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No More Entries
Since we stopped traveling there will be no more entries.
Broken A Frame Trailer Jack
Well we broke the trailer jack on the trailer. I think I over extended it and striped the worm gear or something. Really hard to say exactly. I just now that I raised it up to put the trailer on the truck and luckily when it failed it was right over the ball and it seated.
Finding a replacement was both easy and hard. It was easy because we needed just an A Frame Trailer Jack that has a mounting plate with three bolt holes. It's a pretty standard item. The hard part was because we have a box on the tongue, we needed one with a side mounted crank. That was a little harder to find. When I was calling around. the places that had a side crank ranged from 40 dollars to 120 dollars. Needless to say we went with the place that had one for 40 dollars. It took all of about 10 minutes to replace.
On a side note, the place we got the jack from can also lift the trailer if we want. It's something that the wife has been thinking about. When she talked to them, they were better priced than other places she had gotten a quote from last year and they were only a week or so out. Which is super reasonable. So know we have another thing to think about.
Rethinking Starlink
Lately, we been hitting the same issue we always do. We can not seem to go where we want to go because of lack of cell / Internet Service. Right now we have two hotspots. One is on T-Mobile and the other is on Verizon. This provides us with a lot of coverage but it is not perfect. There are still a lot of areas where there is till no service.
Which leads us back to the discussion on if we should get Starlink. There are some things that make Starlink a hard thing to even try.
First of of course is the cost. Right now for RV it's about 135 USD per month. That's a steep fee per month and the one that makes it really hard to try. Still it might be worth it. And I know some people with regular house Internet that speed about that. When I cable Internet it was about 90 USD per month. So I would just be spending about 50 USD more per month. Also if we did it then I could reduce the cell bills by reducing the number of devices we have. Of course I would not do it right away, but it is something we could do after a few months of testing.
Second is the power requirements. This is a tough one since we don't really know how much power it really pulls. The specs say 60 Watts but I've seen reports of about 40 Watts. The best mitigation I could think of is to add another battery and perhaps add some solar panels. Both of which is something I really want to do anyways. I would like to have about 1000 watts of panels and a lot more battery storage.
Third is the equipment cost itself. Right now the dish and router cost about 600 USD. That's not a small thing to think about. That's a major investment. Here is where we might get lucky. My brother has/had Starlink but in his area it was over taxed and didn't work well. So we might be able to get his equipment transferred to us and all he wants is for us to pay shipping. Which I can not imagine would be more than say 50 USD or so. My brother and I would just have to deal with the hassle of the transfer with Starlink.
Speaking of overtax, that's the forth thing that we have to consider. If you look at the Starlink map you will see area where there is low availability or the need for more coverage. The map you will see depends on if it's fixed or an RV. Luckily many area that we will be are in the High availability areas. And the Low areas right now are slated for more coverage in 2023. I feel that even if we only got 5 Mbps down and up, we would do fine since that's all I normally get on the Cell hotspots and I have even worked with less.
Finally there is how much open area do you need for the antenna. You need an area that clear of obstructions. I have been using the Starlink app to figure out what we would need at places we have stop and for us what I have found so far is that the same open area we need for solar is what we will need for Starlink. That's not to say that there are not areas where we will need more, but so far where we have been for solar will work for Starlink as well.
While there is still a lot of consider, I think that if my brother can transfer us the equipment, then I think we can try Starlink, since then we will only have the monthly fee to worry about.
Camping Laws And Regulations The Things You Do Not Know
In the last two months while boondocking, we have been asked to move by various officials from various agencies.
In the first case, it was a US Forest Service person telling us that we were camping include a recreational exclusion zone and that the only camping was in the nearby free campsite. In the second case, Game and Fish came out to tell us we were camp too close to water hole for the animals.
In both cases they cited rules and regulations that unless they told you to leave, you would have no idea that they even existed. Even the officials had a hard time telling us were to find the rules or where the exclusion zone were. They would try to tell us maps that you could get online but we looked at those maps, they had nothing about those exclusion zone. Or they couldn't tell you were the regulations were actually posted.
Generally speaking, I tend to follow the guideline that if there are no signs and there is a fire pit/fire ring , then it is likely safe to camp there. It seems sometimes those sites in places that violate the laws and rules that as a camper you will be unaware of. So never assume that where you camp is 100% good I guess.
I really wish you could put in a Lat and Long in a website and it could tell you the camping regulations for that area (in general) and/or if you can even camp there. Sadly, there is not central clearing house for those sort of rules. So my take away is for everyone to be aware that even if you think you can camp or boondock somewhere, there actually might still be laws and regulations against it so be careful.
Battery Bank Issue
This one was hard one to notice at first because we been getting good Sun in the morning but rain and clouds in the afternoon. We thought that we were not getting enough charge in the afternoon, so early in the morning the inverter low voltage alarm would go off and we would have to turn it off.
Slowly after many days, we decided something was wrong because even if we ran the generator in the evening to help top off the batteries we would still get the alarm.
So when we were driving through town and saw an Autozone, we quickly stopped by and had them test the batteries in the bank. Neither of us were surprised when they found one of the batteries bad. What shocked me was it was one of the newer batteries. On the plus side at least it under warranty and they just swapped the battery for us.
Now that the battery is replaced, it seems like the bank is once again holding the charge through the night like it use to. Only time will tell if there are other issues. I may look into getting my own battery tester because has happened too often and it would be nice to able to test while we are out and not have to rely on Autozone to tell us.
Solar Charger Issues
This is the second time I have had the same issue with a solar charger. The positive wire from the battery gets loose and melts part of the solar charger case.
The loose wire also causes issue with charger itself. giving it bad reading. This cause the it to think it was 100% charged and the panels didn't charge the battery. This is how we discovered it. We got a low battery warning and was like the panels should have charged things up.
So we looked at the battery bank and charger. When I looked at the charger I noticed the melted plastic. So I disconnected the solar panels and then when I went to disconnect the battery cables. I noticed the positive wire was pretty much not connecting and pretty much fell out of the hole. I had to take the cover off the controller and luckily it looks like there was just melting around the gate that is used to hold the wire in place. I was able to clean that up and get the gate working again. I think cleaned up the wires and shortened the exposed wire a little, so that none of it was extended past the wire gate. I got everything reassembled.
As of right now, everything seems to be working. I will still have to wait and see how long that lasts. I am certainly going to have to keep an eye on it.
Extra Water
If you are going to extend stay somewhere, one thing for sure you need to do is have extra fresh water for your RV. This is certainly something we thought about before we started doing the RV full time.
As the wife puts it, “you can never have enough water”. I agree. Most RVs tend to have small water tanks. I think only a few Toy Hauler RVs have tanks larger than say 50 Gallons of Fresh Water. While I have no idea what others usage is, ours is about 8-10 gallons of Fresh a day between food prep, showers, cleaning, and toilet. We don't use our fresh water tank drinking water, for us that water is carried in separate 5 gallon jugs. With our 45 gallon fresh water tank, the water lasts about 4-5 days depending. This means if we want to stay a week or longer, we need more water.
In our current configuration, that problem is solved by having two 55 gallon fresh water barrels in the back of the truck. We get maybe 50 gallons in each barrels, so we fill up completely we have about 140 or gallons of fresh water that we carry. That will roughly last us 14 days (unless we do laundry). We have a water transfer pump that we use to pump the water out of the barrels into our 45 gallon holding tank. The only downside to the pump of course is that uses power to run it, so I make sure we only do a transfer during the day when either there is full sun or we are running the generator.
There are of course other ways to do this besides the barrels and the pump. I seen some people just carry a bunch of 5 gallon just that they use to fill the fresh water tank. Or could have your extra water tank could have a valve at the bottom of the tank so gravity does the work to empty it and fill your tank. No matter which way you go, I would certainly recommend carrying at least some extra water, even if you don't think you will be out as long as you think because you never know how much water you will really need or if you will be forced to stay somewhere an extra day or two.
Flat Tire
It's hard to believe but we got a flat tire the other day. We had made an overnight stop at a rest area. In the morning we found a tire on the trailer to be flat. Luckily the wife had us get a spare tire. Still it sucks. We found a piece of metal in the tire. Must of ran over it and it slowly leaked out over the night.
Today, we are on our way to a tire shop, to see what our options are for it. While not a fan of a plug, it would be an easy fix and we would just have that for repair. Otherwise we have to replace the tire and it is hard to say if the shop will even have that tire size on hand. With all the weird supply chain issues, a lot of tires have to be ordered and are about one week out. So we will just have to wait and see. I will update when I have more information.
Update : We were able to get the tired patched up. So that is at least a good thing.
Solar Panel Reconfigured
I am not sure where to start this one. Seems we had nothing but issues with rack system that we mounted the solar panels on. No matter what we did, the screws kept breaking. We spent an afternoon replacing them in a Home Depot parking lot, only to have the break after a test drive down the road. The road was not rough at all.
So we made the decision to take the whole thing down and we ended up with 600 watts of panels in the bed of the truck for now. I have no idea if that is going to be enough when we stop but for now, it seems to be working. Only future usage will tell us anything.
Broken Screws
One thing for sure, the rough roads in the forest of South of Prescott is not for the trailer. We went to try to find camping near Thumb Butte. To say the least, all the campsites were taken and the road we took around was really rough. It was not until the next day that we noticed that about half the screws holding the solar panel brackets on were broken.
We limped it to North Of Paulden. We managed to get some new screws in. The wife has to go out and get some more washers and screws so we can finish the repair. Needless to say we are going to have to watch them and see if we can get some less bumpy roads.
At this time, we think we are going to just write off all the sites south of Prescott. For whatever reason, they are always taken and even with the newer smaller RV, the sites are really small and hard to get into. I think they were all meant just for tent camping. Even then some of the spots, I do not think I would even want to do if I was only in a car and a tent.
Bad Water Pump
One of the most vital pieces of equipment in any RV is going to be the water pump. Without it, your shower, sink, and toilet are not going to get any water. So much to our surprise and horror, we started having issues with our water pump.
This of course should not have been. This pump is brand new. We purchased it to put in our Cargo Trailer Conversion. It worked normally until we started our summer voyage. The wife just went to use the water and the sink and nothing came out. The pump did not kick on.
This of course meant I had to go through all the electrical connections on the pump. I could not seem to find any reason. There were no loose wires anywhere, until I got to the pump itself.
On a typical water pump for an RV there are two wires, a red and black on that come off it for the positive and negative side of the DC circuit. The black wire goes to the motor and then the red wire goes to a switch of some sort and then a red wire goes from there to motor. It seems there is a loose connection in that switch.
At first I just giggled the wire and the motor came back on. I tried to see if I could seat it and it came on and stayed on. But after a 2nd move, it did it again. I again played with the wire and got it work off and on. This meant only one thing. We needed a new pump ASAP.
If we were not on the road, this is where I would have just taken the pump out and sent it back for warranty work. This was not an option here. Luckily were were able to find a pump at RV supplier near us. It was about $20 more than we would have paid online but that supplier is really nice and they have a free water and dump station that we have used a lot, so we felt justified spending the extra money.
Installing the new pump was a little tricky since there was water in the system. Luckily with the way the fresh water tank is, we were able to plug outlet hole, while I replaced the pump. There was minimal water loss. Which is a good thing when you are boondocking.
The new pump is a louder than the other one. Not sure why that is.
We do plan on sending the bad pump back to the maker for warranty repair that way we have a spare. Not sure yet were we are going to be having them send it back to. That is a problem for another day.
UPDATE
The water pump maker just had me send them photos and the receipt for the pump. They then did a good will replacement and are just going to ship me a new pump. At this time, I am having it sent to my sister's place until we come back next fall.
Almost On The Road Again
After a few months of being in on place and finishing up our new trailer, it is almost time to be on the road once again.
We still have to help out family with a little project and then head into Phoenix and get a few things done before we finally head up northern Arizona in by next weekend.
It is both scary and exciting to be able move around again. The real fun of course will always be finding a dump and fresh water. Last go around, that was one of the bigger issues. Still, I think we know how we are going to try to handle that.
At any rate, we should be in Phoenix by Wednesday. Since we need supplies and things, that is going to be a full day.
Propane Update
I have to say we just re-filled the propane on a whim. Good thing we did. We had to fill our 30 pound tank (7 gallons) with 6.8 gallons of propane two days ago. Which means we only made it 61 days with last propane fill. Which is about 21 day less than I was thinking with our last fill. Which means right now we are averaging about 10.8 days per gallon. On the last tank we averaged only about 8.7 days a gallon.
All of which means on the new trailer, which will have a 20 pound tank which is about 4.7 gallons. We will need to refill about every 6 weeks. I would say we should fill once a month if we have only one tank.
December 2021 Update
Sorry it has been a while since my last update but things have been a little crazy with work and stuff.
We have finally begun putting the trailer conversion together. We have the black and grey tanks almost installed. Still have to attach the floor above the tanks and install the shower pan and toilet. Once that is complete, then we get to move onto the fresh water storage.
Right now what sort of fresh water tank we want to put in is a tough one. We know we need more than the 45 gallons that our current 5th Wheel has. We are also thinking we may increase the secondary water storage in the truck. It sort of depends on how large the holding tank in the trailer is going to be.
Personally, I am just glad things are finally progressing. It was a really slow start. I am happy that we are started and have at least a few major things done.
Moving Stuff Around
We spent the weekend moving mock stuff around in the trailer this weekend. It was interesting to try to fit stuff. One of the biggest issues was that we couldn't get the waste valves to be where we want them to be. Seems the underbelly frame was really getting in the way of a couple of configurations.
I think we got to a few final possibilities. Hopefully now that we got that in place. We can really start picking up steam. I know I am keeping my fingers crossed.
A Working Vacation
Well this last week or so has been a working vacation. We finally started to work on on trailer conversion but did not really get far. The waste plumbing has been hard to pin down.
We did empty out our storage unit. We been able to reduce it a bit and we have a place to keep stuff that will not charge us a monthly fee. The downside is we had to build a storage shed and that took three days. I also fixed a barbwire fence where we are staying, so I guess I got to act like a ranch hand or cowboy for a few hours.
In general, I think we just did not do as much as we thought we would.
Do Not Forget To Track The Propane
We ran out of second bottle of propane the other day. Of course I found out about it only when I went to make hot water for me tea in the morning.
It has been easy to forget how much propane we use. The 5th wheel has two 7 gallon tanks (which are normally called 30 pound tanks for the weight of the propane) and so far since we started this adventure we have filled them each once. So we have only used 14 gallons of propane total when we ran out the other day.
It has been about 165 days since we started. So if we do the math, 14 gallons / 165 days = 0.084848485 or about 0.085 gallons per day. Or to look at it another way 165 days / 14 gallons = 11.785714286 or about 11.8 days per gallon.
Which mean with a new refill of one tank we should have to fill it again in about 82 days. Which means about Jan 25, 2022.
Should be interesting to see if it lasts more or less than that date.
And So It Begins
It was a long weekend. We left Table Top Wilderness Area on Friday afternoon to head to Phoenix. We had a lot to do. We ran some errands that included us stopping for groceries at the Winco at about midnight.
The next day we had to stop and get the parts we ordered at my sister's place. So we had to stuff the two waste holding tanks, a shower pan, and a toilet inside the RV. It is amazing how much space all that stuff takes up. Afterwards we headed out to get food, look for shoes for the wife (she found none), and then finally to Lowe's to look for parts for the trailer conversion. That last one took hours. We also picked up a small storage shed that we had to drop off at the wife's aunt's place. Needless to say that was long day. I we did not make it to the rest stop until I think 930pm. Good thing we picked up some take out.
Finally, Sunday we heading into Casa Grande to finish up the grocery shopping, dump the RV, and to finish look at stuff at Lowe's there. Finally we waited an hour for a take out pizza (seems it was super busy night) before we left for out one and half hour trip to camping spot. Around 8pm we finally stopped for the night.
So super busy weekend. Still, we have some parts so we can start to look at the trailer and finalize plans on where some stuff will be going. We are also going to seal an stain the walls of the trailer this week I think.
Overall, I think the trailer conversion is gong to an interesting project. I am hopeful we will be happy when it is all done. At the very least, we will have made the compromises that we want to it and we should know how to repair just about everything.
October 29 2021
Well we been at Table Top Wilderness Area since Sunday. Its a nice area for winter parking. We will certainly be back here in the future. We did pretty well overall here.
Of course now come the busy part. We have a pretty full weekend. We have many in town stops for a variety times. We also have to stop by my sister's and pick up the parts for the Trailer so we can install plumbing. We will be staying at two overnight spots. One a casino parking area and the other a rest stop.
I find the rest stops really useful. While not the quietest of places, they are a good choice for a quick overnight stop. The only downside is if they are really busy, you may not find a spot. We have had that happen at least once, but usually we find something.
Of course after this weekend, we have to begin working on the trailer. There are so many parts still to by. I will get more into that later.
October 18, 2021
It has been a few weeks since my last post. It has been a very busy time for us. So where to begin.
First off we had to go dump and when we camp back to Bloody Basin West, our spot was taken. We tried to go to the other side of the I-17 to find a spot. It was really hard to find spots with signal, so we just hit up one spot that was really close to the road. We stayed single night as we decided to get closer to Phoenix.
We then hit up some BLM land near Black Canyon City for three days. The wife made some trips into Phoenix while I worked. On Thursday, we decided to head to look at a few trailers in the afternoon and pick up the new solar charge controller that ordered off Amazon. We had it shipped to an Amazon Locker for pickup. Needless to say neither trailer we looked at was good for us in the end. The one horse trailer we liked had title issues that the “owner” did not want to really resolve. Since it was late we just stayed at a rest stop for the night.
On Friday morning, we moved over to the wife's aunt's place. The wife went to pick up a enclosed cargo trailer that we thought might be good for the conversion we want to do. It was practically new, so she did and drove it out to a place in south Arizona while I worked.
On Saturday, we did a few things and then drove out with the RV to where the trailer was. We plan on being out here for while as we need to start planning and doing some of the conversion on the trailer.
October 4, 2021
Yesterday went to into Prescott to groceries and then dump and get water. Went by pretty well. The only issue we still keep having is the solar charger and battery bank. having some real issues there. I'm almost afraid that the solar charger is killing the batteries with it be weird. Will need to keep an eye on it this week.
We moved to some BLM land at what I am going to call Bloody Basin West. We hope to be here all week.
October 1, 2021
Well we left the Southern Nevada Welcome Center yesterday afternoon and made our way towards Arizona. We were happy to leave Nevada behind. We stopped for fuel in Golden Valley, Arizona, where we experienced some lady singing we think religious songs into a microphone with a speaker at the edge of the entrance/exit of the gas station. Not sure what that was about. I mean why there of all places? Did not make too much sense to me.
At any rate, we left there as soon as we got gas and headed towards Seligman. There we hopped onto old Route 66. There was a pull off on it that we could camp. We found the Route 66 Pulloff without issues, although after we stopped, the wife decided that we should have parked it in a different spot. Not sure if we are going to spend another night here or move on to our next destination.
September 30, 2021
Well we put on more miles than expected yesterday. We went to southwest edge of Vegas to get the oil changed in the truck. Then we went got a little fuel. For some reason The price of fuel in Pahrump was a lot less than Vegas. We should of gotten it there but we thought it would be cheaper in Vegas, so we only got enough to get us to Kingman, Arizona. After we got gas, we stopped to get a few groceries.
Whlie the wife got the groceries, I went to walk the dogs at a nearby park. While I was doing that I went to lookup our next stop to discover that it was not an actual rest stop. Instead It seems like it was a park that closes at 10pm at night that was labeled a rest stop. So it was a good thing I had looked it up. We decided to try to find a place listed near Searchlight, Nevada. We sort of blew by it in the dark and we ended up a the Southern Nevada Welcome Center, which looks like a really new rest stop. Hardly anyone here and plenty of space. The only thing we did find out is that our emergency exit window opened up on the RV and we lost the screen in that window and the window itself is a little bent. Not sure what we are going to do know with that.
September 29, 2021
We left our spot in Tonopah and made it all the way to Pahrump, Nevada yesterday evening. We found this BLM Land Pahrump spot. Not much else to say right now except that we are trying to still get through Nevada as fast as we can. I think we will be glad to be back in Arizona soon.
Did not get a full charge on the panels yesterday. Have no idea why except that the charge controller is being really really weird.