In thanks to our new solar install on the bus, we’ve been getting back to boondocking lately, and loving it.
Boondocking is staying in places without hook-ups (water, electricity or sewer) and generally ‘out in the boonies’. You might also hear terms like wild camping and dry camping to describe it.
During our first 4 years on the road, our travel trailers were optimized for off-grid living, and we got pretty darn good at living without hook-ups or typical amenities.
Then when we bought our bus in 2011, we pretty much immediately headed to the east coast to be near family in Florida while my father was ill. Since we’d be on full hook-ups anyway, we didn’t optimize much for extended off-grid living.
But it was always our goal with the bus to make it a versatile nomadic vessel. Comfortable while being parked in a tight RV Park when needed… or ample in off-grid ability while wild camping.
Since the beginning of November, we’ve been enjoying a lot of off-grid camping. So we thought we’d start sharing some of our lessons and experiences in getting back to boondocking…. from energy conservation, keeping warm, finding boondocking locations, and optimizing water usage.
In this article, we’ll share about our holding tanks and how to get the most out of them while away from dump stations.
Our Holding Tanks
We bought our vintage bus conversion already converted, and it had 100 gallons of freshwater (90 in the tanks under our bed and 10 in the hot water heater), 90 gallons of grey water, and 45 gallons of black. Since we were coming from a 17′ Oliver Travel Trailer (32f/38g/18b) and a 16′ T@b teardrop trailer (without only a 5 gallon fresh tank), this was pretty darn ample.
In regular ‘not thinking about it’ usage, we typically dump & re-fill our tanks every 9-10 days without a problem. That’s given us a lot of freedom in parks without full hook-ups to be without sewer access consistently. And since we love state parks and such, this works out quite well.
At our latest boondocking location, in the Anza Borrego Desert of southern California – we’re in an area with no stay limits like many public lands have (typically 14-days). The nearest publicly accessible dump station is about 8 miles away at the state park, usable for an $8 fee. While here – we decided to see how far we could stretch our tanks with a little conservation to avoid having to pack up too many times.
We were curious to see what would give out first – the black or the fresh water tank.
In the end, it was the fresh water that showed signs of being empty on Day 17 of our boondocking.
Pretty impressive, especially considering we didn’t supplement fresh water much at all by drinking bottled water. And even though we did collect some rain water to supplement dish washing or flushing, we ended up not using it.
However, with a visual inspection, the black tank was not far behind and would have burped mercy not soon after.
So now we know… with being comfortably conservative, we can easily go 14+ days, which is the typical boondocking limit on public lands anyway. And we’re usually itching to leave after 7-10 days in one location.
Update: After our Summer 2015 Renovations, we now have 112f/120g/70b that has GREATLY extended our capacity. We can now go 14 days in regular usage mode without even thinking about it before depleting our fresh water, and have our waste tanks each at about 1/2 full. With some water conservation, we should be able to do a solid 3-4 weeks. If we brought in some fresh to top off the tanks (we set our pump up to be able to ‘suck’ water into the tanks if needed) – we could extend further.
Tips for Optimizing Holding Tanks
After years of living in RVs, we’re pretty conservative already in our water usage. We take ‘Navy showers’, we wash dishes with little water, and typically thrive with just about 250-300 gallons of water usage a month. This is a huge decrease in our previous ‘sticks and bricks’ usage of 2000+ gallons a month. It would be difficult to go back to using that much water even if we did settle down anywhere.
Heck, even when we lived for 5 months during the winter for 2011 in the US Virgin Islands, we lived off a cistern and had to be conservative with water usage.
So here’s how we do it:
Showers:
Navy Showers: My dad was a submariner during the Cold War, and often they’d be underwater for months at a time. Fresh water was at a premium. So I call our showers ‘Navy Showers’. You turn on the water to rinse yourself down. You turn off the water. You soap and scrub up (we use yummy smelly low-chemical liquids – from Dr. Bronner’s Soaps to my yummy Lush bath gels with a ‘poof’). Then you rinse. We’ve done this for years, and now I get the shakes when I watch a movie that shows anyone showering without turning off the water while soaping up.
Oxygenics Shower Head: Combine a Navy shower with a water efficient shower head, and you can feel limitless. The Oxygenics Body Spa shower head is a RVer’s dream come true. It blasts a bit of air flow into the water to make a little bit of water feel like a rain shower. Our Navy showers usually cost us a mere gallon or two of indulgent bliss. And when we are on full hook-ups and don’t need to worry about it – a 5 gallon shower feels like pure over-indulgence.
No-Poo: No, we’ve not come to the black tank discussion yet. Neither of us has used shampoo in our hair since 2007. After going through the icky couple week transition period of adjusting, our hair feels wonderful just using an occasional scrubbing with baking soda or rinse with apple cider vinegar. This means no water, or just a quick rinse, is all we need on most days. With my naturally curly hair, I do however add a little conditioner when in arid climates.
Skipping Shower Days: The wonderful thing about the desert and its lack of humidity, is that skipping 2 or 3 days of showering is really no big deal. When I’m in humid and warm climates, I crave a daily (or twice daily) shower and just feel icky without. But in the desert, using a wet baby wipe is all I need to feel clean for the day. I also use a squirt bottle with fresh water to wet down my hair to make it curl right back up. Then every 3-4 days, we take a Navy Shower to refresh (when we were in our T@B teardrop without a bathroom, we’d go 7-10 days without showers sometimes.. that, was a bit rough). And heck, when you’re hanging out with fellow boondockers, they’re doing the same thing. In our trailer days, we did also carry a solar camp shower bag, which came in handy often enough.
Collect Cold Water: On our shower days, we keep a 1-gallon bucket in the shower to collect cold water while waiting for the hot water to emerge. Our Oxygenics shower head is on a hose, so we can just aim it into the bucket until the sweet elixir of hot water springs forth. Some folks plumb in a feature to return cold water to the fresh tank.. but that would be quite a retrofit in our rig. Our low-tech method works, and then we use the collected cold water to aid in flushing the toilet. (2015 Update: We built in a cold water return to the fresh tank to make this even fancier!)
Dishes:
Pre-soaking Spray Bottle: We keep a small spray bottle with diluted dish soap near our sink. We spray down our dishes and let them pre-soak. Then we scrub with a brush, and we turn on the water to a light dribble to rinse. This saves a bunch of water during the rinse and scrub part of doing dishes.
Paper Plates: When being in conservative mode, we forgo our ‘quit filling the landfill’ green ways and use paper plates for some meals. This saves on the dishes, and lets us extend our tanks a bit.
Wash in a Bucket: One way to keep on track of how much water you are using is to wash your dishes in a bin or bucket. It can also save on grey space, as you can take the bucket out to evaporate, use to extinguish a campfire or responsibly dump. We actually don’t employ this technique much anymore, as the grey tanks are the last of our tanks to fill.
Dribble the Water: We put in a residential fancy spray water faucet when we remodeled our kitchen. When we’re on full hook-ups, it’s awesome. In spayer mode, it can blast away caked on food. And when off-grid, we do use it for really stuburn stuff. But by and large, we just dribble water on our dishes and employ some old fashioned elbow grease to scrub our dishes clean. We use the water to wet and rinse. The water is off otherwise.
Cooking Considerations: We try to keep in mind our cooking methods when off-grid too. We limit how many meals we make that require just boiling stuff in water that is then dumped (like pasta), and we try to keep the number of pots and pans to a minimum to reduce dishes. We’re one-pot meal fans, and often use our little BBQ grill too.
Bathroom
Teeth Brushing: When I was in elementary school, we were taught to turn off the water when brushing. This is an obvious water conservation method for general practice, and essential for RVing. Rinse your toothbrush head quickly, apply a little tooth paste, scrub and then rinse.
Let it Mellow: When off-grid – we employ the ‘if it’s yellow let is mellow, if it’s brown flush it down’ method. As our RV toilet adds a few cups of fresh water to every flush, there’s just no need to dilute urine with some of our precious fresh water and fill up our black tank this way. When it’s brown, we use the cold collected fresh water from our showers to help flush it down. (2015 update: With our new huge 70G black tank – we can go a month between dumps without having to resort to this method anymore. Hooray!)
Water a bush: When it’s discreet enough, we’re not hesitant to water the bushes. Especially at night and it’s not freaking cold outside. In the desert with wide open spaces and RVs relatively close by, it’s a little harder to be discreet however. And for women, it’s a little less discrete without wearing a skirt or having a pee funnel.
Don’t Flush Paper: We keep a trash receptacle for holding ‘yellow’ toilet paper, instead of flushing it into the tank. Every little bit helps. Some folks also don’t flush ‘brown’ toilet paper, we’re not that extreme – we’re fine giving it space in our black tank.
Composting Toilet Considerations: We’re often asked if we’ve considered a composting toilet like many of our full time RVing friends have. We think they’re cool, and have used our friend’s composting toilets (hey, good friends share such things) – but we really aren’t keen on them for our own use.
In 2015 when we had the opportunity to re-do our all of our plumbing, we opted for installing a new flush toilet instead of composting. Our first year on the road we had no bathroom at all, and utilized public facilities, bushes and ‘pee buckets’ we had to discreetly dispose of – honestly, we got tired of it. If we went composting, we’d definitely plumb in a direct ‘yellow’ holding tank to get away from that. But considering we can make our black tank last a month now, a composting toilet would need to be changed out every 2-3 weeks for a couple using it constantly. Composting toilets will also require some adjustments – such as guys have to pee sitting down and some of us women have to re-think how we ‘go’ (knowing in advance if they need to open the poop hatch.) And honestly, we don’t find dumping the tanks to be much of a hassle – and we’d still have to dump our grey and hypothetical yellow tank anyway.
If you’re interested in a composting toilet, there’s no better experts than our friends Nikki & Jason of Gone with the Wynns.
Wrap Up
So.. there it is. How we extend our holding tanks when needed. Have any other ideas to share? We’d love to hear them in the comments!
Some additional resources to finding dump stations nearby to dump tanks and refill the fresh water:
In anticipation of RV living within a year or less we’ve started implementing many of these suggestions in our home. We spritz & dribble our dishes, take Navy showers, save the cold water while waiting for warmer and use it in our toilet, which we’ve shut the valve off to,
and since we’re on septic tÁ nk we’re using the mellow yellow paper tip, unless we have company! We also use septic system tp for brown clean-up and less expensive regular tp for yellow. Guess you could say we’re easing our way into an RV! THANK YOU for a great article.
I have lived in rv for 4 yes., on private land been dumping black water into private sewer every 10 days, but lately is getting fuller sooner. Any suggestions?
Sounds like you need a good cleaning of your black tank – you probably have ‘stuff’ sticking to the bottom.
Great article! Can you explain the return line back to the fresh water tank. I’m a plumbing/hvac contractor so I understand the concept, but I was wondering specifically how you accomplished the task. Thanks so much.
We may cover that in a future post when we resume blogging and start covering the renovations in more detail.
Thanks for the reminders and new tips. On dish washing I will add a little water after removing food from a hot pan to help soften the food stuck on the pan. For gloppy stuff like pancake mix, I use a spatula to remove more and finally a paper towel, before washing the pan with soap and water.
We just came off of 11 days of boondocking in Virginia – camped in fields at sheepdog trials with our vintage Airstream – 5 gallon black tank, 10 gallon Blue Boy for gray water, 20 gallon fresh water, 6 gallon hot water heater, propane for cooking, heat and ref. and a 85 watt solar panel, no generator. We were able to refill the water tank by using a portable six gallon water tank from water spigots on the farm and dumping the port a potty in a large porta potty. So, the issue we had was recharging things – iPad plugged into a 12 volt plug, computer with a small inverter(185 watt), camera bettery, etc. It took a long time to recharge things. Any tips. Perhaps you answered that elsewhere, so just point me in the right direction
What voltage where your trailer batteries at? If you have low voltage (ie. not a full battery), then it can’t put out enough energy to charge things up at full speed. With only 85w of solar, it would seem feasible that you weren’t getting a full charge, or even much charge at all. We generally recommend having a battery monitor in solar setups so that you can better keep on top of energy usage and collection. https://www.technomadia.com/solar is our full solar series with more info.
Thanks for the quick reply. AT this time of year it is harder to get a full charge of about 14. 3, so I’ll see what next year brings when we are out and about again. We have a simple system, some monitoring, because we don’t need much in the way of electricity. Our new 65 will have more bells and whistles.
Do remember that lead batteries age faster if they are not regularly fully charged – which is often hard to do if you are exclusively relying on solar.
We know people with sizable solar systems who still make a point to run their generator or find hookups every two weeks so that their lead batteries get a solid 4+ hour absorption charge to keep the batteries healthy.
A great advantage of Lithium is that batteries don’t care if they aren’t topped up, and they don’t need a slow absorption charge to get there.
Cheers!
– Chris
Hi!
I’ve just been lurking up till now. Great stuff! Nina and Leigh sent us here 🙂
I never throw away the water after cooking pasta. I save it and reuse it for the next time I cook pasta and after it has been used for two or three loads of pasta, it makes a great base for soup or gravy. In the fridge it easily keeps for 4 or 5 days.
Thanks for all the great info!
Koos
Hi – We love following your blog and watching your webcasts. So interesting and informative. We’re on the road in 18 months! Just a quick question about the ‘if it’s yellow….”. I’ve been in a few rigs that smelled bad of urine. How do you control this problem?
We’ve honestly never encountered the problem. It it’s mellowed a bit too long, we just flush and rinse the bowl a bit. With two of us onboard, we usually have a ‘brown’ flush often enough.
Well, mello the yellow, I use Puppy Urea spray in the toilet just after. It get rid of the smell and it’s bio friendly.
In regard to stretching the black tank capacity perhaps this book http://www.amazon.com/How-Shit-Woods-Edition-Environmentally/dp/1580083633 might have some additional ideas (yes it’s for real). Also just an observation that toilet brand/model/style will have a big impact on usage. Our coaches rear bath Techma is a total hog and consumes three or four times as much water as our basic hole-in-the-floor foot pedal toilet in the half bath. Obviously the Techma is for “emergency” use only when we are not on sewer. My favorite toilet (read into that what you will) is the Dometic vacuflush in regard to its low water consumption, high efficiency and excellent reliabilty, but I have only seen them implemented in the marine market, probably due to cost. With two of those on our boat we can get 3-4 weeks of full-time living (2 adults) out of a 40 gallon black tank before calling the pump out boat.
Great article on water usage and how to keep it to a min..
I do such stuff in my home.. We run water into the washing machine to flush cold water and then in shower use a watering can to catch the bit of cold water. After a couple of days with wife and daughter shower water the washer is at least a 1/4 way full..
I go to people home to do chimney service and sometime the lady will turn on water in sink and walk away for 2-3 mins. That is so annoying to me as well.
I appreciate you info and look forward to using your advise when we go full time in 5 or so year.. Got to get the kids through college and all.. 🙂
Happy new year and happy trails..
no need to respond i know you get a lot of “mail.”
Great article!! I’ve got a few more boondocking type posts in the making & will definitely reference this one.
Nina
Great tips! We did many of the same things when we lived on a sailboat in New Zealand and now that we’re living in a 13′ Scamp travel trailer in the States, they’re coming in handy again 🙂 Even with all of our water conservation effort, we still can only stay out for a few days at a time given the size of our holding tanks. Jealous how large yours are 🙂
first off hi guys
Now I’m going to pop your bubble
First you say you have 90 freshwater and 10 in the hot water tank
You’re about seven or eight Gal,s short when you filled up your water tank with 10 gallons you can only get about one third back your hot water tank is designed to stay Three quarters full
That is so you will not burn out your electrode elements Cold water goes to the bottom of the tank
The hot water pick up only extends in to the hot water tank about one third of the way or above the electrical elements look on the tank you’ll see one or two elements Measure about 3 inches above that is where you pick up tube is
Now think when you take a shower
If you have used a gallon of hot water you’ve also added a gallon of cold water so you have diluted your hot water By one to one so by the time you getting to Luke warm water you probably only used 3 gallons ????
Now to solve that little problem you could put a 120v point of demand closest to the shower head and never run out ,, well until you get through your 93.5 gallons but that will be one hell of a shower
A lot of the mid range new RVs are coming through with an electric Point of demand water heaters
Or in your case put a recirculator on the hot water side back to the cold waterside that is a Real common thing in the boating industry
Now I’m probably going to get some flack for saying this but septic you HAVE to dump it in the appropriate place
but wash water Under BLM management rules CAN be discharged on the ground as stated under sanitation rules. paragraph three
You might also want to check and see how much water you use each time you flush
Put a shut off valve and close it down to restrict the amount of water usage
On my 5er,s freshwater I would only get five days at 45 gallons my black I would get 11 days on 28 gallons black
Well now that you’re having a heatwave out there we are having a cold spell here we’re looking at Frost
if your mother emails you and tells you she went ice skating on the retention pond you can believe her
Enjoy the fun
Yup.. thus why we clearly stated we have 90G in the fresh tank and 10G in the hot water. 🙂 We hardly ever get to ‘luke warm’ water in our showers however. Only after we’ve both had showers and done the dishes. Never been a problem.
The mister & I were just discussing the fantastic ways to conserve water & it occurred to us that all RVs should be using the grey water for toilet flushing. It just seems to make more sense, doesn’t it?
For some.. it does. For us, it doesn’t – as our grey tanks are the last to get filled anyway.
We love your suggestions and will be using them when we get warmer weather… Last night it got down to minus 8F (-22C) and we are in our well insulated S&B home here in Maine… hunkering by the stoked woodstove. RV is parked and covered, and covered with snow now) In cold weather like this, I just LOVE the woodstove because I can come in and back myself up to the stove and truly get warm. Will miss this and of course a campfire can substitute come summer.
This fall we downsized from a Class C to a Roadtrek (Class B)… More convenient and easy for quick overnights… We couldn’t wait and on our second trip “winter camping” experienced overnight temps of 15F (-9C…) in Vermont. We stayed cozy with the propane furnace…(and each other!) Yes our plumbing is winterized and not used except for the toilet. We use it for pee only and flush with antifreeze, the pink stuff for fresh water systems in a 1 gallon bottle that we placed next to the toilet.
Do you have any thoughts on the use of Macerator pump…. We may use this one http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001HKZHIW/ as an add on. Useful when “boondocking” at a friend’s house and being able to use a (dedicated) hose that can go up small inclines.
-Bob
& Lynne
South China, Maine USA
We’d like to one day install a macerator to increase our options.. but honestly haven’t gotten that far into research yet. To date, when we need to dump a standard sewer connection or honey wagon has always been available. One-day.. plenty of other upgrades on the list before it. 🙂
Brrr.. keep warm up there!
wonderful article…we incorporate all you mentioned except the spray soap for dishes…we also go one step further on our dish water…we often then use it to flush the toilet…we have 70 gluons of each, (fresh, grey and black)…I believe the longest we have gone is 3 weeks but could probably go a bit longer if necessary…the only other thing we don’t do do that you do is we do flub the paper…Normally when we are book docking our black goes first…
If we had less gray capacity, we’d probably use some for flushing and/or evaporate it.
Nice write up, Cherie. Thanks for sharing a few pointers again. IT looks like you’ll have a few more posts on your return to the boonies experiences, and I’m looking forward to reading them.
Yeah.. judging by how well this post has gone over, think I’ll write up some other related topics of stuff we’re having to re-acquaint ourselves with. Glad it’s helpful!
All great suggestions. I made it three weeks, tomorrow’s my ‘D’ day. Of course now that I can use running water I may not make it quite that long.
Three weeks in your truck camper is amazing, Gaelyn! The dump station at the state park is quite nice.. we especially ‘enjoyed’ the high pressure clean water rinse hose, which allows you to do a nice thorough black tank flush. Ummm… enjoy? 🙂
What a wonderful place we have here, and you’ve got some great suggestions for conserving and extending our trips to the dump.
This place is amazing, and so worth sacrificing a little water usage to enjoy it more!
I just ordered some of your bath gel & soap! Can’t wait to try them! Thanks…Lynda
Great article! Will be trying out the spray bottle tip. We already do most of the others, including the navy showers, capturing the shower runoff for flushing, tp in the trash, etc. One thing that I try to do is just keep the water pump turned off unless we are showering or washing dishes. This way we’re not wasting water with each toilet flush and I find i’m more cognizant of my usage when I have to flip the pump on first. We do use quite a bit in cooking but we recycle a lot of that as well. Boiled water from potatoes becomes steam water for green beans. Pasta water from dinner becomes water for savory grits in the morning. We grow sprouts as well and the twice daily rinse water from these gets saved for soups or whatever is next on the stove. Keeps all the nutrients and saves the water. Thanks for the tips!
Great ideas on turning off the pump (if our switch worked… ahem.. Chris?… we’d do that more often) and re-using cooking water. Thanks!
Wow – 17 days – great job! We’ve already implemented some of your suggestions following our telecon – but appreciate all your efforts in documenting further. FYI – we just did 5 days of dry camping at Rose Parade and limped away with 0 fresh and full tanks… We have some work to do!
5 Days is a start… y’all will do great. Hope you had a great time at the Rose Parade!
A simple upgrade: I tucked the sensor for a terrarium thermometer between the foam and the water tank. We only heat the water to 95 F, shut the tank off, and shower with only the hot water tap. We also catch the cooler water in the line for dishes. Eliminates the temperature swings when turning the shower head off to lather up! Used dish water flushes the toilet.
That’s an excellent suggestion for regulating the temperature, and re-using water for multiple purposes .. thanks!
So you have literally gone with the Wynns!
Hahaha.. yeah, guess you could say so 🙂
Best article on water saving tips for boondocking. I’m anxious to try this but havea few upgrades to make first but we practice water saving when without sewer hookups. Also like the spray bottle for dishwashing. Appreciate so much all the info you share.
Thanks for stopping by Cheri.. and glad the article is helpful to you!
My mistake, I looked again and you are at a dump station.
We keep our showers to a minimum also but mainly because we’d have to take the cat box out of the shower too often! Otherwise, we practice most of your water saving tips. One problem with all this economy is that the contents of the black tank can get more concentrated than usual which can also contribute to blockages. I see you dumped the grey water in the desert, is that allowed in BLM land? I don’t see any real problem with it, seems harmless.
Oh gosh no.. we never dump our grey water anywhere but a dump station (which we were at). For us, it doesn’t matter what’s allowed or not, it just doesn’t feel right to us (and besides, dumping the grey after the black helps clear out the lines.) And yes, the black tank does get more concentrated, so we generally do a very thorough flushing during dumping. This particular dump station had a separate high pressure hose just for that, so we did two additional fills of the black.
Love the water sprayer idea for the dishes. By far, th e dishes are our greatest water loss. We use our kitchen like a residential kitchen and the dishes pile up. Thanks for great tips! BTW didn’t know if you were aware, the shower head link shows it’s out of stock. Might want to consider swapping it out for something similar so you can get the residual income from those of us who are interested in purchasing one. Thanks again!
Thanks so much for letting me know… switched out the link (it was in stock last I checked, my how quickly they can sell out 🙂 ).
Between Technomadia, RV101, RVGeeks and LoveYourRV touting the virtues of the Oxygenics shower head, I’m surprised they keep any in stock! 😉
Another great article from the hardest working kids in RV show business. Glad to see you relaxing lately, was a little worried about you late last year when you were going so hard. Thank you and Happy New Year!
Thanks.. it’s been most excellent to get more relaxation hours in these past weeks. Happy New Year to you as well!
This may be one of my favorite posts yet! We’ve only yet to experience lack of sewer hookups which we supplemented with one of those nasty little toter tanks. 😉 It was within our first few weeks of full-timing too so flipping the mind switch from using water freely to keeping track of every drop that went down the drain was crazy! I definitely like knowing I’m doing a little bit to “save the planet” even if it’s for my own selfish gain of not having to dump tanks. Thanks for the post! I especially love the tip of the spray bottle with dish soap. 🙂
You definitely start to get motivated to save more water once you get some more miles and off-grid stays under your belt.
Totally! I probably should have mentioned we managed to go about 7-9 days which I thought was great for our first few weeks are official RVers. 🙂
Our limit is our black tank so we installed a valve (http://www.justfinding.blogspot.com/2012/09/toilet-supply-valve.html) in the supply line to the toilet. The valve is off most of the time, replaced with a spray bottle with water and bit of dish soap to rinse the toilet bowl after peeing. Turn the valve back on to flush the brown stuff.
That’s an awesome upgrade.. thanks for sharing! If we do much more of this extended stuff, we’ll have to do the same.
Water running while shaving and teeth brushing is a huge pet peeve of mine, yet I keep it running while I suds my hair and body – I obviously lack consistency 🙁
These are great tips – I especially like the kitchen spray bottle. Thanks for sharing some of your more “low tech” lifestyle adjustments!
It’s so tempting to just let that nice warm water keep running over your body, isn’t it? It was a hard adjustment to make at first, I so love warm water.
Am going to try your dish washing method–I’m a bit of a clean freak and probably use too much water when washing dishes. The rest of your suggestions we all ready do–ordering our solar and the cowboy is installing–can’t wait!
Once someone introduced me to the spray bottle – it made so much sense, and so super convenient too. We use it even when not boondocking. Enjoy your new solar setup!