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- Shorter showers using water shutoff valve
- Use power from unused devices such as laptops with USB charging ports
- Solar devices: Expandable Solar Lanterns
- Keep your refrigerator or freezer cooler for longer stints
- Make cold brew iced coffee with less water
One of the first things we did was upgrade our shower head to a higher pressure and less gallon per minute shower head. Our shower was already equipped with a valve to turn off the water when we’re not actively using rinsing. This valve is great, and you can purchase one for your camper and add it between the hot/cold valves and the water hose to your shower head. The only downside is a burst of cold water when turning it back on but the water quickly goes back to the temperature you set. If you want to go to one step further you could simply turn the hot/cold valves completely off and this will help to save even the drips from the shower head while you’re lathering or conditioning your hair.
If you travel with a laptop, you will likely have a USB port that has a different color insert or a graphic of a lightning bolt or battery beside it that helps identify that it’s a charging port. These USB charging ports work off of your laptop’s battery even when the laptop is shutdown. My laptop has a massive battery that will work for up to 7 hours without a charge, if I forget to charge my phone while we’re driving somewhere and I don’t want to crank up the generator, I’ll simply plug into this USB port to give my phone the boost it needs.
While boondocking, we’re always aware of our RV auxiliary batteries and how quickly you can drain one by leaving a light on by mistake. For this reason, we’ve purchased an expandable solar lantern. We leave it out during the day to capture the sun’s rays to charge. So far we’ve gotten over 5 hours of light out of it on its brightest setting, which is more than enough to get us through dinner and setting up our beds. There are 3 light settings, low, bright and SOS/flashing. It came with a micro USB charging cable to charge (if there’s no sun, use a laptop as stated above ^). There is also a USB port on the lantern that will allow you to charge a small device such as a phone or tablet.
If you’re running propane gas to cool your refrigerator when you’re not plugged into electricity, one of the best things you can do is keep it stocked. The more cold items inside the refrigerator & freezer, the longer it will stay cool without needing the refrigerator to run. We typically keep at least a gallon of water divided into our water purifier pitcher and sports bottles in the refrigerator and frozen pizzas and ice cubes in the freezer. When we start hearing the frig kick on more often, it’s often a telltale sign we’re down on groceries and a trip to the store is in our near future. This simple tip helps us conserve more of our propane which aids in keeping us in the wild for longer!
We are huge coffee drinkers! Nothing is better than waking up to a new location and having a glass of iced coffee to soak up the morning sunrise. While making cold brew on the road I noticed we weren’t utilizing all the water efficiently. Our process starts with sweetening the brew. We will heat up 8 ounces of water in our microwave for two minutes (using our generator and propane we’ve saved by keeping our frig stocked). We then add sugar to the batch and stir it in until the water is clear, then add the grounded coffee. While pouring our purified water from our pitcher, I’ll rinse the spoon and cup to help clean sugar off of them, catching the water in the coffee pitcher. This process allows us to capture 99% of the water used in the process and leave us with 2-3 days worth of cold brew iced coffee.
