Perpetual Ruminations

Hurry Up and Wait

As the late, great Tom Petty sang, "The waiting is the hardest part". Although his song is far different from my waiting right now—waiting is waiting.

I'm waiting for our camper to be delivered, which won't happen until the snow melts and the door tracks where it's in storage unfreeze. It's not a new camper, but it's new to us and our first (usable without needing work) hardshell camper.

It's all set up to go camping, but we need to put our camping things in it. My wife will want to give it a thorough cleaning, despite it having been cleaned by the previous owner before storing it. I'd be happy with their cleaning, but she's pickier than I am, and that's a good thing.

There are some things I want to check out and possibly change that fall into my area of being picky. I want to know what kind and how powerful is the battery in it. I want to relocate one outlet from inside the cupboard to under it (why they put an outlet inside the cupboard above the stove is beyond me), and I want to set it up for remote camping at sites that do not have electric power available.

This means setting it up to use solar power when needed. We don't need a lot of power available, but enough to recharge the battery, as well as to run fans and lights. I recently purchased a 200-watt solar starter kit that has most of what we will need. Now I just need the camper to see what else I will require to install everything.

I want to be able to place the solar panels in full sun, since many times we can park the camper in shaded areas; the panels need to be mobile. Since the majority of our camping is at campgrounds with electric hook-ups, the solar side needs to be switched on or off as needed, and I'll also want to be able to run a small 110 volt converter. I have the converter already, a portable unit that has one 110v outlet that we use for a few different things. In the past, we've run it off the vehicle battery, but I want to install it inside the camper and run it off the camper battery/solar panels. So this also will need to be fused and switched.

I also want to put a valve on the kitchen sink so that when drained, it will either go into the camper gray water tank or can be switched to go into our portable waste water holding tank. Why? Because when the temperature drops below freezing, we can't use the camper's holding tanks for fear of them freezing up.

Instead, we use portable water tanks (refillable 5-gallon water bottles), a rechargeable water pump that fits the bottles, and a portable gray water tank. We heat the water on the stove for washing ourselves and the dishes. When we drain the sink, however, we have to divert the water from the camper's gray water tank to the portable tank. We also have a portable toilet that we use when temperatures drop below freezing. Both the portable gray tank and the portable toilet can be easily dumped into one fo the vault toilets since the dump station is also closed once the temperatures drop below freezing.

Yes, we've camped in below-freezing temperatures before, as you can see. But the pop-up camper is too difficult to keep warm when the temperature drops that low, unless we have electricity available and use a couple of space heaters to assist the LP furnace in the camper. The canvas just did not hold the heat, and despite using foam and weather stripping, there just wasn't any way to keep the wind from finding places to blow through where the canvas attaches to the camper roof and sides, so we would quickly burn through both twenty-pound LP fuel tanks.

Now, with a hardshell camper, it will be much easier to keep the inside warm. We will still utilize the space heaters to save on LP fuel, since electricity is provided at the campsite. But without the drafts and canvas, we shouldn't need to use the camper furnace very much.

As you can tell, I'm excited about the new (to us) camper and being able to camp earlier in the spring and later in the fall. Hell, if the weather isn't too cold, I'll be camping right into the winter. With that said, maybe I should start looking for a little Christmas tree and some solar Christmas lights just in case we're still camping through December.