I’d like to follow-up my previous post with another round of answering questions about RV living. Before I do that, I want to make sure to express the caveat that we haven’t been full-time RVing very long, so these answers shouldn’t be mistaken for some form of expertise. They simply are our early impressions/thoughts about our transition to RV living. I hope they are informative…and occasionally entertaining!
Is RV living less expensive than traditional lifestyles? I believe the best short answer to this question is “It can be.” Now, for the longer answer…lol. One of the appeals of RV living to us was that, based on the information we researched, we could expect that our monthly expenses would be lower. One reason would be that the monthly RV loan payment and nightly RV park fees would likely be less than our mortgage payment. Of course, this wouldn’t be so true for someone who owns (or owned) their house outright, because you’ll start making RV loan payments (if you don’t buy your RV outright), and you’ll pay monthly RV park fees, which weren’t a part of your budget previously. However, there’s another way to think about the nightly RV park costs – you could think of them as replacing much of your normal travel/vacation costs, since you will essentially be using your RV living as a way of traveling and vacationing. We’ve probably been paying an average of $50/night at RV parks, so that comes out close to $1,500/month. We have a huge mobile home, so we tend to look for the better RV parks that can handle our size/needs, which means our RV park costs would be higher than someone else’s who has a smaller RV. Our plan is to try and reduce those costs by making an effort to stay at some free places through Harvest Hosts or by dry-docking on Bureau of Land Management land. Moving on to other savings, we knew our home oil heat bill would disappear and electric bill would be lower – some RV parks charge you for electricity if you stay long-term (monthly). We also knew that we were going to drop down from two cars to one, so we’d save some money that way, but we have noticed that the cost of gas for our RV is significant enough that it may offset the savings of having dropped down a car. If you’re going to drive the RV a lot, the gas can get costly. We’re hoping to drive to a destination and then stay put for several weeks, hopefully not spending tons of money on gas. However, we do want to make our way around the country, so there will be some serious driving…and gas usage…over time. We are hoping that we’ll also reduce our food costs by shifting to doing more food prep instead of eating out as much, but we’ll see about that…we do enjoy exploring the cuisines of the areas to which we travel! Obviously, with an RV, there is less house furnishing costs, so we hope that will save money. On the flip side, because our home is mobile, there’s probably a greater likelihood of maintenance costs to keep it running and in good repair. My suggestion for anyone trying to assess if RV living will reduce their expenses is to create a spreadsheet of your current expenses and then put in estimates of expenses if you became a full-time RVer….and compare the totals. I’m more than happy to provide some input as to the types of RV expenses to include and estimates of amounts!
How do you do your laundry? While most RV parks have laundry facilities, we knew that we wanted to have the freedom of doing our laundry whenever and wherever we wanted to and not have to worry about waiting for machines to be available, so we spent the money to have both a compact washer and dryer installed in our RV. We purchased our RV knowing it could accommodate a washer and dryer. I’m not sure if the smaller RVs all offer that capability. If we’re hooked up to water at the RV park (as we usually are), the washer pulls water from the park. If we want to use the washer when we’re not hooked up to water, then it will pull water from our RV’s fresh water tank…as long as we remember to have water in that tank! By the way, our washer and dryer only handle pretty small loads and the cycle times are pretty long. I guess that’s the trade-off for having our own laundry facility on board!
Do you have to limit your shower duration because of less hot water availability? The short answer is “No”. Our RV came equipped with a tank-less water heater that heats up water on demand – so we can have a hot shower last as long as we like….presuming we don’t run out of propane, which the water heater needs to heat the water. We have a large propane tank, so the likelihood of it running out while we’re showering is pretty slim. So, when you’re connected to the RV park’s water supply, you could take an endlessly long hot shower. If you’re pulling water from your own tank, then your shower could get limited by your tank running out of water (we have an 89-gallon water tank). By the way, the one downside of a tank-less water heater that we’ve noticed is that, while it will provide endless hot water, it can take a while before the water finally gets hot.
What do you do for TV? The truth is, we haven’t gotten this entirely figured out yet. Most RV parks that we’ve stayed at have a TV hook-up for your RV. We connect a coax cable (we bring one with us) to the park’s cable outlet and plug the other end into our RV’s cable input port. Some parks have a wide selection of channels, many of which are high-def. Other parks, not so much. We do have the option to get our own TV signal by way of our satellite dish and/or antenna on the top of the RV. We haven’t tried the satellite dish yet because it means we’d have to purchase a monthly service/plan through Dish Network (our satellite dish will only work with Dish Network). When an RV park doesn’t offer TV but they have a fast/strong WiFi, we’ll typically choose to use my computer and connect it to our TV in order to watch some shows. If they don’t have either TV or a fast/strong WiFi, we’ll put up our antenna and see if we can catch some TV that way. After spending a few days at a park in North Carolina that didn’t have TV, didn’t have WiFi, and our antenna couldn’t pick up any stations, Karen and I decided that it is probably time for us to cave in and purchase the Dish Network satellite service so that we can always have TV, regardless of what an RV park offers…as well as for when we decide to stay overnight at places other than RV parks.
How is your RV kitchen different from a traditional kitchen? This is where the RV living is really different. We had a decent-sized (but not large) kitchen at the farm. Well, the RV’s miniscule kitchen area makes our farm’s kitchen seem like it was absolutely huge! Obviously, because an RV is so much smaller than a typical home, you’d expect the kitchen to be smaller. However, I think that the particular floor plan of our RV simply didn’t emphasize the kitchen. I’m sure there are other large mobile homes that have more space dedicated to the kitchen than ours. We do have a very large, residential-size refrigerator, which is quite nice. We do not have a dishwasher or an oven, but we do have a convection microwave oven and a stovetop that uses propane from our RV’s large tank. We have limited counter space and limited storage/pantry space. Given the limited storage space, we really had to work at narrowing down to the absolute necessities in terms of dishes, bowls, glasses, small appliances, etc. We did bring our toaster, k-cup coffee maker, and electric hot water kettle. When the weather is nice, rather than heat up the inside of the RV with our cooking, we’ll use our camping-style grill to cook outside. For sure, at least in our case, the kitchen has been the big “trade-off” of transitioning to full-time RV living.
Okay, let’s make this the last question for this blog post:
When your RV is not “plugged in” to electricity, how can you run things requiring electricity? The electrical system(s) of the RV would be another area that can make us feel incompetent as relative newbies. Without going into too much detail (and at the risk of disappointing John Matthews by not providing a technically accurate answer ;-)), the answer basically comes down to batteries. We have two big batteries whose main job is to provide the necessary juice to be able to start up our RV engine and/or our generator. We have 4 other batteries that supply the power to run most of the electrical stuff inside the RV. When we’re hooked up to electricity at an RV park, the RV knows to use the juice coming in to run things as well as keep our batteries charged up. Similarly, when we’re not hooked up to electricity, but we’re running our RV engine or our generator, they keep the batteries charging while the batteries are keeping things running. When we’re not plugged in at a park and we’re not running our engine or generator, that’s when the batteries are providing all the juice and are slowly discharging, depending on what devices are being used in the RV that are drawing power. This is where one needs to be careful – you don’t want your batteries to get more than 50% discharged because you could damage them. Luckily, our RV does have a feature that automatically starts our generator if our batteries get discharged down to a certain level. My understanding is that this feature is typically found in recent model mobile homes. One of the things that Karen and I are looking into is the possibility of getting some portable solar panels so that when we choose to stay out in the relative wilderness or places that don’t have RV sites, we can find ways to charge our batteries without having to start our engine/generator that use gas and create exhaust fumes.
Congratulations on making it through this blog post with its overload of mundane information! Unless some burning questions come up that I haven’t yet thought of or addressed, I’ll give folks a break and wait to do my next post until we get back on the road some time after New Years. Thanks for reading this — enjoy the holidays!
