RV Lifestyle in WWO

Notes from an alternate world, a World Without Oil.

There are some who feel I am sitting in fat city. Well, maybe that is so, but it is because I planned ahead. I knew times like this were coming, so when I retired I chose a new lifestyle that could survive, and one which would be a lot of fun in the meantime.

In this new world order, you can live in an RV if you stay in one place, at least for the most part. That is what my wife and I do. We have a 25-foot fifth-wheel trailer. You cannot see it in this picture, but it has a slideout on the other side so we get a total of 240 square feet of living space. Of course, we have the whole outdoors as well. There is storage in the basement for bulk items and to hold the antennas when we travel.

At the back of the trailer we have our reverse osmosis water system. In this picture we are taking water from a pedestal in an RV park, running it through the RO filters, and using the output to fill our fresh water tank. My system includes a boost pump to make the water run faster, but we can run on the line water pressure or a gravity feed. One of the downers about reverse osmosis is that it "throws" away 2.5 gallons for every 2 gallons we put into our tank. The waste water can be run into the sewage system, or it can be used to irrigate the plants around our rig. There is nothing wrong with the water we throw away; it is just a bit hard and contains all of the microbes and such that our system filtered out.

One key ingredient for us to travel on the road is good communications, wherever we are. We have a cellphone, and hopefully we will be within the range of a cell-tower so we can receive and send calls. We also have satellite TV and satellite Internet. This allows us to stay on top of what is happening in the world, no matter what.

This communications system requires 180 watts of electrical power to operate, and we have a bank of solar panels on the roof, providing a maximum of 240 watts to recharge our four batteries. One  a good day the panels can collect about 1.2 KWhrs of electricity (figuring an average of 5 hours of head-on sunlight). When the batteries are fully charged, we have on hand about 1.2 KWhrs available. A single 120 watt bulb in your house would use all that energy in about 10 hours; that is why we use LEDs for lighting throughout and we restrict our use of the communications system to under two hours per day.

As you can see, we conserve big time. If we fail to conserve, we go without.

The original idea was to spend our winters in southern California and our summers in Washington and Oregon. We use our trusty old Dodge Ram pickup to pull this rig. It has over 175,000 miles on it, put there when the price of diesel was less than half what it is now. As the price of fuel has increased, our travel has been restricted.

BTW, I still sell LEDs at www.prudentrver.com and to people I meet. In time, it will be the only choice we can afford.

So this is how and where we live. It is small, but it is efficient. We don't require lots of power to survive. In fact, I planned ahead and chose this outfit as a means to survival.

In a World Without Oil, planning ahead like this can make the difference. Hope you have done your planning, or are convinced that is what you must do.

Maybe we will meet someday down the road.

Sam
the Prudent RVer

 

Comments

[Megiddo Tell]

Hi!

Yeah, I think that dessum9 was just blowing off some steam, but the comments were pretty pointed were they not? I guess a couple of old gaffers like ourselves saw this comming, and prepared for it while dessum9 continued to fiddle. Are there any attempts at contacting the local, state or federal officials from your end? Is there anybody trying to organize stuff? Hope you are doing well.

Regards

Megiddo