Living in an RV

There are many folks who are full time RVers.....or "full timers".   Most of these folks are retired but some travel in their RV's from job to job.  Others are workcampers....folks who move from campground to campground taking various job assignments, usually for a free campsite; but sometimes for a few dollars an hour as well.   Many (most??) of the retired, full timer RVers stay in just a couple of places, depending on the seasons.   They may spend 4 or 5 months in FL or TX or AZ in the winter and then move north to any number of locations for the summer months.   Still others move around the country, typically traveling within the warmer states in winter and away from those same states for summer months.    We fall in this latter category....moving around to see and experience many different places...and we try to avoid temperature extremes!   Example: while spending this week at Big Cypress RV Park on a Seminole Indian Reservation in the north Everglades, today we drove the Mini Cooper over to the town of Immokalee, FL and visited the largest Mexican Open Air Farmer's Market in the States.  HUGE.   We came back with fresh strawberries, oranges, grapefruit, squash, corn, cantaloupe and more corn (Pam loves corn on the cob!!).   It is things like this that we love to experience in our travels.

Here is one of the booths....you can see red and green peppers and LOTs of oranges and lemons.

Here is another with watermelon, corn, limes, grapefruit and mangoes.

There were about 50 such booths stretched in a circuitous line that you drove through in your car....you can see the one way sign telling which direction for cars to go in.   If one booth didn't have what you were looking for no reason to despair....there were all those other booths to choose from.  And prices were ridiculously low.....one fellow gave Pam three or four large hands full of fresh beans in a bag....for $1.00!!   Anyway, it is things like this that make exploring the local areas both educational and fun.

Getting back to RV living....many folks will ask RVers how they can live in such "close quarters" for months (or years in the case of full timers) without problems.   Well, it does help if you like each other a lot...but the fact is you do spend a bunch of time outside your camper, which makes it that much easier.   There are folks who travel in small and medium size travel trailers; some in pickup campers (that would be a bit tight!!); and some who have large, diesel pickups that pull 35-40 foot 5th wheel trailers....and many of these are very nice.   When it comes to motorized campers we have seen folks traveling in B class campers, the size of a large van; and the class C campers (you recognize as part of the living quarters extend out over the truck cab)...and then motorhomes like ours.   And when it comes to motorhomes, they come in all shapes and sizes from 28 feet up to the 45 foot size like ours.  We have seen older models dating to the 1980's and 90's, the vintage RVs....and we have seen multi million dollar Prevost Bus conversions pulling very long trailers with Cadillacs or BMWs or Mercedes inside.   Many of these "spendier" new RVs come with Ipads so when folks get to the campground they pull out a chair and use the tablet to level the coach, open the slide outs, extend the awnings, and turn on the TVs.   While we don't have one of those, our 2003 Travel Supreme Select was one of the top of the line models when it was produced...so we really don't lack too many "creature comforts".   So, while the living space is much smaller than living in a house, let's compare some other things:

Electricity.....like a house we have electricity.  It is provided by "shore power" when we plug into the campground electric.  We do have a few advantages though....if we lose the power we have a backup generator we can use; OR we can simply rely on our inverters to take DC current from our fully charged 8 house batteries and "invert" it to AC current we can use.  And to take it one step further, in our case we have a 1.2KW solar system with 9 panels on our roof...meaning we don't have to rely on the generator when the power goes out.

Plumbing....we do have to be attentive when it comes to plumbing.  If we are hooked up to campground facilities we have constant fresh water coming in through our hose and that is filtered before entering the motorhome.   If we are on the road we draw water from our 100 gallon on board fresh water tank.   In terms of waste, we have two tanks to watch out for...a gray water tank that holds water from sinks and shower and clothes washer; and a black water tank that holds sewage.  These are 75 and 50 gallons respectively...and the key here is to remember to open and release your sewage valve to empty that tank allowing for the cleaner, gray water to help flush the system down the campgrounds septic.  As for incoming Hot water, instead of a hot water holding tank (like most houses and most RVs have) we rely on our Hydro Hot instant hot water system to provide all the hot water we could need.

Heating and Cooling....while houses up north have furnaces and those further south have AC...and many in between have both; we too have both.   If it is only slightly cold we turn on our electric fireplace in the living room to take the chill away.  If it is colder but not down to 45 degrees or so outside, we use any combination of three roof mounted heat pumps; and if we are caught in temps below 40F (we have done something wrong obviously), we turn on our Aqua Hot system that uses diesel fuel to (quite efficiently) provide heated water to circulate to seven vents where fans blow the hot air into the rooms.   As for cooling, these same heat pumps also work in reverse to provide AC when we need  it.  

Propane.....Most RVs have furnaces that are hot air and are powered by propane.  This propane also heats their hot water in a 6 or 10 gallon quick recovery tank, AND it also provides power to the RV refrigerators when the RV is not plugged into shore power or when on the move down the road.  In our case, we are fortunate to be an all electric coach....that is meant to indicate we have no propane on board (making us a bit safer indeed).  Instead of an RV refrigerator we have a residential one.  And because our electric needs are much greater than most RV's we have more batteries on board (8 instead of the usual 4) for house support...and two high capacity starting batteries to start the coach(starting up a 500HP diesel engine with over 1500 foot pounds  of torque needs 2 very large chassis batteries).   In addition to shore power at the campground, our motorhome is wired for generator backup; as well as wired with two 2000 watt pure sine wave inverters; the 8 house batteries; the solar panels and all is managed by a 80AMP charge controller.....the "brains of the outfit".   We have a monitoring panel in our bedroom power closet that allows us to see what is happening and under what conditions and when....and in many cases it allows us to manually over ride the automatic system.

Comforts....we have two wonderful sound systems as we both like our music (and Pam REALLY likes her music)....one in dash system that allows FM and AM bands as well as a weather band and XM Satellite radio; and it is hooked up to a 15 CD changer system so we can play stuff we really like as we head down the road.   Our other system is a 5 CD changer system in the living room that is hooked to a 5 speaker surround sound system....so the place can really rock if we have a mind to!  We also have three LED TV's, all hooked to DVD players and all wired for cable and satellite as well as over the air signal connections.   So, when asked about our comforts and we reply with "all the comforts of home" we mean it!  

I hope this answers some of the questions we get from blog readers who wonder how we manage on the road for long periods of time.   The freedom this lifestyle provides....to see so many different things and meet so many different people and experience so many different cultural offerings...is simply wonderful....and to do so in comfort makes it all the nicer.  We try (and will continue to do so) capture many of the highlights and report them in our blogs....so stay tuned.