Raven’s RV
The ongoing education and adventures of two rank newbie RVers

Jul 29, 2008

Power

Filed in Blog

We recently returned from a four-night trip up as far as Dunsmuir, a lovely little railroad town with waterfalls and all sorts of interesting goodies. I hiked my little heart out and we learned some new and interesting things about the RV.

Firstly, our battery stopped wanting to charge as much as it should. This was okay; we got by with early nights, little solar lamps, and a campfire. But we did start talking about electricity. We’re strongly leaning towards investing in a single 150-watt solar panel and maybe an extra house battery. This would allow us to boondock or stay in the lovely, quiet campgrounds that don’t have hookups. Given that one of these critters will set us back $750 or so we’re still investigating, but at $30 a night for a full-hookup campground, it would pay for itself in 25 days.

We also talked about investing in a Honda generator, especially after we polluted the air with sound and gas fumes as we stayed at Castle Crags. They’re very quiet and very efficient, running for a day on about a gallon of gas. Again, not cheap, but definitely a worthwhile future investment and we’re looking out for a bargain.

The fridge may or may not be functioning properly. We know for a fact that the thermometer went a little haywire, but also one of the big packs of meat that I didn’t freeze went off sooner than its sell-by date. In fact we lost all the red meat, but the chicken/turkey went into the freezer quicker. So that’s another thing to watch out for. I’m a bit sour that I had to replace the meat, but it was a fairly small amount compared to the rest of the stock-up shopping trip.

Still…I really hate waste.

So anyway, it seems that our alternator has gone. We were on the way home when the low-battery alarms started going off. They’re high-pitched and annoying so Don pulled off to see what was what, wielded some wires and meters, and concluded that yes, the alternator was gone, which somehow explains why we couldn’t keep everything charged during the trip. It might just be a $5 fix (new brushes) so we’re not panicking. The main thing was to get home in time for my blogathon (a 24-hour marathon of blogging to raise money from which I’m just about recovered now, thank you.) So Don did his magic and we ran off the generator the whole way home, and I’m not even going to think about our gas mileage for the trip. ;)

I conclude from this two things:

RVing can be expensive
Expensive investments can pay off relatively quickly
Without a technical whizzkid on board, RVing would be prohibitively expensive.

When we got home the wolf-hybrid parked in front of our rig, howled in welcome, and then tootled off to do whatever else he felt like doing. :)