Wanna-B-RV(ers) - Trailer Modifications

Fresh Water Tank Upgrade

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 19:21:00 -0400

Our Sunline T1950 comes with a 24 gallon fresh water tank. It's probably intended to give you a chance to wash your hands and wash the dishes after a roadside picnic on your way to a full-hookup campsite - anything beyond that is tough to accomplish with 24 gallons. We've managed to make it last about 2 days with very judicial usage and military showers (2-3), but it's hardly convenient - and we didn't upgrade to an RV to forego convenience!

Tanks Side by Side

In the past, I did manage to extend things a little by bringing along a couple of 6G Reliant Aqua-tainers, but that's cumbersome in its own right because you have to lug them around, improvise a hose to pour them into your tank filler orifice, not to mention holding them up above waist height!

Therefore it was time to make a change. For this installation I decided to limit project scope to the fresh water tank only. My grey and black tank are both 28G for reasons that are completely mysterious to me, but I figured I'd deal with that limitation later on. Measuring the space it became clear that there are two ways to go - either replace the tank with a larger one, or add a second tank alongside. Adding a second tank would require a lot of hackery with Y adapters on all four connections to the tank, in other words - more points of failure. With that logic in mind, I decided to cram in the largest replacement tank I could possibly fit.
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RV LED Interior Lighting experiments for energy saving

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:07:09 -0400

In an attempt to make our battery last longer on dry-camping expeditions, I measured all the electrical loads we have and found that the biggest appliance we have is the lighting system - and the Sunline has 15 interior light bulbs, not to mention outside lights all over the place. All the bulbs are 921 (spade type) and at 12-13v they consume at least 1.3A each. That's easily 18 watts. That's each! If we have, say, 4 of them turned on, that's over 5A - over 100Ah in a 24 hour period! How big is your battery?

So that was no good. There are two alternatives - compact fluorescents and LED's. I've tried LED's before, but the color temperature was horrible - very cold and white, bluish almost. They are very efficient though. As for CFL's, the idea of running something that will only glow at several hundred volts from a 12V system just doesn't sound efficient to me, so I looked into what's been happening with LED's these days. I was pleasantly surprised...
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RV Expansion Tank Installation in the trailer

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:34:04 -0400

Problem: the water pump pulses on-and-off to maintain water pressure. It does a decent job, but it's noisy and the water flow varies every second or two.

Solution: install an expansion (accumulator) tank that will accumulate pressure and reduce the need for the pump to cycle or even turn on.

After some preliminary research, I ordered the parts and installed it in 2 hours (including some performance testing). Here is the how-to, largely for me to remember how I did it.
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Our RV gets Solar Power

nospam@example.com (Admin) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:26:27 -0400

We have yet to take our first trip, but I couldn't wait. Actually I found used panels and a charge controller on Craigslist and picked them up the same day we got the trailer! Someone was selling a pair of 50 watt panels and a 15 Amp charge controller.

As it turned out, the hard part of this installation was not electrical but rather mechanical - finding beams to screw into, without perforating the rubber roof unnecessarily or causing leaks.

Some details on both electrical and mechanical install:
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