Moochdocking

This past week we found some friends that were nice enough to let us come visit and park our RV on their property. This was our second location to park our RV in and the first time that we would be staying in our RV while not in a campground. In most campgrounds if we plan ahead we have luxury of having support infrastructure such as power, water and sewer. If you book a campsite that has full hookups this means that there is drinkable water that you can attach to your RV via a hose, a fifty amp or thirty amp electrical outlet to plug your RV into shore power and a sewer pipe that you can attach to your RV allowing you to dispose of black and gray water immediately not needing to hold it in your tank. You can also find campsites with partial hookups as well and this means you only have water and power available to you on demand and you’ll need to hold your waste water in your RV holding tanks.

Full hookups are wonderful and that means you don’t need to be conservative on water usage while taking showers, cooking or doing dishes. It also allows you to use cheaper (electricity is often included in the nightly rates) electrical heating sources for heating the RV and water versus the more expensive propane options. Our RV has two electrical systems. A 12 volt direct current (DC) system that runs off two 6 volt batteries joined in series giving us 12 volts and 225 plus amp hours. This DC system runs all our lights, hydraulic landing gear, slides and refrigerator. The batteries also power through an inverter, the TV, stereo and select receptacle outlets. We also have a solar panel on our roof that can keep the batteries charging during the day. The second system is 120 volt alternating current (AC) or shore power system that plugs into campground power. Our particular RV uses a 240 volt 50 amp connection that is split out in the breaker box as two separate 120 volt systems. On smaller RVs you can also find 30 amp and 15/20 amp systems. The shore power is used to power the two air conditioners/heaters, fireplace, the bedroom TV, the rest of the outlets and the washer and dryer (if we had them).

Boondocking or dry camping is when you’re camping in your RV but don’t have any hookups and are fully reliant on your holding tanks, battery power and propane. We have yet to try and boondock but from what we have read so far it’s a skill. One has to know their RV inside out in order to conserve power, water, propane and not overflow the waste tanks. People that boondock a lot will also outfit their RV with much larger battery systems and add additional solar panels to the roof to help stretch their electricity for longer.

Last week at our friends place we were moochdocking. This is when you’re staying for free on someone’s land, and have a makeshift supply of infrastructure available to you. Getting water is usually pretty easy as most house will have a hose bib on the side of the house and as long as you have a long enough hose you are good to go. Power is a little bit more tricky. We’ve camped with only a thirty amp electrical supply available to us before and it’s manageable as long as we are conscious of not using two many heaters or the kettle at the same time but houses don’t usually have a 30 amp plug, let alone a 50 amp one either. Most houses usually only have 15 amp plugs which is barely enough to run one heater. Luckily I had planned ahead and done my research and purchased some adapters to make our stay more comfortable. We had ordered an adapter that allows us to attach two different 15 amp circuits to our 50 amp trailer. The adapter splits out each 120 volt leg of our 50 amp shore power system allowing us to connect each leg to it’s own 15 amp circuit allowing us to run both our fireplace and our kettle at the same time without blowing a breaker. One thing we did learn is that attaching your RV in shore power in this manner while using Ground or Arc-fault Circuit Interrupters will blow the breaker immediately upon attaching the second power source as it does not like the combined neutrals across the two circuits. Sewer is another tricky one as most houses don’t have a convenient dump hole. This was another lucky score for us as only 50 feet from the driveway was a sewer pipe cleanout that we were able to open up to dump our tanks. Overall it was a fairly comfortable experience roughing it for the first time and we look forward to trying more boon/mooch docking in the coming years.