Our front cargo doors seal well — they never leak. With that comes an inconvenience. Sometimes the seal sticks and it is difficult to open the door. The doors don’t have handles. So sometimes I would have to press upward on the key while it was in the lock and lift/pull with the key to open the door. Eventually I would have probably broken the key. So I needed a solution.
It’s a pretty common complaint among RV owners — it takes forever to fill my fresh water tank and the water keeps “backing up” while filling.
This was a big problem for us. We have two 50 gallon fresh water tanks and it would take an hour to fill them. The Owner’s Manual warned of this and states to fill the tanks slowly with the water bib turned to a low volume. This was completely unacceptable.
I finally devised a solution that cost very little money and will not take much time for anyone to adopt.
Just got back from an extended camping trip in the desert in Nevada and my website had a bunch of “ping-backs” from this post by Andrew Skurka.
A ping-back is when another website refers a reader via a link. Andrew was very complementary about this website and Dave Chenault’s Bedrock and Paradox as blogs with some quality content, although not a lot of content, and both sites are not monetized; that is they do not generate income.
I want to clarify this and state again as I did on October 16th, that popupbackpacker.com now incorporates affiliate marketing, which generates a small amount of income for me.
If you’re reading this you probably know what an inverter is. Just in case that is not the case let’s quickly cover the subject. I have been using inverters for decades and through a lot of trial and error, research and tenacity, have learned much. By sharing this I might be able to assist you in making a good inverter decision and save you from the timely and often expensive option of learning through mistakes.
I have camped in the desert during summer without air conditioning many times. In our local deserts, temperatures do occasionally hit 120F and once in a while even higher. See this post where I re-packed our wheel bearings in 123F temperature. The rare occasions we patronize a campground with electrical hook-ups is usually when we take our inflatable boat to the lower Colorado River in the middle of summer.
Old Age is Creeping In.
Staying cool in the hot desert during the day is simple: just stay in the shade. But as I get older, it is getting more difficult for me to sleep when the nighttime temperatures are 90F or higher. This June we spent a couple of weeks at Lake Mead and most days were above 110F and a couple hit 114F. Anticipating this, and not willing to stay in a parking lot campground with hook-ups away from the lake and in civilization, I came up with an idea – a portable evaporative cooler (aka swamp cooler).
Now, I could buy a generator, which is expensive and more importantly noisy. So that was out based on principle and philosophy. Being familiar with evaporative coolers, I first needed to do some simple math.
Continue reading Camping in 114F Temps and No Air Conditioner (sort of)