Going Off Grid - Our Lessons Learnt
The Off Grid Test
So you think you’re ready for D-day. But are you really?
You’ve got everything on your packing list checked off. You’ve got your equipment ready, tested and checked. You have a great understanding of your budget and you know which way you’re heading. Great, you’re already halfway there.
You just need to know that it’s all going to go well for you. The last thing you need is something to go south when you sail off into the sunrise.
In some circumstances it may not be possible, but we were lucky enough to have had the opportunity to go on a ‘test run’. And what a test it was.
Let’s start at the beginning.
We decided to stay at a caravan park and booked a power site. The reasoning for this was that if something did go wrong, we had access to power as a back up to right any wrongs. We were not planning on connecting the power or water unless we really had to.
Day 1
Before we began the 250klm drive, we did a walk around the van to make sure everything was locked and secure. Hmm, we missed almost every door and hatch!
Once we arrived at the caravan park, we opened the caravan door and headed inside to set up, only to find that our top kitchen drawer with the most items in it, was on the floor and everything from the drawer was all over the place. Worst of all, the corner of the drawer had hit the floor quite hard and left a dent in the floor covering. Omg. We unhitched and got settled in. I must admit, it did feel quite odd not connecting the power or the water.
We began to check the brains of the caravan, our drifter control panel. It’s daylight, around early afternoon and we were ready for any issues that may arise.
The battery was full, all of our devices were charged up, the water tanks and drums were full, gas bottles were full, we had clean clothes and linen, and enough food to feed an army.
Day 1 was done! Or so we thought.
9:30pm, we found ourselves in the dark. What the heck! And the beeping from the inverter installed under the bed was telling us something had gone wrong. We had no lights, no stereo on standby, no clock but the microwave was still reading the time. We had only looked about an hour prior to this event at the battery app and it told us the battery was at 98%. Now, the drifter control panel said the battery was dead flat.
Lesson 1. Don’t believe what the app says? Go by the caravan control panel.
We continued to play process of elimination. Torch in hand, looking at battery chargers and switches etc. Our fuse panel seemed to show there was no mains power coming on.
4 minutes passed and we managed to find that because the battery was below 12v, the mains power wouldn’t come on. A simple flick of a switch and we had power. Mains power from the grid though.
There wasn’t a way to get around connecting to the caravan park power. It turned out the fridge had sucked the battery dry. Oh, what a great start!
Day 2
We stayed connected to the caravan park power for most of the day to recharge the battery and give us a fresh, clean start. We disconnected around 3pm once the battery was full, to restart the test.
We’d had the fridge running off mains all day on day 2, to preserve our gas and also had the hot water on just to test the efficiency of it being on all day, hoping it would use barely any power once it reached temperature. Once we disconnected from the grid, we switched the fridge over to gas, but left the hot water on 240v through the inverter.
Day 3
Something went wrong on the morning of day 3. We had gone to bed with a full battery and woke up to yet a flat battery again. Thinking we had just enough power to boil the electric kettle, halfway through we had to turn the grid power back on to finish the job.
We thought at this stage the problem with day 2 running out of power was having the hot water running off 240v since 3pm, as the fridge had been on gas since the afternoon of day 2.
Something else we found was that where we were situated in the park, there was a beautiful big happy tree, shading every single one of our solar panels. This would make it hard to complete a true and accurate test.
On this day, we started to chase the sun with our portable solar panels and with the solar panel on the car, but decided not to connect back to mains to see how the battery would go.
Lesson learnt : run hot water on gas for about 30 minutes prior to needing the hot water then turn it off.
Day 4
By midafternoon, we still weren’t making enough solar to charge the battery due to that big tree above our complete solar set up. This really wasn’t going to work.
This is where we decide we were going to have to relocate for this test to actually work. Martin’s Bend campground was going to be our best bet as it had no power at all and was only 2kms down the road.
Let’s start again
New location – Martin’s Bend Campground
Day 1
Our fridge was permanently on gas. Not even a thought to run it off the inverter.
As for the hot water, we only used it on gas from here. We would turn it on for about half an hour before we wanted to shower and then switch it off when we were done.
We used the inverter to charge our devices and for the water pump.
Our new location was predominantly sun, except for one tree shading our panels from about 2pm onwards. But we managed to almost fill the battery.
Day 2
Woke up to a freezing morning. We had enough battery power to turn the roof top heater on before we got out of bed. It only took 10 or so minutes to heat the caravan up, then we switched it off.
We boiled the kettle on gas this morning.
We both showered this morning, super quick ones at that.
At this point we had only used the water tanks for the kettle, 3 showers and one load of washing. With our extra water drums on the back of the van, we topped up one tank that was down a notch on the control panel, and it took around 18 litres of water.
We thought at this stage we had the power sorted, running fridge on gas, and also the hot water on gas for around 30 mins.
Something we learnt :
Running one of our non LED lights used less power than running an LED light strip. Interesting.
We boiled the kettle using the inverter in the evening.
We even used the microwave to defrost dinner (took about 5 minutes)
Day 3
We moved to a more open area as we still had a tree blocking some of our solar. When we first arrived at the campground 2 days prior, the best spots for solar were already taken, so we had picked the next best thing. But day 3 saw one of the good sites become available. And as annoying as it was moving only 50 metres or so, it was still worth the effort.
Solar was really good on the new site. We used the microwave to heat food and boiled the kettle with the inverter. I managed to charge the laptop and all of our devices while the sun was out without worrying about running out of battery.
With clear, blue skies on day 3, we managed to fully charge the battery through solar we had generated.
We ran the hot water off the inverter most of the day. Once it got hot, it didn’t take much to keep it hot, so we left it on.
We had a couple of breaks on day 3. One of our grey water hoses had split in the middle and one of our stabilizer legs had started to play up since levelling the van at the first site.
Day 4
This was a very cloudy day. We did everything we could to make our solar charge the battery, but didn’t seem to fill even half way. The car solar was plugged into the caravan plus the portable panels plugged in too, but it was a fruitless effort.
Day 4 was also a little different though. We had noticed a person acting very suspiciously around the campgrounds. We watched him out of concern, noticing him walking through a couple of other campers’ sites while they were not there. He came to us asking if we had a light for his cigarette, but we told him he could use our fire as we didn’t smoke.
When the other campers arrived back at their site, we walked over to advise them what we had seen. They proceeded to tell us he had also asked them for a light to which he was declined.
Not even an hour later, he had parked himself (he had no car, no tent, purely on foot) amongst some trees and had himself a fire which had us thinking he wasn’t coming to us for a light, he more wanted to have a snoop around our campsite, as he did with 4 other sites.
That evening, we noticed the campground had become quite empty, and so we decided to leave the following day as we no longer felt safe. This brought us to and end of our off grid test.
So, the big test was over. What did we learn?
We cannot run our fridge on anything but gas. It just sucks too much power. Even on the day or 2 that we made more power than we could use, when we tried running the fridge through the inverter, it used more power than we could generate.
In future, we will only have the hot water system running just before we want to shower, then switch off again.
We need full sun coverage over our panels to fill the battery. Even one tree blocking the panels for a few hours took away the ability to get to full charge.
Had we brought our generator with us, we would have had a far more successful run on the cloudy day.
Limit shower times even more. Even though I’m not keen on turning off the water mid shower to soap up to save water, our set up and needs are just not going to keep us off grid if we don’t. Perhaps even look at handwashing clothes if they aren’t too filthy. By doing this, we would save probably around 15 litres of water.
Even though we thought the drawers and cupboard doors were locked and safe, wrong! We came up with a simple idea to possibly prevent our kitchen drawer from coming out of its place again while travelling. We bought a length of wood from bunnings, bought some caps to go over the ends of the rod and fed it through each kitchen drawer handle in hope that it will prevent from a repeat of this.
If we are getting low on battery power at night, we will use a 12v rechargeable work light instead of eating into the battery for light.
Safety
Always be aware of your surroundings. Take mental notes on things that don’t quite seem right, and always go with your gut if you don’t feel safe.
Need and don’t need
Throughout our trip, we had time to go through the van and do a ‘spring clean’. I couldn’t believe just how much we had in there that we didn’t use or replaced with something that worked better.
We ended up with a drawer full, a cupboard full and a bag full of ‘stuff’ needlessly taking up precious room in the van and adding to our payload, so we decided out of interest to weigh it as we removed it from the van. Just under 50kgs of items that now take up space in storage at home haha!
Fixes and mods
Instead of this time away being only a test of equipment, we also used it as a test on how things will fit best, what works and doesn’t work etc.
As we lived day to day, we took note of things that we thought needed to be modified a little, things that didn’t work as they should and things that we needed to add or remove. Believe it or not, we returned home with an entire A4 page of things that needed attention. Many of them were simple things, yet others were things to fix.
Our list of ‘fixes’ included:
*Leak in ensuite cupboard (we believe this to be an item on the shelf leaking, rather than a costly roof leak)
*Awning LED strip not working (we believe this to be due to an incident having occurred a few months prior)
*Put awning tape on a tear (also damage part of the incident a few months ago)
*TV ariel
*Sagging roof vent screens
*Leak from water tank
Mods – simple small things that we just haven’t ‘got around to’ doing prior to this trip
There’s always something that could work a little better in our world. We had found just a few things that would make life a little easier (or the caravan a little more organised).
*Slide for our rope box which sits in the tunnel boot
*Mount the inverter button (instead of lifting the bed to gain access to it)
*Laptop charger, currently can only charge it with the inverter on
*Sunglasses hooks in the ‘drop zone’
*Convoluted tubing on Anderson plug cabling, to keep it neat and tidy
*Outdoor floor mat pegs or metal strip to stop it lifting
*Re-label light switches
*Drill a hole in my comb to hang up while stationery
*Dull the illumination of car switch panel
*Sort out ropes and pegs – somehow, we have more than we ever use
*Seal around hose inlets
*Wall join tape
Things we removed – some of these items have been on my ‘might use one day’ list, but never have or haven’t in so long that I am going to take them out finally
*Alcohol, some that I haven’t drank in ages, clearly, I don’t drink enough!
*Cast iron plate for our Ziggy
*A couple of clothing items I haven’t worn in forever that no longer fit
*Old laptop, iPad and extra hard drives
*Some clothes pegs (somehow I have collected way too many!)
*Ice cube trays as we bought the reusable ice cubes which take up way less room
*New pan set – it was absolute rubbish (and I will be throwing in the bin)
*2nd car fridge – with just the 2 of us we didn’t even use it
Lastly, things we need to pack in future
*Generator + pallet or the like
*Water bladder for in the car (so we can fill up when out and about)
*Portable clothesline
*Battery banks
*TV signal booster – for some reason we were not able to get any TV channels at all
*12v power tool battery charger
*Stable table for using laptop
*Thicker sleeping bag (apparently sleeping bags wear thin after a while of using them!)
*Fire pit + accessories box
*Tarp to go on bed for chairs when we travel
*Carpet mats for floor of caravan when cold
*More collapsible containers (yup, apparently I need more haha)
*Laundry stain remover
*Old pan set
*Notebooks (I don’t even know how I forgot them!)
*Nail files
*Drivers side gas bottle
*My sleepwear (I was certain I had those packed!)
As our test came to an end, we realised just how many things we still needed to do before we are off grid ready. Lucky as we were, we feel once these items have been addressed, we will be super close to beginning our new life on the road. We look forward to our next ‘test run’ and hope we return home with far less on our ‘Fix/Mod/Add/Remove list!
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