Bill and Lisa's Great Adventure

The preparations:

Lisa and I love the North-West, we love Vancouver BC. We Love Yellowstone, and the Rockies, we love any part of the West really from Las Vegas, Joshua Tree National Park on up the coast and back to Idaho Falls and Yellowstone National Park. We have always wanted to take a long RV trip out to that area and have made plans but never followed through. We always had some reason kids, money, Kids, time, KIDS and KIDS. But this year no kids and Lisa began looking again at the idea, and we discussed where maybe a good home base would be. We wanted our base to be in either Idaho or Washington, although we looked as far away as the New Mexico Mountains and Northern California. Lisa one day found a development called Rim Rock Meadows that sold building\ camping lots that you could park your RV on for up to six months a year. Well we did a lot of research and e-mailed the property manager and then decided we had to go visit. In April we flew out to Washington and stayed at Lake Chelan (one of our new favorite places) which was about 50 miles from the land we wanted to see. We the short of it is we fell in love with the area, we walked the property for a few days and finally bought a 1.6 acre lot that sits on a ridge.

We flew home and somewhere that first week it hit us that we only had the month of May to prepare for our trip. Now that being said I had done research on how to live off the grid (No Electric, Water or sewage), the development has a campground with water and dump station. I know from past trips we can go about two weeks before we have to dump and I can got about 4 days using the water in our RV fresh water tank (Lisa can only last one shower), Hmmm guess I better work on that fresh water. Anyway I measured usage of power in the RV with all the computers, TV, coffee maker and other electrical devices and without AC came to about 2500 watts per day. Well that was not bad I thought and I began the process of discovering how to reduce needs and increase power input. I had through research chosen to go with solar panels and a 4 battery storage bank which would give us about 380 amp hours of power enough to power us through the day. I also figured we would need a generator, but we had one a big Coleman 6500 that power everything in the RV so we were good. OR so I thought.

My good friend Allen was skeptical of my assumptions and he recommended that I a buy a device called a Kill a Watt meter that measures actual power consumption. I think we were both surprised that I was actually using a little less than I had assumed, but that still was causing me an issue on how to charge the batteries. Well that got me thinking back to solar and power. It seemed to me I could add more solar panels or run the generator for a few hours a day (which was the original plan) or reduce my consumption. Before I did anything I decided to run some test, first test run the generator for 6 hours and see how much gas I used. Yikes not good about a gallon per hour, ok you do the math but if I had to run that beast for 4 hours a day that would be at minimum $16.00 per day. All day would cost me close to $100.00 per day, not going to happen plus a lot of waste since the generator run pretty much full speed.

So with the Kill A Watt meter (yes that is the brand name of the device) I started finding what used all that power, surprise to me was our 32 inch flat panel TV pulled 160 watts, the big coffee well that just killed us and the box fan? Yea another power hog. Ok well time to do more research and get items that use less power. We got a new LED TV power usage 20 watts running, switched my Windows Media Computer for a RoKu and a usb hard drive with all the mp4 movies we have. Got a Black and Decker 1 cup coffee pot (makes coffee very fast). So with all the changes we made we got down to less than 1500 watts per day, which with our new solar panels (2 x 100 watt panels)should be adequate.

Solar Panels

Solar Panel Battery Charger

We also decide that the old beast of a generator would not be going with us and we purchased a DuroMax Hybrid that runs off of propane or gas.

Another issue since I need to work was cell coverage, which we have at our property but was weak. We purchased a Wilson Cell Booster and we actually took that to the property to see what we could get. It take a weak signal an turns it into a much stronger one (1 bar say to 4).

Booster Antenna, WiFi Booster and TV.

Wilson Cell and 4G booster next to MiFi.

The last issue and it is a big one for me was cooking, I have needs and to that end we purchased and modified a few items so I could be all the Chef I can be.