, so unless we’re in a spot where you can legally “water the plants” (a controversial topic) the grey tops up first. In our rig you can’t transfer grey to black, but that would extend things if we could. Nina
ha…the secret was replacing most of the showers with a jump overboard for a refreshing “salt bath”. Some serious offshore ocean boaters use watermakers to replenish fresh constantly but that would be a bit difficult in an RV.
Hey blogger people, I’m doing my budget for fulltiming. I’m lost as far as a number ( gl. ) for propane usage. You guys are writing the book ( as you go ) hoping you have a sun-chaser number you can throw our way. I know everyone and every RV is going to be a little different, but a ballpark number for a month or year will get us going.
Thanks
Really, really hard to give an accurate propane number since ALOT depends on how much you use the furnace. If you don’t use the furnace propane can last a loooong time. Cooking/fridge doesn’t use much at all and our tank (40 gallons) will easily last 6-8 months if that’s all we do. If it gets cold and we use the furnace, however, we can burn through that one tank in a week!!
That’s why it’s so hard to estimate. Last year we only filled up twice all year (~$160). This year we’re only in April and we’ve already filled up twice mostly because we spent more time in colder temps boondocking. We’ll probably end up filling up 3-4 times this year in the end.
Hope that helps!!
Nina
Being amateurs I’m going to figure about 5 times a year just to start. Thanks you guys are always a big help.
236 days to retirement
Dave & Kathy
P.S. We have been talking you guys up and lunching Amazon from your suite
Thank you so much for thinking about us. Our Amazon has been going well so I want to thank you deeply for that!
Nina
Interesting comment about ALL the water that we use goes into the black and gray tanks. I plan on buying powered milk so I don’t have to make grocery runs every week as a gallon lasts me a week right now. Plus right now I drink one gallon of water a day. If we full time we will once again have Tang and Country Time Lemonade on the menu. You would probably be shocked at how long our port-a-potty lasted when we dry camped with the pop up camper as we used public facilities for bathrooms and showers. We really weren’t in the campground/campsite that much all day. We had picnics instead of eating inside the pop up camper frequently. However, the pop up camper refrigerator was pretty small so we used a cooler while the TT refrigerator won’t be that small.