Our Top Pain Points for RV Boondocking | Full Time RV Living

Hey guys, welcome back to another Sunday video. I'm Chris and I'm Aaron and today we are talking about boondocking. So Chris and I have been on the road full time for just over a year now and we've kind of had a journey of how we like to travel. We started out on the east coast in a lot of big cities and it seemed like we would spend a couple days in the big cities and then maybe what a week or so at campsites. Yeah. And in between we would do Cracker Barrels and Walmarts and also a few state parks. Yes and we did a lot of like 24-hour parking lots that are downtown in major downtown markets. New Orleans and Savannah were the two I think that stick out. Yep, like Philly and Boston and you know New York City those are all big markets that we did some stealth street camping and that was really fun. We were bouncing around a lot from city to city. It was really fast paced. We covered a lot of miles. We covered a lot of states and then we made it over back home to Minnesota and over to the west part of the country where we got to start with a couple national parks at like Yosemite, the Grand Tetons. Yep, where we also did our first kind of boondocking experience which we'll link that video above and below and that was kind of an eye-opener. It was a different style of travel and it was to be honest very difficult for us to do in a class B. Yeah and we definitely wanted that to slow it down because up until that point like I said we're going so fast and moving moving moving it's like we really did just want to take a step back and breathe. Yeah out in nature but we found that we weren't really equipped to properly boondock for more than like a night or two. So this whole video is going to be about our goal for this year in 2020 which is to do more boondocking and to see more of this beautiful country and the goal is to be out for about a week at a time and that's going to be quite difficult in a in a class B van. There are a lot of pain points and that's what we're going to talk about today. Pain points. First off let's talk about electrical. So our power system and talking about electrical I mean battery, solar, generator, you know how are you gonna power your vehicle while being off-grid. So for us right off the bat we upgraded our batteries basically by doubling our AGMs. So we doubled our capacity to 300 amp hours and for the first half of our travels while doing cities and driving quite quite a bit that worked very well. We didn't really have any issues we're pretty sustainable for a day or two with that battery size. Because we were driving so frequently and getting a charge during our driving. Yeah we were kind of staying in a spot a night or two and then moving on or if we were in a spot for like a week or so it would be at a campsite where we were plugged in. More recently we've been trying to do a little bit more of the boondocking and especially at the Escapers Bash where we were dry camping for a week we just found that we did not have enough power to work basically. So we have enough power to run the van and the fridge and the basic systems but we don't have enough power to charge our laptops, our phones, the hot spot, the heater was a big deal too because it's very cold in you know overnight Arizona gets down into the 30s if not the 20s we saw. And I'm a freeze baby so not only is that like uncomfortable like obviously we weren't freezing to death we were fine but I don't like bundling up and wearing sweatpants and a hoodie and a flannel and like five blankets to sleep in. We're trying to we're trying to live normal. If I wanted to be roughing it would be tent camping. Yes. And also I don't like being in dim lighting. A lot of the times we'll have minimal lights on at a minimal dimness just to help preserve everything. So that's another thing when it's like cold and dark and you just feel kind of off. Yeah it gets really frustrating because do you turn on the lights? Do you turn off the lights? Do you keep the hot spot on? Do you turn the hot spot off? There's so many areas where you're just trying to conserve so much power that it just becomes not fun. So we're working and we're not you know if we're taking a day off or two days or a week off and we were you know just out experiencing nature it could be a lot less. We don't have to worry about. If we were truly off grid. Yeah. But we're not. No we're we're pretty much powering our laptops all day long so that's a big deal. So we do have a generator on board and of course we could run that every day if we wanted to but we don't and it seems like every time we want to or we need to run the generator it'll just be a bad time. There'll be someone that's right next to us. It'll be early in the morning. It'll be late at night and it's just you know we want to use the generator maybe once a week if we have to like charge up the batteries for an hour or two that would be fine but we don't want to run it daily. That's just not the style we want. Plus it's mounted right up underneath where we're sitting right now so when it's on it's shaking the whole van and it affects the mood. Yeah you can barely talk. So another point with solar on the class b's is you can only fit so many watts on top. We have 300 watts which is okay but in the winter time you get a lot less than max power. A lot of times you're getting half of that so maybe 150 watts or 500 watt hours per day or in the summertime we might get a kilowatt or a thousand watt hours so you know that's basically putting in in the winter time 40 amps back into our battery or at max you know 80 amps. So a lot of people have portable panels. We see those everywhere and that would be cool too but once again we don't have storage for a portable panel so lots of options out there but electrical is one of the first systems that we need to tackle to be able to be self-sufficient for a week at a time. Next big category we're going to talk about is tank size. So we've done some videos on tank capacities but once again we have a 26 gallon fresh 27 gallon gray and 15 gallon black. Very respectable sizes for a class b van but it would be nice to maximize that out a little bit so there's a lot of options that we're kind of kicking around and thinking about. All of these I think will be slowly progressive stages as we just kind of tackle one at a time to make boondocking more. Yeah and our tank so normally if we were to just plop down in the middle of nowhere our black tank is the first tank to expire on us and in situations where you are boondocking with a lot of neighbors like where we are right now yeah we're pretty packed on top of each other and it's not an option for either one of us to just pop outside and take number one in the bushes because everybody's on top of everybody yeah so when you are forced to like really use your toilet a hundred percent then it really doesn't last very long yeah absolutely three four days max maybe lots of variables with the black tank so some options that we're kicking around possibly a composting toilet we talked about this a long time ago we haven't really brought it up again yeah that's a surprise to me well the cool thing about a composting toilet is if we could use like the urine diverting valve into the black tank yeah then we could have a 15 gallon black tank still for liquids and then a composting toilet for solids and that would you know definitely boost this out to a week because a traditional composting without that valve for the liquids we wouldn't want to be dumping a gallon little container no because we just drink way too much water for that yeah absolutely so a traditional composting toilet i don't think we'd ever want that yeah unless you rigged it up like the way you just said also we could increase the size of our black tank which could be pretty tricky but it's an option so if anybody else has any other thoughts or comments on increasing the black tank leave them down below the fresh and the gray tank i feel like that could last us a week for sure it's just very minimal showers if not using washcloths and wipes at times also carrying uh drinking water on board we would probably need to get like a one of those collapsible bladders and bring more fresh water on and i think we could easily have our fresh and gray last us a week i think that'll be the easy category also doing certain food preparations before you get onto your boondocking site will help with the amount of dishes that you're doing so that's definitely something that you can calculate and formulate ahead of time just to alleviate the amount of water that you spend washing dishes cooking specifically next up let's talk about garbage this isn't something that we really heard that much about when we were kind of researching it really does kind of just get like under the radar people don't talk about waste as a pain point for boondocking maybe it's more a point to being in a van and less about big regs or trucks and trailers um because inside a van we don't have anywhere to really store our garbage besides where we're living so we have the little tiny garbage can um and then one sweet option we saw a couple weeks ago was on cass's base camp and she has a uh what's it called a trasharoo i don't know the name but it was an exterior trash bag that would be affixed on the back of our door here like on an exterior ladder which if we put a ladder up that would be great because we would use it to get on the roof and then you could use that ladder to store an exterior trash bag yeah just to get the trash out of here because it does add up quick even when you're being mindful about it like when you're in a tiny space the last thing you want to be doing is moving trash bags around which is exactly what we are doing currently yes we do have some um approaches that helps us minimize waste such as like when i go to the grocery store before we come out here i get rid of all the big bulky packaging and transfer it into my own packaging that's smaller doesn't take up waste when i go through those products and next up on the pain point list is cell phone coverage and 4g internet uh we use a verizon hotspot along with t-mobile cell phones and we have a couple different antennas we use we use a mimo antenna and then also the um weboost uh cell booster so those work pretty well for us but honestly there's a lot of internet coverage cell coverage out there it's it's uh it's becoming easier and easier to find and then also with great apps like campendium you can find it a lot easier next up food and water we touched a little bit on the water where you could pull it from your tank directly or if you want to extend your tank you could bring some collapsible bladders on board for drinking or refilling your tank we drink a ton of water and we never pay for water unless it's in a bubbly canned form so so that's something that we definitely like to consider i mean this week for example aaron has literally said he's drinking that he's limiting his water intake so that he doesn't pee as much and it's like oh that's a terrible the two go hand in hand and i know my coach did not i did not like hearing that i know and it was a bad thing to say but it's it's true i was drinking less water because i'm trying to conserve the water and the and the tank capacity and uh it's not a good thing to do but so i'm being honest yeah so the water i mean your your consumption varies but i encourage drinking a lot of water and then it's up to you like do you want to drink out of your tank do you only drink bottled water are you a water snob i don't know we're not a water snob we'll drink anything we filter it we filter the water twice uh coming in from the hose and then on board we also filter it with our brita pitcher and then the next topic food um this is something i'm really passionate about so i mentioned when i'm at the parking lot of costco or whatever i repackage the food so that i can eliminate bulky waste at the same time that allows me to really get more fresh foods into my fridge i can really cram that sucker full in fact i think my fridge packing skills are really impressive and there's an art to it and you just get a little bit better and better as you practice it um like for example i had these huge chicken breast packages from costco and it was like five pounds per package and what i did was i cut the breasts out i trimmed them down to manageable pieces got rid of all that chicken juice got rid of all that um excess packaging put in my own ziplocs that way when we're out boondocking we don't have chicken juice sitting in our tanks getting stinky or sitting in our garbage getting reeky and condensing space doing as much food prep before you hit your destination and it really by doing the food prep you are covering off on so many issues you're covering off on your health you're covering off on waste you're covering off on fridge space you're covering off on like convenience time routine like so many things so like this is one area where if you can master this you are gonna really alleviate a lot of pain points next topic let's talk about the locations and the convenience levels of some of these blms or forestry lands um if it takes a half an hour to get to the spot that would be fine if you're having the tank size and the capacities to stay there for a week or two weeks but right now we're having to leave every few days to dump the tanks or um you know so it it matters how remote it is and we want it to be remote but we also want it to be easy access i guess that's the balance that we're we're trying to find in a perfect world it's going to be super remote nobody's there and it takes two seconds to get to so for example the place we're at right now is called snyder hill right outside of tucson and it is super convenient to get to stores and dump stations and water and planet fitness and there's a costco which is why it's so congested yeah and there's a lot of people here there's people in every kind of like car or rig or tent or trailer fifth wheel motorhome like we saw some overland vehicles that were pretty sweet from like europe and um there's just a lot of variety here because it's so popular which makes it a little less fun and a little less enjoyable it kind of makes it feel like it removes the specialness from it like it's not just your secret place anymore yeah yeah and the whole reason we want to get out and do more boondocking is so we can get out and go on like hikes every day and see some beautiful scenery and climb up some big mountains and hills and things like that and right now all we have is snyder hill and it's not very big and we've already summited it multiple times also another factor is weather of course there's seasonalities between summer and winter and even as it gets colder you have to run your furnace more and it's just a little less fun to be outside when the weather is kind of crappy out so it's just something you have to consider and when you get cooped up in a van for a couple days because it's cold and rainy it just becomes less enjoyable especially like us when we have our workout routine and if you're cooped up you know we have our clam tent for working out in the rain but where we're at right now we don't even have the space or ground to put that up yeah and it's not really a controllable the weather so it's just something to think about and speaking of routines that's kind of uh our last point here which is affected by all of these different things we're talking about today is how well you can establish a routine and for us we find it's very important so if our routine is messed up we just don't have as much fun we start to fight a little bit more and a little cranky yeah we're just not yeah and that is a great point of how close we are to town where we just had a local uh guy who delivers water uh come out to this blm boondocking spot and he's interested in getting customers uh so he can deliver water to them so or pick up trash or do trash yeah uh you know that's just kind of unique so it gives you a different spin on boondocking it's like city boondocking yeah very interesting so we're learning a lot this is uh very interesting and we're very excited about this year upcoming and uh changing and learning there's so much out here to like learn and do and we're just uh we're just getting started with this so it's great back to the routine part um i just wanted to say this is really important to us so all these other factors we need to kind of get buttoned up and address so that we can get our routine back and we can make boondocking work for us we need to be efficient and we need to be happy and you know like not sitting and thinking about every little anxiety source yeah all these little pain points just hit you and when they're all lined up in a row then it just becomes like where's the rv park yeah it's like let's go back to the rv park yeah so we're very excited this year to expand on our boondocking experience so look for more of the videos addressing these topics that we're gonna be coming hopefully um alleviating and improving as this year goes on so that we can stay out more and more and more and have longer trips and go out to more unique places and see more yeah so anything else that's about it you sure yeah all right thanks so much guys for watching we really do appreciate it if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and if you like the content don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch you next time bye so what did i say what what did i say about being self-sufficient self-sufficient are you drinking were you drinking this morning not yet