This detour, part of our stay in Grand Canyon, requires some fairly dull background of how an RV works:
There are three power sources in an Airstream: 1. Propane tanks (ours has 2 tanks, each holding about 8-gallons, which is typically good for several days of normal use. The propane powers most important things: the kitchen, including the refrigerator, and the furnace). 2. batteries (which provide 12 V current for lights, fans, and the stereo). 3. 120/240 V AC shore power (provided externally). When you hear of a campground having “full hookups”, that includes AC shore power, which charges the trailer’s 12 V batteries and provides power to the household plugs, thus enabling the TV and air conditioner. RVs frequently use gas or propane generators when there is no shore power available. This works well, but uses fuel and makes noise (most campgrounds have restrictions on when you can run generators because of the noise). We have 2 pretty quiet Honda generators that can run in tandem providing all the power the trailer needs for 15-20 hours on 2 gallons of gas.
When we got Minnie, our motorhome, it came with two 12 V batteries, but ones that are supposed to be suited to RV usage, not starting cars. The batteries were never very good, and we swapped them for two 6 V golf cart batteries wired serially to look like a large 12 V battery. This worked very well, and we never had a problem with them. Unfortunately the Airstream’s battery box wasn’t big enough for the taller 6 V batteries, so we kept the two new batteries that it came with, which were much like the ones in the Minnie. And they sucked again. On top of that, though, I left the trailer plugged in since we bought it, thinking that its charger was sophisticated enough to keep the batteries charged without frying them. I was wrong, leading to some fried batteries. They worked, but even more poorly than before.
That’s enough of all that background. Remember the night it snowed and was freezing cold? Well, up until then, we’d run the generators when it was allowed, charging the batteries. When we had left home, I’d filled the propane, but one tank wouldn’t take any more, so it just had whatever was left from the last trip, which clearly wasn’t a lot. I didn’t worry too much about it, because we’d never completely finished one tank before finding a place to refill. So we had just over one tank of propane, and two generators full of gas. We ran the generators more than normal because of the shitty batteries. We ran the furnace much more than normal, because of the cold-ass weather. You can see a problem coming, I’m sure.
During the evening, we noticed the batteries were not doing well, the cold weather hurting their already shitty performance. We turned off everything in the trailer except the furnace and went to bed. The problem came when the batteries died completely during the night. You might remember back to how I said that the furnace runs on propane, not electricity, and think we’d be OK. Unfortunately the blower for the furnace and the thermostat that controls it both run on electricity. So when the batteries died, so effectively did our heat.
The baby was fine, cuddled nicely between two warm parents. But let me tell you that any piece of us that wasn’t covered with a blanket was fucking freezing cold by morning. 8 AM rolled around, and I had to haul my ass out of the warm bed and out into ice and snow to start the generators to get the heat back on. And, you guessed it, we’d run the generators so much to compensate for the batteries that they were out of gas. So I had to load the generators into the truck and drive to the gas station to refill them. That sucked, but the heat was back on and we’d survived.
The next night, we knew the batteries were on their last legs, and so really ran the generators as much as possible and kept our use of battery power to an absolute minimum, since the forecast was an even colder 17 degrees. The batteries died again, but we made it farther into the next morning and it wasn’t as bad as the first time. I went out at 8 AM again to start the generators. They kicked on but soon after—you probably guessed it—the propane ran out. We made it through, but it was clear we were going to have to be more on top of our power. We had the propane refilled (and this time, the second tank filled fine).
Seriously cold weather uses serious energy that we weren’t prepared for, obviously.
Upon leaving Grand Canyon and getting back to civilization (around Flagstaff), we decided to have our batteries swapped for the good ones. This required us to have the battery box modified slightly, so we began making calls to places in the area. There are a ton of RV places in and around Phoenix, and we found one that could accommodate us and they got it done in one day. While they worked on that, we picked up some other miscellaneous things we figured out we’d forgotten, including a car charger for our iPhones—yes, another battery problem. We had a car charger, but the one that we had in the truck stopped working and our phones were dying.
With big new batteries in the Airstream and our phones juiced up, we are finally no longer power deficient. :)