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What is this?
If you come to this website, you might be wondering what is going on here. Well first off, welcome to my site. It is a collection of stuff about two primary things, our travels in our RV and about my Role-playing Game hobby, which at this point I am attempting to do some stuff while we traveling.
Last 5 Travel Journal Entries
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.
Last 5 Trailer Conversion Entries
Waste Storage Install Part 2
Well after some discussion, we are going the route of two different waste discharge valves. It just sort of needed to be that way. There was just no way we could get the required connections working the way we wanted them to be.
The biggest issue now is just the weight distribution of the tanks. We will just have to see what we can do about it. However, I think it is just going to be what it is.
Waste Storage Install Part 1
So we did not get as far as I would have liked on the conversion over my vacation. One of the biggest things we have to contend with is the actual frame of the trailer.
We putting the grey and black tank inside the trailer and going to build a platform that that the shower and toilet sit on top of them. One challenge has been the discharge, how do we hook it up. The drain pipes were not going to be in the right place, so we had to move the tanks around a bit.
Now the issue is we either need to combine the waste discharges together in a manner so that the do not hang low enough that it will not hit anything on some of the roads we want to take it on.
I am leaning towards two connectors one on each tank.
Waste Storage
One of the big things we have to think about for this conversion is waste tanks. We know that we want something to last a while.
One of the things I noticed about a lot of the trailer conversion I have seen is how many of them sort of exclude a shower and/or toilet.
If they have a toilet, then they do something like a cassette or compost toilet. Neither of those options were something the wife liked. If they had some sort of shower, a lot of them seem to just have a drain hole to the outside and no storage tank. That was not option for us either. While we do go places that you could drain somewhere outside, there will be places that we go that we can not.
So we have decided to install both a black and grey tank in our conversion. The trick is for the black tank, the toilet has to be over the black tank just like in normal travel trailer. And the next trick is going to how to install the tanks we did get. Right now the plan is to build a platform for the shower and toilet area and have the tank underneath that platform. Going to lose headroom doing that. I will have to sit down to shower but I should be able to manage.
The sink is the only place where we will have a separate small holding tank we can dump. We should be able to dump it either outside or in the shower or toilet.
Hopefully these plans will pan out. Will update in a future post.
Starting a Trailer Conversion
We have an old 5th Wheel RV that we have been using since May of this year. You can review our Travel Journal to see some of the places we been in the last six months.
In those travels, we came to one conclusion, the 5th wheel is just way too large for us. For us, it has some of the following shortcomings.
- Too Long to fit in some of the boondocking spots we wanted to go to.
- Tends to no like the rougher roads we use for boondocking. In some places we have bent our truck bed when the RV has touched it.
- A slide-out. We have found that we do not like it at all. One more thing to fail and if you wanted to discretely park somewhere overnight, you have to slide-out just a bit to acess the bedroom and bathroom area easily.
- Too much wasted storage space. Since we rarely slide-out all the way, the storage hidden by the slide becomes useless to us.
- Grey and Black Tanks too small.
- Stairs and more stairs. We did not like having to go up into the bedroom and bathroom via stairs. We like things on a single level.
We looked at small travel trailers and they pretty much had the following wrong for us.
- Really small Tanks for fresh and waste water.
- Bad layout
- limited cargo capability.
- really pricey for a new one
In the end, we decided that while it will be a lot of work, we will convert an enclosed cargo trailer to have the features we want. After some searching and looking, we found a 7×14 enclosed for sale. The person that had it, only used it a few times. It pretty much was brand new.
I will post more information about the conversion when we do more.