The planet needs us to do better

We put the truck in 4-wheel drive and started pulling the trailer up a long and muddy dirt road in Stanley Idaho. Pretty quickly, we hit our first obstacle: a deep ditch that was dug across the road by a local who didn't appreciate out-of-towners going up into the wilderness managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). We came to a crawl and inched our way forward until we heard a scraping sound from the trailer. Nicole got out to inspect and realized one of the jacks was dragging. No worries, we can live with 3 stabilizer jacks and they're pretty cheap to replace. Onward! (Ain't nobody going to break-a my stride.)

We found a spot (pictured above) between 2 hills that just barely had a view of the town below, allowing 2 bars of cell phone reception to come through so I could take zoom meetings. Perfect! This would be our home for the next few days. With no place to plug into the grid, and only the 60 gallons of water we were carrying on board, we'd have to think about our all of our resource consumption in order to enjoy this paradise.

Brew a pot of coffee

Do you know how much energy it takes to brew a pot of coffee? I do. A typical coffee pot is anywhere from 750 watts to over 1 kilowatt. Coffee is something that Nicole and I cannot live without, so it was essential to have enough power each morning to brew a pot before the sun came up. It takes about 6 minutes to brew a pot, so if we turned it off as soon as it was done brewing and put it into a thermos, each pot would cost us 0.1kWh or 2% of what we could hold in our battery. Alternatively, if we brewed the coffee and left the pot on to keep it hot for the breakfast hour, it would cost us about 1kWh or 20% of all the energy we could possibly store.

Once your comfort is tied to your ability to be smart about how much energy you use, it becomes second nature to conserve. Most mornings, we brewed 2 or 3 pots of coffee and had plenty of battery remaining. It wasn't like we were constantly sacrificing, either. It's just little things, like using a thermos instead of leaving the coffee pot on. (Most people don't even know that a coffee pot uses a ton of energy.) Or choosing LED lights and then turning them off when they're not in use. Or using a white noise app instead of running a fan all night. These little tiny choices, that add no real inconvenience to your life, add up. Also, choosing a smaller space instead of powering a palace that is 90% empty of people helped too.

The planet needs us

What I learned is that when being an energy-hog adds the smallest inconvenience to my life, it takes almost zero effort to stop being an energy-hog. So why don't we do it in every day life? We are currently getting firsthand experience with how bad a global crisis can be. So why, then, are we flirting with the worst global crisis that has ever existed: Climate change through man-made global warming?

I've become convinced that even I - who completely gave up meat for a year and a half to lower my carbon footprint - am too lazy to think hard about my energy consumption without some sort of pain associated with being an energy hog. I'll strive to be better, but I'm just one person. Maybe we need some systemic nudging (carbon tax?) to get us all to think a bit more.

And yes, I certainly recognize the irony of preaching about climate change when I drove a truck thousands of miles over the past month. But rest assured: I bought carbon offsets to hopefully give back to the planet in some way that does enough good to offset my actions. I'm on the fence about carbon offsets, leaning away from them in general. But I do believe that the recipients of the funds are genuinely doing good work, so I'm happy to give them my money. Maybe a better term is "Karma Offsets".

Appendix: Energy Onboard (skip this if you're not into techie stuff)

Before leaving for the trip, I equipped the trailer with a home-built electrical power plant.

This consisted of 600W of Solar panels on the roof of the trailer, a 3kW pure sine wave inverter, charge controler, and the gem of the entire build: a salvaged Tesla battery module from a wrecked car with 5.2kWh of storage at 24V packed into just 65lb of lithium cells.

In our last RV, I built a similar setup, but I made a mistake using lead acid batteries and a 12v system. Lead acid batteries will have a big sag in voltage at high amps, so even if your batteries are fully charged and showing 14v, if you try to pull 2kw, the voltage will drop under 10v and your inverter will shut off. One solution is to run at 24v which will cut your amperage in half on the DC side of the inverter. The other solution is to use lithium batteries, which do not have the same sagging voltage problem. Live and learn. This time, I used both of these solutions.

To cut down on the current running from the solar panels to the charge controller, I put the 12v panels in 2 groups of 3, or 2 parallel 36v panels. To run the higher voltage panels into a lower voltage battery, you really need to use an MPPT controller so that you don't waste the energy you've harvested. PWM controllers are cheap, but I wouldn't recommend them, even if your panel and battery configuration are synced. The panels are always going to run a much higher voltage than they're rated for and you don't want to lose that energy by having the PWM opening and closing the circuit to bring the voltage down.

Of course, we also had a propane tank, which provided much needed heat. (It snowed 2 of the nights we were up there.) And the propane kept the fridge running if our electricity was low.