Sunday, January 18, 2009

Life on 30 Amps

Hi there everyone! Well, we have been living in the RV now for about 5 days, not a life time by any stretch of the imagination, but so far so good. We seem to have settled into a routine for our daily schedule of events. I still get up and go to work in the morning and Carol gets up and studies for her Medical Transcription training. The last few weeks have been a little un-focused for us as far as a regular routine, but I'm thinking that this next week will be one where we really get back into the swing of things. Today, was pretty much a regular weekend day. Today was the day that we focused on chores and shopping. This is pretty much the norm for us. One day on the weekend, we play, the other we do vacuuming, laundry, shopping and the such. And, this weekend was no different. The only difference was that the cleaning took a whole lot less time than it did when we lived in the house on Snooks lane. The main reason is we have a whole lot less square footage to clean up. The house on Snooks lane was 1300 square feet, and the RV has a whopping 300 square feet to clean up. When it comes to consistency though, there is one thing that is still the same, the amount of dog hair that we vacuum up. We still have three dogs and two cats, and they all still shed, so that amount of hair we vacuum up is still the same.

We use a whole lot less energy in our new dwelling. For the most part, we can heat the trailer with two ceramic space heaters. Each one of them draws about 1500 watts, so if we run much more than the two space heaters, circuit breakers start to blow. But, we've had this RV set up for a couple of years now, so we've pretty much figured out how to manage our appliances without blowing any circuits. Heck our Furnace would draw almost that much power just to run it when we were heating the house, and the propane use was on top of that.

We also use a lot less water than we did in the house. Because of the way RV toilets work, they only use about 1 quart of water to flush. Home style toilets use 1 gallon to flush. Now, there is some water used in the flushing of the black water tank, so toilet use may be a wash. But, shower use is much less. Carol and I both take 'Navy' style showers. Turn on water, get soap wet. Turn off water. Lather up. Turn on water to soak wash cloth, turn off water. Scrub a dub, dub. Turn on water, rinse hair and body, turn off water.

Even the water that runs while waiting for the hot water to get to the shower head is not waisted. We run it into a water bottle via a funnel and use that water for the dogs drinking water. Are we perfect, not by a long shot, but our carbon foot print is a whole lot smaller than it use to be. Some day, I'd like for our rig to have solar panels so that we can live even more off the grid, but, we have to take this one step at a time.

When you get a chance, check out our videos of our new digs. Many of you might think we are out of mind by doing this, but if for nothing else, the shear economics of it really work for us. Our rent went from $1250 a month to $880. Cable TV, Electric, garbage and water were not included in that $1250 a month. It is included in our Space rent, so we are going to save a fair amount of money with our move.

The animals are all doing fine. They all seem to adjust to the new digs just fine. Our setup is pretty simplistic, so we still plan on getting out to RV at least once if not twice a month.
We'll keep you posted! Happy camping! - Eric -

Friday, January 9, 2009

Our new lives as full timers begins

Hi there everyone,
Well, Carol was correct in pointing out to me that I haven't updated you all lately with the fact that tonight we will be moving into the trailer and in four days we will be pulling up and moving off the property.
Over the last few weeks, we have been busy giving things away to family members, placing some stuff in storage, making copius trips to the local Hospice thrift store and making donations, and the occasional trip to the dump.
Though we are running a little close on time, we are making good progress to getting our lives moved over to the trailer. On Tuesday of next week, we will be moving into a local RV park. After that, we can start to really get a handle on our Full timing budget and then plot our course from there.
We are very excited. We have a kitty zone set up in the trailer and one of tonights projects is to hang a few critical family pictures in the rig for a little homey touch. As for the dogs, well, they are old pros out of living in the trailer, so they are ready for anything, just as long as we don't leave them behind.
We'll keep you posted. Happy Camping!

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Happy New Year







Happy New Year everyone,

We got to spend new years eve with Karen and Mike my sister and Brother-in-law. We got together in Red Bluff at the Durango RV Resort. We got to spend three days together getting caught up and just spending time hanging out. We really enjoy this rv park. They have everything here, a Pool, a rec room and lots of area to let the pooches go running.

It was really nice to have 4 days off in a row so that I could recharge my batteries a little bit after the installation of the new version of Telesphere. The install was rocky, which was to be expected. We still have a lot of work to do, but I needed a break. This trip was a great one to get away from work and have a nice distraction from it all.

We brought the three pooches with us on this trip to Red Bluff. They were all doing so great. We have three of the best dogs in the world. Roxy is still hanging in there, pretty well. We are still blending her dog food down for every meal, and she seems to be handling it well.

Well, that is all for now.

We hope you all have had a great Christmas Holiday and a safe New Years Celebration.

Happy camping! - Eric and Carol -