Required Equipment for Boondocking? - RV-Dreams Community Forum

bates6618 · RV-Dreams Community Member

Required Equipment for Boondocking?

azrving · RV-Dreams Family Member

Extra water tank/bladder, generator (inverter type yamaha/honda 3000 or larger to run one a/c etc.), jump/booster box or 12 volt cables for your generator (just in case your tow vehicle battery goes dead), cell phone, etc.

Here are some links:

http://www.rv-boondocking-the-good-life.com/boondockingtips.html

http://rvbasics.com/rv-lifestyle/RV-Boondocking-America.html

http://www.phrannie.org/boondock.html

http://www.rv-camping-lifestyle.com/Boondocking-Check-List.html

bjoyce · RV-Dreams Family Member

azrving gave you some great sites to study but I just wanted to say that the first thing you need is a good battery bank. Many RVs come with too little battery. You might be able to get by with two group 31 or two golf cart batteries for around 200+ amp-hours, but most find that 400+ works better and if you want to use a big inverter, 600+ amp-hours really does the job. Figure out your battery storage and see what you can do.

thebearII · RV-Dreams Family Member

Portable water tank/bladder, waste tank, 1000 watt generator to charge batteries (using a battery charger) or run small appliances/TV and 4-6 batteries are needed at minimum.

To run microwave, hair dryer and A/C you'll need at least a 3000 watt generator or 4000 watt to have extra power capacity.

Solar would eliminate the need to use the generator daily unless you use the A/C.

We are happy with our 2 Honda 2000 watt generators with parallel kit to run the A/C. Most of the time we run just one of the generators until we need to turn on the A/C. The single powers both laptops, the sat box, TV and the microwave plus lights and our other electrical needs. We can use everything we would use if we had a 50amp hookup at a resort.

Where we boondock, the generators can't be heard beyond our campsite due to ocean wave and traffic noise at one place we stay. In our favorite desert spot, everyone spreads out so your neighbors are about a 1/4 mile away. Plus the offroad vehicles drown out any noise.

Jbbar · RV-Dreams Family Member

We have 4 X 100 watt solar panels on the roof, but the heart of our power system is really the 8 X 6V batteries we have down under. We added 4 to the standard battery bank in our rig. We are able to use pretty much all the power we need or want and if the sun is cooperating get back to a full charge by mid-afternoon.

As for water our outfit holds 100 gallons of fresh and we have a number of five gallon jugs that we refill when we are in town. Black water storage is not an issue but we need to be careful with the gray tank. With caution we can easily last a couple of weeks before having to visit the dump site.

Also have a 8KW Diesel genny but rarely ever need to use it.