Full-Time Freedom in a MINI Class A RV – A/C AND HEAT with 2000W of SOLAR!

And it's a fairly good sized rig. How long is it? It's 26 feet. Right, which is for in the class A, that's a little tiny baby. It's a baby class A, that's exactly what I call it. My little baby class A. But it's sure cute, like all babies. Yep, yep. Hi everyone, welcome back to my next video. Today we're gonna meet Yvonne. Hi Yvonne. Hi Bob. Welcome to the channel. Thank you. And we're gonna see your pretty amazing setup you've got here. Thank you. I've put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it. And I guess the thing that, among all the reasons it's really exceptional, is all the solar you have. That was the very first thing I wanted to do because I knew I wanted to go boondocking quite a bit. I didn't know where I was gonna end up and I wanted to be prepared. And so how much solar do you have? I have 2000 watts on the roof and 6000 in storage. 6000 watts. Watt hours. Watt hours, yes. Okay. Yes. And then 8000 on my EcoFlow, which is what runs my heating and air conditioning. Well, you could power a city with that thing. I wanted to be comfortable and have redundancy because if one system failed, I wanted to have a fallback. Absolutely, I think that's really wise. And so you mentioned that you have, you're doing heating and air conditioning? Correct. And you're literally running both of them off of your whole system? Yes, yes. And I purchased the EcoFlow Wave 2 because it has both heating and air conditioning in one unit. I had to do something because the air conditioner on my roof is so unbelievably loud, I couldn't even have a conversation inside of my rig. And the furnace that I have in my rig takes so much propane. It's just not worth it for me. Yeah, if you can run everything off solar for free at once, you got it all, but why not? Right. Absolutely, that's a great idea. I wanted the, the whole reason I went with the Class A is because I wanted that big windshield and the view and something that was manageable. I didn't want to go too big. And will the little EcoFlow heat and cool all that space? Yes. Really? Yeah, the air conditioning works phenomenal. The one downfall to this system is it's a heat pump-like system. So when it's heating at 40 degrees, you're done. You have to go to an alternate heat source. And that's where I pick up my, my little buddy. So let me understand, if it's 40 degrees in the vehicle, it won't heat? If it's 40 degrees outside. Really? Yeah, it works like a heat pump. So once it hits 40 degrees, it just can't, can't do anything. It just can't generate the heat that it needs. It's more for comfort than survival. So how long have you been on the road? I have been full timing for almost four years now. Four years, that's a long time. And what motivated you to move on into a vehicle? Funny story. Right towards the end of, right in the middle of COVID actually, I went on Zillow and saw the price of my property, what it was worth. And that was my motivation. My property had doubled in the three years that I had owned it. So that was a sign from the universe. It said, this is, this is your sign. Take it and go. And now I have an RV home base in Tennessee, which is just for the RV. And how are you supporting yourself on the road? I do work full time. I've had an IT career for 35 years. And I think I've probably got another 10 years left in me to work. And I am fortunate enough to be able to work from home. Essentially, you're a digital nomad. Correct. But living this way, you live really cheap and kind of enjoy life. I do. And it helps me afford my retirement. And I need to save every penny I can because I don't know, you know, what's in store for me when I get older. Would it be okay if we took a look around? Oh, please. Yes. Let's do that. So give us the grand tour. All right. Well, welcome to my humble abode. One of the first things you might notice over here is there's no passenger seat. I'm single and I don't foresee that changing anytime in the near future. Well, at least not in this rig. So I removed the passenger seat to afford me a lot more storage and the usability of my EcoFlow Wave 2, which is vented out here. Just through a window. And it had to be there because that was the only sliding window in the rig that goes left to right instead of out or up and down. So that's really the only place I could put this, but it's actually the best place because it shoots air throughout the entire rig. This is the head unit. This is about 2000 watts. And this is an add-on battery, which is also about 2000 watts. Both of those paired together will last me an evening and through the night. I run these off of 800 watt total. I have two foldable 400 watt all power solar panels outside that power this whole system and it works great. There's been a couple of times when I've had to top it off with my generator, but only because we didn't have sun for a day or two. And you must take those down. You couldn't travel with them off. Correct. It takes me about five minutes to pull everything down to the ground and pull this table up. And everything has its place in the RV. Right here is my living room, dog bed, office combination. This once used to be a pull-off bed. It had that really bad, like laminated leather that just starts peeling apart. So I yanked it out. I put in a residential wall hugger refiner and I just strap it in with seat belts when we're traveling. And my favorite thing in the world in this RV, you'll see these scattered all over, are these gray storage boxes. And they're strong, they're sturdy. I've got four of them here and you can sit on them. So I've got my stand-up desk and my sit-down desk. So I sit here, the puppy sit here, and when I need to work, I sit right here. I never use this propane stove. I'm not a big fan of cooking inside of the RV, especially with such a small RV, all the smells are gonna linger forever. So I do have a induction cooktop from Ikea and I bought this slide-out, it's an adjustable table that's supposed to go over a microwave, but I shortened it to just go over here so I could have some elevated storage space. Another space-saving tip is door-hanging baskets. So here we've got the same exact setup on the other side of the door, but just for my hair and makeup products. Wow, that really gives you a lot of storage, doesn't it? It does, it does. Because this is all I got in the bathroom. This is, it's about this wide inside and hardly any space whatsoever. Yeah, not a lot of room in there. This is a twin bed setup, which I changed and I bought those platform slats that Ikea sells for platform beds. They're slats on like a ribbon. So I put the slats down and I put a full-size bed in and I yanked the two twin-size beds out. I love this, this is a fantastic RV. I'm really happy with it. I was really, what's the word I'm looking for? I was worried about getting something that was too big that I wouldn't be able to handle. And I saw this and I saw the size of it, I was like, this is it. I had a 27-foot Class C before and I just wasn't happy with the Class C. It was falling apart and there was just problems with the overhead leaking and starting to literally come off. So I knew I didn't want to go with Class C again, but I wanted to go with Class A, but I was intimidated is the word I'm looking for. Intimidated of going too big. And this is so manageable. I can back it up and get it almost into a regular parking space. I have not had too many problems with this, but I've had all the typical problems that RVs have with things coming loose, things coming off. I dropped an ice cube down there and you can see the damage one ice cube did from cheap. Yeah, they're put together fast. Unless you pay an awful lot of money there. Yeah. They skimp everywhere they can. Oh, absolutely. And you need to know that going into it. And if people would like to learn more about you or contact you, can they do that? Absolutely, absolutely. So I have a YouTube channel titled The RV Chick, C-H-I-C-K at YouTube. Great, everyone should go and check that out. So this is the Titan 0.0 all-in-one unit. It is a all-in-one solar generator. So I purchased this and these are add-ons, they're like Legos. Each one's 2000 watts of storage. This has no storage. This is 2000, 2000, so I've got 6,000 here. And I chose this one because at the time it held the highest input for solar, which was 2000 watts. And it also was the only one with an RV 30 amp plug out. This is all one long 30 amp cord going out. I drilled a hole here and pulled the cord out and plugged it into there because I didn't want to hardwire it into my system. Right, so now everything runs just like you were on shore power, but off of your solar. Exactly. And I really love that battery design. It's great because you can actually, you can stack them and configure them, but you can also put them on their sides. Oh, that is nice. This is the brick that they send you if you want to charge it through the wall or through a 110. Like I said, the reason why I chose this is because I didn't want anything that I was going to have to hardwire into my rig in case I wanted to change rigs. Right. And I could just pick this up, unplug the solar panels and go. And it will also go onto my RV home base, you know, if I put a cabin there. So I see, working from the road, you have a Starlink. I do, I do. I have one of everything as far as internet goes. I have the Starlink. I have an unlimited plan on the T-Mobile network. And I also have a Verizon wireless phone with a hotspot. And I have an AT&T MiFi that I use as well. So I see you're towing. Yes. And tell us about that. Yes, I flat tow my Ford Ranger four by four. When I first bought my rig, I swore that I would never flat tow. I was really intimidated. And then I started going across the country and finding out I'm stuck. I don't want to break my camp. I don't, there's no Uber to call. What do I do? So after my first year on the road of coming out here to Arizona, I figured out really quick, I needed to flat tow. I needed another vehicle. So I had the Blue Ox system with the pedal system that pushes the pedal on inertia and it works great. I don't even know my truck's back there. And it's so super easy. You know, once you get your flow going with it, it's super easy to hook it up and take it apart. I see you've got a gazebo and how's that work? I just got this a couple months ago. It's my first year using it. And I really wish I would have bought one a long time ago. It's a 13 foot high crew pop-up gazebo. It has a roof. And the reason I bought this one was because it has a Velcro floor on it. So it stops the rain from coming in, all that kind of good stuff. This has almost doubled my living space. I can offload all kinds of things into it, like my water filtration system that I plug in, my coffee maker, all my appliances for cooking. And I can cook out here without getting rained on. This doesn't have the walls that pop off, but it does have a roof that does go on. The reason I have it off right now is because we had a really bad storm last night. And I'm trying to get everything dried out. And it takes me about 10 minutes to open this up and do all the steaks. Now, getting it back in the bag, tooth rat now. It takes substantially longer to get it back in the bag. But yeah, getting it up and out, no problem at all. Well, Yvonne, thank you so much for sharing your home and your life with us. It's a really great setup here. I kind of envy you in some ways. Thank you, Bob. Thank you for coming out. And remind us again, you have a YouTube channel. What's it? I do, V-R-B Chick, C-H-I-C-K. Very good. Everyone should go there right now and subscribe. Check it out. Thank you. So folks, hope you got something out of this video. If you did, like us on YouTube, subscribe to the channel, hit that thumbs up button, and we'll talk to you later. Bye now.