Hard to believe we’re already leaving our Texas property, but we are hitting the road tomorrow and heading on our west coast loop. First stop is in Tucson to get the hail damage from the truck fixed. Unclear how long that will take, so the rest of our timing will depend on that. On the list is Joshua Tree, Channel Islands, Pinnacles, Yosemite, and Lassen Volcanic in California. Then we’ll spend some time in Portland and Bend before resuming our hunt for a mountain/forest property (thinking somewhere in WA-ID-MT). We won’t get to the WA parks this year, and actually, we might skip some of the CA ones as well. That’ll depend a bit on the truck and a bit on the state of the National Park system (frozen federal funding and losing employees).
Our water storage system is in place but we have postponed the water catchment roof until either next year or maybe later, depending on other upgrades. Here you can see our setup. The catchment roof would go in the area below (in the photo) the tank/shed 30’x10′ area, extending 20′ so the whole area would be a 30’x30′ square.
The two water tanks hold 2500 g each, so we have the capacity to store 5000 gallons of water. Inside the shed is a water pump and filtration system and that goes through a trench to our landing spot so we can hook up water without running a hose across the road.
Inside the shed is a BLUETTI power station. It has about 2000 W battery and we can plug the solar panels directly in, so we can charge it up with the solar array (the four hail-dented panels we kept).
Scott made a little “sled” to attach the panels to the roof without drilling into the roof.
The PVC pipes rest on the roof. We have two sleds, so four panels total. Way overkill for what we need (the power station never went below 92% while we were using it), but we might expand later, so we put them up.
These tanks were filled with 1000g when installed and we only used about 80g while we’ve been hooked up. For now we plan on getting water delivered next season if we need. We got used to using very little water while we were out here because of the way we had to haul and fill (plus the pump in the RV was pretty loud and sounded like it was going to break so we used it as little as possible). This is what our little water hookup looks like (box installed by Scott).
Once we had this system hooked up, we had pressurized water (yay!). We ran into a bit of an issue when we first hooked it up and it wasn’t giving us any pressure. I went through all the possible things I thought could be wrong (the pump was turned on, all the valves were open, the power station had power), I turned everything off then on, thinking that might reset things but still nothing was working, we had zero pressure. Apparently on this power station, there are several possible outlets and they aren’t live until you choose (AC, USB, DC). It was also on an automatic sleep mode where if it hadn’t been used in 2 hours it would turn itself off. So even though it looked like it had power and was on, it wasn’t giving any power to the pump. We reset this setting so it always stays on and haven’t had any issues since.
We got a water flow meter and have been able to track our water usage. We still haven’t done laundry out here, but next year we will. We plan to test how much water our laundry uses once we get to Tucson. We’ll probably still go to town to get drinking water, just feels a bit safer to trust city water over the tank water with the basic filtration system we have set up. We added drainage and a rain barrel so all the rain from this roof will go into a 100g tank we got and then we’ll use that for landscaping or something.
The shed doubles as a storage space, which is why it’s 10’x10′ rather than something smaller to just house the pump and filtration system. We have extra building supplies and are leaving our tools (and a few other things) behind. We’ll keep our recycling here – we discovered there’s an employee of Big Bend National Park who also does recycling for Terlingua as long as you sort and clean it yourself. He takes tin cans, plastic 1 & 2, aluminum cans, and cardboard. Once we got the shed we got three bins for our sorted recycling. The shed has a locking door, so hopefully everything stays safe and secure until we return!
Looks like good progress! I would suggest if you haven’t already done so is to hide some remote cameras around the property to record any activity. I know it’s remote but you never know what may happen – remote set of eyes provides that data should you need it.