As we wait for GANNET2 to be delivered any day now with our new updated house systems I figured it might be a good time to explain our energy choices for life on the road, particularly in South America. Our old roof solar panels and air conditioner photographed in Paracas Peru in 2024:
In the US choices are fairly straightforward depending on how you want to travel and park for the night. Campgrounds with electrical water and sewage hookups are common and roads are smooth enough that to hang utilities under your van, propane water or sewage tanks for instance, need not be very limiting. Even in Mexico you can expect to find campgrounds that offer these facilities, more or less efficiently across much of the country. Argentina is famous for inexpensive, $5 -$10 a night full service municipal campgrounds as Argentines love to camp. So in some places you can camp in organized campgrounds but these facilities are rare when you look at Latin America as a whole compared to Europe or the US and Canada.
South of Mexico you need to consider different requirements not least because any items that wear out or you run out of will be hard to replace. Don’t expect to find chemicals for toilets or replacement water filters or other consumables which isn’t a problem if you plan to return to the US in a few weeks or months but long term travel requires a different strategy. Below is one of the Harberton Ranch free campsites along the Beagle Channel, Tierra Del Fuego Argentina, 600 miles north of Antarctica…all to ourselves for New Years Eve 2024/25. No fireworks for Rusty, no facilities for us.
Part of the pleasure of RV travel is the independence it confers, the ability to carry your customs and your preferred foods and culture with you instead of having to adapt to hotels and public spaces all the time. But to do that you need to find the correct balance between simplicity and ease of maintenance. We do it by eliminating potential sources of friction.
Instead of convenient inline water filters we use a clunky but effective Berkey water purifier with long use charcoal filters that can be scrubbed clean from time to time. It requires us to transfer water back and forth but it needs no frequently replaced filters. We fill our 30 gallon (105 liter) water tank with potable water which we usually have to pay for, but we still run it through the Berkey before drinking it.
Convenience stores and supermarkets sell water in these 20 liter (5.5 gallon) jugs called garafones. You bring an empty and they sell a full one for between 50 cents and two dollars depending on the country. We even stop water trucks to buy water as we did here in El Salvador.
It takes some explaining to persuade some shop keepers to let us take their full jugs out of the store without handing them an empty but eventually they get fascinated by the process… and often help enthusiastically. To try to avoid spilling we use a special siphon hose to fill our tank.
In countries with potable water, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile and Argentina so far we fill up in the usual way with our hose. Hose fittings are thank god universal. Here in Arizona:
In this campground in Argentina they had a quick connect I couldn’t unscrew so I used my water bandit:
Which if you haven’t met one this is a water bandit:
Propane on the road can be a huge hassle as every country south of Mexico has its own tanks, filler connections and rules for handling a potentially dangerous gas. There are universal gas adapters for sale online but presenting a weird out of country tank to be filled far from home can freak out the suppliers. Some people resort to buying local canisters and hand transferring gas to their cans, others buy local canisters and regulators as needed. Some travelers say they have no problems. With our experiences sailing Central America and the Caribbean we elected not to have any gas onboard at all and we went all electric which has its own issues. Our induction stove below. I’m not too fond of it as I find it persnickety to use but it works:
But as usual the ideal energy solution doesn’t exist as we require huge amounts of electricity to operate our home on wheels. Lithium batteries help as they store lots of energy but generating electricity requires an expensive grid to keep our home powered. That’s one reason we have modernized and expanded our solar panel capacity, but that alone isn’t enough.
We have a second alternator to charge our house batteries while we drive, an addition to the van that has been nothing but trouble for us constantly requiring repairs. I regret the $4,000 installation every day. Even now our new Brazilian replacement is holding us up as the mechanic struggles to align the new alternator with our house batteries. I would never do this again preferring to generate less from our main alternator but not having to deal with this fussy installation from Nations in Missouri.
The third choice to charge our batteries is plugging into shore power, which you do in the States at a campground without a second thought. In Latin American campgrounds shore power is available but usually it’s pretty crappy and the reason is most campground owners don’t take outdoor electricity seriously and spend no money to install decent systems. In the photo taken in Chetumal I have deployed our home made ground to allow our system to work, as grounding in Mexico tends to be a rather vague concept. The 15 amp plugs are your basic household outlets. I checked this outlet and my meter showed no ground so I plugged my wire into the top outlet. The outlet underneath would take our power cord and is now grounded through the top outlet into which I have plugged my home made ground. I was shown this system by another camper and as weird as it is, it works.
Forget 30amp plugs as outdoor installations will melt if you try to run an appliance off a campground system. Early on in our travels we naively tried and tripped circuit breakers everywhere. In one campground in Nicaragua we actually melted a plug. Grounding will be sketchy and wiring is frequently too wispy to carry amperage. Below in Argentina I had our portable voltage converter out and had to protect it from the rain in Jujuy Province.
So our solution now is to generate more solar power to try to rely less on shore power. When we do plug in we only charge our batteries and I’ve set the charger to a maximum 5 amps to not stress campground systems. If we want to run appliances I unhook the shore power and run our kitchen off the batteries through our 3,000 watt inverter. Then we plug back in to charge the batteries. We have an air fryer and microwave as well as roof top a/c because this is our home and we’re old farts and like to be comfortable.
Some overlanders take pride in doing without but we accept the limitations of a delivery van over a gnarly Jeep but we don’t criticize people in roof top tents cooking outdoors. There’s lots of different ways to travel and to me it’s more important to enjoy your way than worry about how others choose to travel. Our van is heavily loaded and will require more maintenance than travelers with less stuff.
I know the engineers who seek perfection in all things will dream up circuits and systems to overcome but every single thing you bring will break. My goal is function through simplicity. Thats one reason we have no water heater. If you want hot water aboard GANNET2 use the electric kettle to heat it. We have no shower preferring to use an outdoor camp shower or a campground shower or a gas station facility. Our van has never had signs of damp mold or condensation inside. Ever.
One other thing about shore power is that southern South America uses 220 volts. Once you leave Ecuador it’s 220 volts all the way south, so we have had an automatic voltage converter installed. Using an adapter we can plug into any outlet now and the magic box will control the input to the charger.
This is especially useful in Brazil where the northern states use 110 volts (as do Guyana and Suriname) but the southern states use 220 volts. Some campgrounds offer both outlets so you never quite know what you are plugging into and caution is necessary for anyone relying on 110 volts. Europeans with 220 volt systems lose power if they plug into 110; but if we accidentally plug into 220 we burn out our system so this magic box will be very helpful. It replaces this heavy portable converter we’ve been dragging around:
Lastly the toilet, the subject never brought up in polite society. Skip this part if you get queasy as this is all the details you may not want to hear. We love traveling with our Thetford Curves porta potty as it saves us using public facilities which range from weird to revolting across different countries. In decent hotels and in shopping malls and upscale restaurants toilets are as you find at home but in gas stations and roadside restaurants they can be and usually are fairly disastrous depending on how developed a country you are in (Brazil Chile and Argentina are mostly very good) but having your own loo is best I’m sure you’ll agree. We also like having a compartment for all that we have been married for three decades. Shitting in your living room does not make a camper van feel like home in our opinion. Your needs will vary from ours but that’s up to you, so you will get more space in your camper if you don’t have a dedicated compartment, and some travelers have no toilet at all.
The first rule in Latin America is put the toilet paper in the trash can provided. (Suriname was the only country that flushes toilet paper that we have come across). Toilet paper is never flushed! Critically important! A free public dump station in Wisconsin; I’d love something this simple all over Latin America please
The second rule is don’t expect many dump stations. They exist but are rare. Intercity bus depots have them if you have a dump system and can get permission to dump there but having a black tank in Latin America means you’ll be dumping roadside which is gross or bucketing the contents of your black tank by hand into campground toilets (please separate your paper!). Either way I prefer a five gallon porta potty for ease of emptying at campgrounds or in roadside toilets. Wild camping I have dug holes to empty it but it takes an awful lot of digging and very slow pouring to leave no trace. The perfect solution in Nicaragua, a vault toilet in an outhouse:
I am not a fan of composting toilets for Latin American travel because you aren’t composting you are simply shitting in a bag and then dumping a bag into a dumpster or trash can to be disposed of by a fairly chaotic trash collection system. Furthermore you will not find dedicated compost bags, coconut coir or other fancy supplies required to operate fancy toilets. Some people do it by stopping at sawmills to pick up sawdust or buying kitty litter as best they can. I like simplicity and my porta potty with no paper in it will clog no toilets.
Bahia Tenacatita Mexico:
There you have it, my solutions to travel conundrums and how we live on the road. All this effort to take your home south. Is it worth it? Khoi a fellow Promaster owner from Canada thinks so, seen here in Arica, Chile:
Argentina:
Another van entering Chile ahead of us in the Andes:
Starlink soon to be planted on our roof:
Stuck in sand again in Chile. I failed to pay attention:
Atacama Desert. Sunrise in Chile:
Argentine beach at sunrise:
