We just concluded our five day boondocking adventure this morning. This was the longest period we have ever drycamped in the coach but we are no strangers to hanging out on the hook in our former sailboat so it was fun to compare the two experiences.
We completely topped off the water tank and having enough water was never an issue as it turns out. in fact I think we still have about half of it left. Water conservation procedures were:
-paper plates for all meals
-brief showers every other day (but still long enough duration to feel really clean)
-never opening up faucets above a trickle unless necessary
-minimal use of the potty (you can decide what this means
)
-obviously no laundry was done
We were a little draconian with our conservation but I'd rather have some water left than run out because of that last long shower I took.
Managing the batteries and electrical consumption was actually fairly easy. A feature of my Xantrex RS2000 inverter and auto gen start is that I can option it to start the generator on certain triggers like low battery voltage and I entered quiet hours so it wouldn't start in the middle of the night. It took a couple of days of playing around with the parameters until I got the genny starting and stopping automatically while keeping the batteries in fairly good shape. The final triggers/settings were:
Quiet hour start - 9 pm
Quiet hour end - 8 am
Start on low voltage if 11.3 volts for 30 seconds
Start on low voltage if 11.9 volts for 15 minutes
Stop on battery charge float status
Max run time - 5 hours
Here's how the drill went:
We identified everything that didn't need to be plugged in all the time like nite lights, coffee maker, chargers, VCR/DVD, Tivo and unplugged them and only pluged them in on an as-needed basis. I also shut off the UPS supply that powers my big tower PC when not in use.
While running on inverter, we switched everything over to propane (furnace, water heater, refrig.) We set the furnace thermostat to 73 degrees and our morning lows were usually in the high 40s or low 50s. Sometimes the furnace only cycled off and on only a few times in the early morning hours, other times it was cycling much more frequently over several hours.
The batteries would start out fairly well charged when we went to bed because we would usually run the genny in the evenings
to watch TV, run the microvave, etc. Almost every day, the auto gen start wanted to start the genny as soon a quiet hours were over at 8 am and it usually ran for three hours to fully charge the bank. We were then good for several hours of hanging out in the coach. Once we had the genny auto start at 6:30 pm and another day it auto started at 4:30 pm. It all depended on what we were doing in the coach and what was turned on.
One conclusion I came to was the three group 27 house batteries are not large enough for extended drycamping. After pulling 10 to 12 amps from the battery bank at night they were probably 50% discharged (however it is difficult to know with any accuracy). I would add an 8D AGM battery between the frame rails in front of the rear axle on a fabricated shelf. One beauty of an AGM or Gel battery is that it can be mounted in any orientation - on its side, upside down, etc. Plus you NEVER need to look at it again
!!
Some of you might be thinking solar panels would be a good addition for this situation. I like solar panels and had a 50 watt panel on my sailboat. Their big drawback is the initial cost. I would rather spend $300-400 on an 8D battery and then do another five days of drycamping to see how that works out first. The Xantrex has a 100 amp charger (as I recall) and it could only pump 68 amps into my small house bank; with an 8D added, you could really use the charger to its potential.
Some numbers:
Gen begin hours: 67.9
Gen end hours: 103
Total run time for five full days (5x24 hrs) of drycamping: 35.3 hrs.
Average run time per day: 7.06 hrs.
Estimated fuel used: 14 gallons (.4 gal/hour)
Estimated fuel cost: $45
Cost of drycamp site for five days: $50 ($10/day)
Total cost of drycamp with own power generation: $95 ($19/day)
Maximum charge rate observed in bulk charge mode was 68 amps
Estimated water usage: 40 gallons (8 gal/day)
Usual electrical consumption as reported by the inverter at night was around 100 watts and about 250 watts during the day if I had my tower PC running. In the morning with the coffee pot running we would pull about 700 watts.
Hopefully all you boondockers will find at least something useful here.