Clean drinking water is one of those things you don’t think about until you don’t have it. When we were driving the Pan-American Highway, we mostly just bought bottled water outright — Mexico has a well-established network of purified water stops that made this easy and cheap. But the further Read more
If you’ve ever wandered off the beaten path — hiking, overlanding, or camping somewhere with zero cell service — you know how quickly “no signal” can turn into a real problem. That’s exactly the gap Meshtastic technology is designed to fill, and in this post I want to walk through Read more
It’s been a little over a year since we built and installed our DIY LiFePO4 pack into our Sprinter van. We built a 280Ah LiFePO4 12.8 volt pack using new, grade A prismatic cells I bought from AliExpress. Using a 4S Daly BMS and an active cell balancer, our pack Read more
Portable solar is an essential way to add more capacity to your camper’s existing solar system. It’s also a great introduction to clean, unlimited electrical power. Portable solar can be very expensive but it doesn’t have to be. For less than half the price of commercial systems, I can show Read more
Lithium batteries have been steadily dropping in prices in recent years thanks to more efficient manufacturing processes and the global transition to electric mobility. Along with a boost in the popularity of vehicle camping, partially amplified by the pandemic, an explosion of portable power banks are now available on the Read more
When we built out our van back in 2018, we decided to stick with two six-volt AGM deep cycle batteries. We knew all of the benefits of switching to lithium but the main reason was that they were still very expensive. At the time, there weren’t as many factory-built packs Read more
Air suspensions are a popular aftermarket upgrade for trucks and vans that carry heavy loads. Whether it is a work vehicle or a camper, it can help smooth out the ride as well as prevent sagging in the rear end. But how do they affect the structural integrity of these Read more
Portable solar generators have become a huge and very competitive industry in the last few years. It wasn’t that long ago the only way to get an electrical system built in your camper was to spend days and weeks learning about watts, amps, ohms or hire someone who knows to Read more
We have always tried to keep our systems in our campers as simple as reasonable so it can be easily maintained and repaired as necessary. It is especially important as we have been traveling in our camper van internationally over the last several years. We also need our systems to Read more
We use Reliance Aqua-Tainers in our water system in the van and it has served us very well over the last 2 years in the van. It gives us a lot of flexibility when we are camping off grid and fill up water wherever we can. Each jug can hold Read more