Boondock electricity

I am going to upset a few folks, but...

I have a hard-sided TT, and no generator. We only dry camp. We have gone for multiple week-long trips with no recharging but for our 100w solar panel. I have one 97aH 12v battery.

I have camped below freezing for two nights, with the furnace set at 55° at night, and 70 in the mornings and evenings. Had no problem with power. I have replaced all lights with LED lights, and it makes a difference.

I may get a second battery when this one dies, but until then, I don't anticipate any problem relying on solar for all my charging, regardless of how long I am stationary. But, I camp out west, where we have more sunshine than eastern U.S. That makes a difference.

I would imagine that two 100w panels and two batteries would keep you going fine (again, I have not camped where the sun isn't out at least every-other day) for over a week, unless you brought an inverter.

Our camping style may be more resource-conserving than yours, so our style may not suit you. I just wanted to post our experience, as it is different than most on here who use a generator.

Finally, a Buddy heater does not work well above 7,500 feet, and doesn't work at all above 9,000 feet. I had two, and had the same experience with each.

Welcome to the forum Ken. You've gotten some good advice above and it's all spot on but I'll give you my experiences and my equipment and my thoughts.

2005 Jayco 27BH trailer, two 6 volt batteries from Costco and a Honda eu2000i inverter generator. 40 gallon fresh water tank, 36 gallon gray and black tank, 4 kids and my wife. I boondock in the desert almost 90 percent of the time I'm camping.

My family will go through the 40 gallon tank of water in three to four days, and that's using the water sparingly. I have all boys and am in the desert so they have to pee in the bushes during the day. But they still need to wash their hands and brush their teeth from time to time. And I need water to cook and put out the fire at night.

My trailer is a hardsided trailer, not a popup and I run the furnace at about 65f at night (mid to high 30's outside) and that hits the batteries hard. I can make it two nights easy before recharging if I want. But I have a generator that I paid good money for so I run it.

My brothers popup though runs the furnace almost constantly all night and he needs the recharge (off my generator no less)in the morning. More blankets or better sleeping bags would probably help there.

Enough about me, now about your question.

#1 forget anything about using an inverter for comfort in your trailer, you and I just can't carry enough battery for this.

#2 Plan on 1 night of heat per battery installed. Yes if you keep the thermostat low you can usually scrape out a second night, but it's the fan on the furnace that's chewing through your battery storage.

#3 you need a way to put electricity back in your battery. I use a generator but I don't like the noise. The Honda is one of the quietest generators on the market. But to not hear it I need to walk about 75 - 100 yards away in the desert, so you will hear the noise in camp. But it is relatively quiet, almost like a low hum sitting on the other side of the trailer from the chairs. I charge the phones and things like that during the day when the generator s running.

#4 Solar is silent, but only works when the sun is shining and you need more panels than you have roof space to charge your battery up after a night of furnace.

#5 In a pinch you can turn your vehicle around and use some jumper cables to charge the trailer batteries. But that's a really expensive battery charger. :)

#6 Don't count on your tow vehicle charging the batteries while pulling the trailer. It takes many hours towing to put a decent charge in the battery.

If you are already a tent camper, just take your gear minus the tent and go camping. Use the trailer like you want to and see how it works. If you burn through the battery charge in one night you still have your trusty camping gear and a big comfortable trailer to sleep in.

I fall into the group that has little use for generators. Mainly because they contradict the reason I go off the grid in the first place.

Camp areas that are set up without hooks up are designed around enjoyment of the natural world.

Sure I like to watch the tv news and weather before bed time, but if the camp ground is designed for a more primitive camp style, I can certainly rough for a few days.

When I bought my TT I kept my PUP because there are a few events I go to that offer little more than an empty field for camping. The PUP is a perfect set up for these times.

RoyB wrote:
We get by very well with just 255AHs of battery capacity. This requires us to re-charge each day however by connecting the POPUP shore power cable directly to my 2KW Honda Generator using a RV30A-15A adapter (WALMART)
...
It does take some planning to be successful otherwise it will get dark on you around 10PM at night haha

We get by very well with 215AHs of battery, but ours lasts 4-5 nights without a recharge.

Of course, we don't bring along a houseful of electric appliances like Roy does!! ha ha.

thank you all for all the feedback, i will do some more homework on how much power i think i will be using. thanks Ken.

As others have stated, run everything possible from propane. Even the largest 12v system won't last long heating a popup. Even the fan in your propane heater will run your battery down pretty quickly.

Take a look at Mr. heater. When we had a Coleman PU years ago that's what we used and it worked well in our mountains.

Welcome aboard.

All good advice above.

When I first started out, I was coming from decades of tent camping but not really understanding just what was and was not available via the PUP's electrical system.

Long story, short: You really have to gear your mindset when dry camping to conserve power and/or figure out how to replace it for electrical needs. You tend to look for the most efficient ways to extend what you have.

For dry camping, I ended up going with a large group 31 battery, switching from incandescent bulbs to LEDs (big electrical savings there), heating in the cooler months with a Coleman catalytic heater with the onboard furnace as backup (keeps the 12v fan from spinning as much), installing cut-off switches for things like the radio and other unnecessary devices to minimize parasitic electrical draw, etc.

While I haven't gone solar yet (I would like to), I do have a 2,000 inverter-based generator to recharge the battery. Inverter generators are often quieter than open frame generators. During mid to low 30 degree nights, I need to charge the battery after the second night to keep it well maintained. You never want your battery to dip below 50 charge, which is about 12.06 volts. When it's too hot, I have a parallel kit and a second generator that provides enough power (3,000 running watts) to run the air conditioner.

Some good introductory reading is the 12 volt side of life parts 1 and 2

As stated above, do not use your battery for any kind of heating or cooling. This includes running the refrigerator. In my opinion, electricity can be used for this only when connected to shore power or a generator - something that is providing 120v AC to the PUP's converter. My personal thought on using electrical devices like computers, tablets, phone charging, etc, is to skip the 12v DC to 120v AC to that the device's charger converts it back to. That's just way too wasteful due to inefficiencies in all of the conversions. I use 12v cigarette lighter outlets and use the little USB adapters. That way, I'm going from 12v DC to 5v DC, which is a far cry better for not wasting energy. That basically covers everything except laptops. When we're dry camping, we usually don't bring the laptops along anyway but would just plug them directly into the generator during its run for charging up the PUP's battery.

I do have an inverter in the "junk" drawer of the PUP but have yet to use it. It's there just in case. I may donate it sometime. The one inside the tow vehicle gets used heavily ;)

We enjoy dry camping but also despise the sound of generators. We first tested our amperage used with each appliance and found under conserve mode, we use about 25ah per day. With my 2 trojan 6-volt batteries I can dry camp for about 5 days before its time to re-charge the batteries. and after that 5 days, it's also time to dump the sewer, re-fill the water, and do a bit of shopping. It is then we will stay in a FHU park to charge the batteries, and we may also do a bit of laundry before heading out again.

Propane for heat and cooking.

Electricity for lights and your furnace fan.

Quiet generator when the battery runs down.


If you're mostly summer camping, skip the furnace, bring warm blankets if you're camping at higher elevations or latitudes where it gets COLD at night, and you can run just LED lights on your batteries for a week or two.

I have both solar and a 2k genny. It rained last weekend while camping and I used the genny 2 hours every day to charge, as solar was useless in the wet woods. I am going to an area that is high mountain and sparsely treed next weekend, if the sun is shining (fingers crossed) my 200 watts of solar should do the trick of keeping the 3 AGM charged.