Airstream Upgraded & Unplugged
It has been a really long time since we wrote something on the website, but I thought it would be a good opportunity now to go into a little more detail than our video could handle on our upgrades and why we completed them. It’s important to note that boondocking or dry camping doesn’t require anything that we did, but it will certainly make our lives a little easier and more comfortable. The main reason for the 12V upgrade, was to create a less stressful environment for when we were out doing something where the dogs couldn’t come.
I’ll start with our stay in Florida over the summer. We were at the Johnston Springs campground and were heading to Disney parks for a few hours at a time. In our travels over the past 5 years we wouldn’t have questioned our power staying on, but while we were there we started to get sporadic power outages. The first was due to a storm that came through and knocked down a power line, but then we were seeing an outage nearly daily for anywhere between 20 minutes and a couple of hours. This happened for a few weeks. We would later find out that this was happening because the main breaker for the row of RVs was being overloaded and in the heat of the day tripping when everyone’s A/C was kicking on. But that first outage had us without power for over an hour. We had luckily had shown up 20 minutes after the power had cut, but the temperature inside the Airstream was already 85 or so degrees. We turned on a fan without any real results before the temperature finally hit 100 degrees and we decided to get the dogs in the truck and drive around with A/C.
It was at this point that we decided we wanted a backup system that would be available for the dogs if we happened to be out and the power went out. This is where our electrical upgrade started.
After talking with Ronnie at Airstream Nuts & Bolts, we decided on two Battleborn GC3 batteries (2x270Ah), a 3000 watt inverter, and increased solar panels (8x100W). This will allow us to run the A/C for a few hours off the batteries and keep the dogs comfortable. In the meantime, we have a thermostat that will alert us if the temperature rises above a certain point and along with the new electrical system we have access to see where our battery capacity is at any moment, as well as remote monitoring of our propane and a few other temperature sensors. We felt like this was enough that if we were out and the power was lost there would be enough time to get back before the dogs were in any danger (we only leave them alone for about 4 hours at a time).
Lest you think this was an overreaction to a single park with power issues, this has now occurred at 3 different parks. We also understand our miss in planning this year which put us in Florida during the summer, but there is more to that as well.
In addition to those changes, we also opted to make a few other upgrades within the electrical system. The first was adding soft starts to both A/C units. While not completely necessary, we felt that being able to run both units on 30A service would be a nice upgrade, so we went ahead and got that. We also upgraded to an in line Progressive EMS, which is really just a time saver for when we plug in.
Adjacent to the electrical system, we installed a control for the water pump that smooths out the pressure so we don’t get the hammering charge through the lines anymore. It was a late addition, but we feel worth the cost to have something slightly better.
Moving outside of the electrical system, we opted to add the 3” dexter lift to our trailer. We had been to a campground in Arkansas with a dedicated entrance and exit. The entrance was ok, but the exit had a pretty steep break over which likely would have had us scraping our bumper, so we chose to leave through the entrance. Just before our visit to Ronnie, we had parked in a friends driveway with roughly the same issue. When we left we came within a few centimeters of scraping. We feel like this is a piece of mind upgrade that we won’t have any issues with scraping. Finally, lets be honest, it looks cooler too.
Lastly we had a few cosmetic changes completed. The first was the glass in the door. When we are in the trailer, we tend to spend quite a bit of time at the dinette either working or watching a movie. We felt like we couldn’t see out the curb side of the trailer due to a lack of windows and ultimately changed it out for clear glass. A lot of people seem to be doing this now and we think it was well worth it. The last item on the long list of changes we made was replacing both of our skylights. We had gotten a little bit of hail damage while we were in storage in Colorado and the outer bubble of our rear skylight had cracked. This allowed a little bit of rain to penetrate and while we don’t think it was doing any damage, we also didn’t want to take a long term risk. The benefit of the upgraded skylights is that the radiant heat is not quite as oppressive and . . . when it rains it they don’t have the sound of a drum being beaten on.
We still have a few things that we would like to do, most recently we decided we are going to upgrade our maxfan so we can change the direction of the air flow and run it while we are in motion. We think we are going to be able to do that ourselves in the coming months.
If you’ve watched our video, thanks for coming by and reading this. If not, you should go take a look at all the upgrades and what they look like. We even spent a few days dry camping to test it all out in the following week.
Right now we are in Louisiana making a new dinette table and bedside tables. We are excited to share this as well as continue to share our journey around the country.