Before we decided to hit the road as full-time RVers, we knew we did not want to be fully dependant upon full-hookup campgrounds as we travel. We enjoy a mix of state parks, federal recreation areas, Harvest Hosts, and RV parks in our travel. This means making sure that we can function as remote workers without being plugged into shore power. Until our trip to Everglades National Park, the longest we had gone dry camping was 7 nights. Here's how we managed our resources to extend the time to a full 14 nights without any hookups!
Everglades National Park: Long Pine Key Campground
Everglades National Park has two campgrounds that are big enough for larger travel trailers and RVs: Long Pine Key and Flamingo. Both campgrounds are operated by Flamingo Adventures as a National Park Concessionaire. Neither campground has any hookups, but they do have bathrooms, solar showers, and miles and miles of trails to explore. We chose Long Pine Key because it is a much shorter drive back to civilization and we knew we would need to grocery shop and refuel during our two weeks there.
Stretching Our Fresh Water Tank
Typically, our fresh water tank is our limiting factor. We work really hard to stay hydrated so we go through a lot of water on a daily basis just filling up our Berkey Water Filter. Since drinking water was the main use of our fresh water tank, we extended it's life by filling up two 1-gallon containers of fresh water at the park's drinking fountains and pouring them directly into our Berkey. This allowed us to use the fresh tank for the water we needed to wash dishes, brush teeth, and flush the toilet. We also ate the majority of our meals for these two weeks off of paper plates to minimize the amount of water we used to wash dishes. This allowed us to leave the campground with 8% of our fresh water tank remaining.
Stretching Our Gray Water Tank
As we said above, we minimized our water use by eating our meals off of paper plates. But if the only thing going into the gray tank is dish washing water and tooth brushing water, we can go for eternity! What really fills up the gray tank is taking showers! Since we didn't want to waste a single drop of our fresh water tank on showers, and it was WAY too humid and sweaty to not take regular showers, this meant taking advantage of the park's solar showers. We were pleasantly surprised by how consistently hot the water in the showers was. We took showers in the late afternoon or early evening to make sure the water had time to heat up in the sun all day long; and we had to turn the heat on the showers down! It felt great to shower off the daily sweat and humidity and there was no way we could have survived this dry camping experience without those solar showers! We left the campground with only 25% of our gray tank filled!
Stretching Our Black Tank
This was another simple task accomplished by using the park bathrooms. Our rule was simple, if it wasn't the first or last bathroom trip of the day, we walked over to use the park bathrooms. This had the added bonus of helping us increase our step count every day! We had absolutely no problem getting our black tank to stretch for the full two weeks this way. We left the campground with our blank tank 85% filled.
Stretching our Battery
Solar, solar, solar! There is nothing less peaceful when camping than the sound of gas generators running all day long. We are proud of the fact that have not needed to use a generator once in our journey so far. However, this meant needing to maximize our solar power. Since we both needed to work during the week we needed to charge our laptops and run our wifi, stretching our battery wasn't as simple as just using our solar rechargeable lanterns after dark (although we did that too!).
We did need to make some changes to our initial solar set up in order to increase the amount of power we could draw. The first few days Steve (he's in charge of the outside stuff) had the panels connected "in series". This meant the panels were better suited to low-light situations like early morning or near sunset. The setup would have worked amazing during midday, if it weren't for those pesky palm trees making shadows. You see, any shadow on any panel meant the entire group made very little electricity. Thank you Amazon drop box delivery! We bought new cable connectors, and Steve used the tools he brought along to make extension cables, to try a few different configurations. He tried "in parallel", where each panel created power on its own instead of as one unit. He tried "2S2P", meaning 2 panels act as one and 2 act as a second. He also changed the ground setup to be more upright, minimizing the amount of time any panel was in the shadows. Though these different configurations are all capable of 400 watts of power (theoretically), he found the "2S2P" setup worked best in our situation. It was common for our battery to gain 4-5% of its capacity in the daytime hours, even with our normal consumption of power.
Impressively, we were able to leave the campground with 8% of our battery life remaining! We are so happy that we were able to survive that long, using all the electricity we needed, without having to resort to using a gas powered generator!
We hope hearing how we were able to dry camp for 14 nights inspires you to try your hand at off the grid camping! Do you enjoying dry camping and boondocking? What are your tips and tricks for extending your time off-grid? Tell us in the comments!
That's impressive and pretty cool to learn about. Nice job Team Tiegs!