Water Conservation

When I started out this crazy little plan, one thing I had in mind was conservation -- of anything I could. Water, energy, time, money, and so on. One thing I recently realized is that I was able to make tremendous savings in water. Not that I was wasting a lot before, but it's a concern living in the West where water is scarce and becoming more scarce with climate change and population growth.

From the beginning, I have logged my water use. The nice thing about having holding tanks for soiled water is that I know how big they are. I drain my gray tank once a week and my black tank once every three weeks. Combining capacity with the frequency of drains tells me about how much water I am using.

The other day on NPR, a factoid was dropped that the average American uses 150 gallons of water per day. No details were given about the statistic, but I assume this means toilet flushes, showers, hand-washing, dish washing, clothes washing, and drinking. The number seems excessive to me, perhaps especially now that I am living in a domicile that is specifically built for keeping water use down.

With two ~40 gallon tanks being drained a total of four times over 3 weeks, I can estimate that I am using about 160 gallons of water every 3 weeks. That comes to somewhere around 50 gallons per week, or about 8 gallons per day. Comparing NPR's factoid, it seems that I'm doing pretty well on water.

I should note that my data are based on my water use for dishes, food prep, drinking water, shower, and toilet. I have no lawn, so no water lost there. My numbers do not include laundry, which I do once every two weeks at a laundromat or toilet use while on campus. So, as bad as my science may be, even if I have a 100% margin of error (unlikely), I am still saving tremendous amounts of water in my daily endeavors.

Reasons for the savings likely include the flow restrictor I installed on the RV to keep standard water pressure from blowing the pipes. Also, the minimized number of dishes I have and the smaller sink, so dishes are done quite efficiently. The toilet I am using is also not a tank toilet, so I use a fraction of the water that even the most efficient house-toilets use.

I'm chalking one up for water conservation on the list of successes this experiment has produced.

First Semester Complete

A long overdue update -- I completed my first semester of grad school living in the RV. Got a 4.0 for the semester and began solidifying some solid relationships with professors and peers. I think I've finally found that 'work/life' balance that I have always biased more toward work than life. All in all, I think the semester is a sign that I'm on the right track.

The RV has been great. After spending time in places with shared walls and in landlord situations, I am realizing more and more that the RV was the right way to go. It's like living in a tiny house alone. It's also really nice to know that if something goes out, I don't have to wait for the landlord to come fix it -- I just have to fix it myself. For some, this may not sound desirable, but I greatly prefer it.

Anyway, the semester went great. I spent a lot of time working with literary theory in my humanities courses and environmental law and decision making processes in my environment course. It's a great mix of material that keeps me interested. Strangely, it's really an educational path that builds on what I was doing professionally at my last job -- blending science and policy in the frame of culture to make science and policy  understandable and consumable by the public.

Overall, it was a great semester. I hope the next semester goes as well. The RV has been great and I'm excited to make it through my first winter in it. So far it appears that my winterizing work paid off, which is a major relief.

2 Month Checkup - The Good. The Bad.

I've now been living in the RV for a little over two months. I've seen temps down to 15 degrees, and winds of around 55 mph. I'm starting to get a firm grasp of what it's like to live in an RV full time. In relation to living in a house, some things are better, some worse. Here's what I've found so far:

Things I Really Like

1. Small size = fast cleaning: I can clean my entire house, including vacuum, sweeping, mopping, bathrooms and kitchen in under 30 minutes. That's for a deep cleaning. When you live in ~150 square feet, it's a FAST clean with little waste and minimal cleaning products. 
2. Minimized Belongings: While I do have a big storage unit as my rough space, I tend to need rough space more than soft living spaces. But within the RV, I have minimized my dishes and all other belongings, so there's not as much potential clutter. Simple and minimized makes for just a plain simpler lifestyle. 
3. The potential to leave: How many people have had bad neighbors? I have a few I don't like, but there's profound comfort in knowing that I can literally unplug and go within 24 hours if people really bug me. And there's not much in the way of moving to be done, either. Just unskirt, unplug the utilities, and drive away. Pretty amazingly simple. 
4. Feeling the Elements: This is one that doesn't fit a lot of people, but I've found that I like being closer to what's going on outside. Even though the RV is a tiny house on wheels, temperature swings are still greater than most new stick and foundation houses. After spending 10 years going from a climate controlled workspace to a climate controlled house, I greatly appreciate some variety in my living space. Not for everyone, but it was an intentional side effect that I welcome. 

Things I Really Don't Like

1. Sewer: The RV has two tanks, one for toilet and one for all other water waste. These tanks can't just continually drain, due to the potential for leaving solids in the tank, so they have to be filled then dumped. The process isn't hard -- just opening a couple valves in the water closet, then closing them, but it's one piece of maintenance that is unwelcome. 
2. Humidity: In a space of so little volume, humidity builds up fast. Whether from cooking, shower, or breathing, the humidity rises sharply. This will become a problem come January when I can't easily just open all the windows to dry the place out a bit.
3. The Pitfalls of Small Volume: Like the humidity element, everything else works the same way. Cooking food, burning food, if you smoke up the kitchen with burnt toast, the whole house is smoked up. That's not always fun. Lots of testing of the smoke detectors. 

Overall, I'm enjoying it quite a bit -- There are challenges associated with it, but considering that my house cost as much as a modest used car, the trade-offs still seem well worth it.

Insulating the front windshield - Macgyver style

I got the front windshield and the driver and passenger windows insulated this weekend. It turns out that the super cheap comforters at Wal-Mart are the perfect size for the 'Bago. I ended up using two King-sized comforters in black to get 'er done.

What makes this job trick is that the comforters get folded fully in half, doubling their potential insulation. I'm sure it sounds really ghetto-riggy, but from inside and out, it looks like something I bought.

I ended up using safety pins to hold it all together. None of the safety pins are visible from the outside of the vehicle and from the inside, only along the top hem of the curtain that the vehicle already had.

The difference already is tremendous. The bare glass was just bleeding heat. Now, there is a major difference in how frequently the furnace runs and the temperature gradient in the beast. Most noticeably, the temperature on either side of the comforter is dramatic, indicating that the insulation job was quite successful.

It's all coming along.

Pounding snaps in canvas

I spent most of last weekend pounding 5/8" stainless-steel snap heads into the 16 oz. canvas tarp that I'm using to create the skirt on the RV. It's a faster process than I anticipated, but shaping the canvas around the sewer compartment door and the door into the vehicle are going to be difficult. For this, I have rivets intended for denim, since I don't have the sewing machinery to actually create hems.

One problem I have also run into is that the tarp company sent me a 9 foot tarp that is only 8 foot 3 inches. I was planning for something closer to 9, so they're now sending me a 10-footer. Waiting on that to arrive has slowed down the process, because it is the tarp material for both front and rear.

Spending my time pounding snaps and working on midterms has been such great fun (sarcasm). But really, it's all coming along, and I hope to have it all ready in the coming weeks, just in time for Winter.

Enduring the first freezes

Temperatures are falling on the high plains early this October. The temperatures at night have been in the high teens, which has helped me to gauge what the coming months are going to be like.

So far, it looks like my water hose is going to do well, though in a conversation with EasyHeat, my heat wire wraps will only be tight enough on the hose for -15 degrees even with the insulation. Eek.

I'm also now running to complete the skirt, so the floor doesn't get so cold. Hopefully the plan works as expected.

All of the water lines are pretty well protected by the furnace running, except the one running under the floor to the kitchen sink. I am hoping that between the skirt and the heat in the cabin that the frost gradient will protect the pipe. A frozen water line under the floor would be disastrous. Luckily, it's PEX tubing, so it should be pretty resilient.

Regrettably, since I wasn't able to complete all these projects before school started, my life has basically centered on keeping up with school, working on winterizing the RV for arctic temps, eating food, and trying to socialize in the time in between.

Get 'er Done! The tale of the heated water hose

I finally have my heated water hose made. I ended up using a 10' water hose from Camping World, wrapped with EasyHeat 'self-regulating cable' (the heater wire), then insulated with foil-covered 1" fiberglass, surrounded by foam pipe insulation.

The heater element was bound to the hose using EasyHeat-brand tape for the application; the fiberglass was secured with black electrical tape (belts to keep it in place); and the exterior was sealed along the seam with black duct tape, then belted for additional strength and to keep the tape seam from splitting.

Right now, I'm in testing phase, but I'm concerned that the heating element isn't actually self-regulating as I would expect it to be. In my view, it should come on only when it's cold (say below 45 degrees), though it comes on any time it is plugged in. Since EasyHeat provides no specs for what "self-regulating" means (that I have found), it could be working as planned.

However, even though the cable is only 3 Watts/foot, I don't really want it on all the time. I'm likely to use an EasyHeat thermostat electrical plug to make sure that it only powers on at 38 deg F. The cable heats fast and efficiently enough that 38 deg F should be sufficient time before freezing.

I also protected the water inlet on the RV with a spigot protector, modified to accommodate the insulated hose. It looks like it's ready for an arctic expedition, which at temps of -20 deg F in the Winter here, I'm sure I'll appreciate.