How to Raise an RV Grasshopper

One of black squares in my checkered past is a brief stint at teaching. I say "black" because I was aware I wasn't very good at it. This seemed unfair, because my father was an excellent teacher. Perhaps that is why I am enjoying mentoring Grasshopper as he hooks up the solar panels, battery charger, and inverter on his new Nash trailer.

When he called up on the phone to buy my first trailer a couple years ago, I didn't think he showed much promise. He said that he had no house-handyman or technical experience. Worse yet, he didn't seem to desire overcoming that handicap. Any RVer who intends to camp outside RV parks and their hookups has to be a little bit willing to get involved with their RV.

Buying my boondocking trailer from me was a deft move by him, because all that solar/battery/charger/inverter stuff was done. Even better, it was visible, because I treated the trailer as a cargo trailer wannabee. And he asked questions from time to time.

Before getting back to Grasshopper, I must pontificate on how bad most RV 'how to' blogs are. Sure, they mean well. And they are pretty knowledgeable. But I suspect one eye is always on their link-bait or Google income. Sometimes they bury the newbie under mountains of extraneous details. Why so? Their game can be guessed at -- but let's skip it.

Whatever happened to the old proverb about 'give a man a fish and you feed him for one day...teach him how to fish, and you feed him for life?' It is astonishing to see these blowhards on the internet spoon-feeding newbies with endless snippets of 'practical' details.

I am here to tell you that solarizing a rig is not rocket science. Rather than going on and on about minutiae, the newbies' main challenge is to simply adjust their attitude: stop thinking like a wasteful and conventional suburbanite. 

How many RVers think that the only way to heat a cup of tea is to turn on a 2000 Watt microwave oven [*]? 

Don't they know how well an old-fashioned pressure cooker works -- on a propane stove -- for cooking a variety of foods?

No, they don't need a 1000 Watt Mr. Coffee gadget for making a cup of coffee. Can't they see that their thinking-patterns are merely inherited from their shameful past in a stick-and-brick house?! If they try real hard, they might convince themselves that water in a metal pan can be heated on a propane stove.

Pulled into a morass of details, the newbies aren't even taught the basic ideas and principles and categories: you use propane for high-power devices, and electricity for low-power devices.

There are other examples of "technical" problems that really just show an unwillingness to adjust mentally: 

1. Why are they using a 50" television in a van? 
2. Why are they still using an obsolete 17" laptop instead of something that uses lower power? 
3. Would it kill them not to have toast for breakfast? How much electricity does a WASA cracker take? 
4. Why do they waste propane on a water heater that runs 24 hours a day, when they could just heat water in a pan on the propane stove, and take a navy shower?
5. Why do they dress the same way they used to, in their stick-and-brick house, instead of adopting a practical style for winter weather?

Well, this rant has pulled me away from my original mentoring story. Later.

[*] Most people who have just bought a $60,000 pickup to pull a $70,000 16,000 pound fifth-wheel can probably afford a $25 Kill-a-Watt meter to measure their energy hogs.