Hookup Culture, RV Style
August 16, 2016
No, not that kind.
This kind.
I don't know whether this qualifies me as adventurous or just foolhardy, but I had never even been inside a motorhome when we decided to live full-time in one. Shoot—I'd never camped in anything that had running water, much less a toilet! So I had absolutely no idea about the whole mysterious process of connecting to power and sewers, and I was afraid the whole business would be somewhat daunting.
The good news is that the whole process is really pretty simple.
If you have even a rudimentary understanding of RV hookups, you don't need to read this post. But if you, like me, are a complete novice to most things motorhome, here's a quick run-down on this part of our new lifestyle.
I don't know whether this qualifies me as adventurous or just foolhardy, but I had never even been inside a motorhome when we decided to live full-time in one. Shoot—I'd never camped in anything that had running water, much less a toilet! So I had absolutely no idea about the whole mysterious process of connecting to power and sewers, and I was afraid the whole business would be somewhat daunting.
The good news is that the whole process is really pretty simple.
If you have even a rudimentary understanding of RV hookups, you don't need to read this post. But if you, like me, are a complete novice to most things motorhome, here's a quick run-down on this part of our new lifestyle.
3 Things You Can Hook Your RV Up To
(Bonus points for ending a subhead with not one, but two prepositions!)
Electricity
Electric hookups generally come in two forms: 50 amp and 30 amp. For reasons I do not yet understand, 30-amp hookups give you 30 amps of power, while 50-amp hookups give you two inputs of 50 amps each—in other words, 100 amps of power.
Here's what the electric-hookup post at our current site looks like. See how the two circular outlets in the bottom panel have different holes? The outlet on the left is for 30 amps; the one in the middle is for 50 amps. And yes, you use a different plug depending on whether you are plugging into 30 or 50 amps. The white outlet on the far right is for 20 amps, which is what you'd use if you were camping in a tent and wanted to plug in a household-type extension cord and a light.
I'm not sure, to tell you the truth, why you'd choose 30 amps instead of 50 if you had the option, but I suppose there must be trailers or RVs that can handle only 30 amps. Our RV can use either 30 or 50. On 30 amps, we can run anything requiring electricity--microwave, both air conditioners (we have two: front and back), refrigerator, lights--but not necessarily everything requiring electricity at the same time. (Cleverly, our RV understands this and shuts various things down--"sheds" them, in RV-speak—if we try to run too many at once.) On 50 amps, we can run pretty much everything all the time. This seems to be important mostly when it's hot and you want to run both AC units.
Water
Hooking an RV to water is pretty much like connecting your garden hose at home. Often the water pipe is located between two campsites and is shared, like in the photo below. We have pressure gauge on our hose, but that's not a necessity; as you can see, our neighbor does not.
Sometimes a shared water hookup can be pretty far from your site. Our two 25-foot hoses barely reached this one.
On the RV end is a "wet bay" that houses the water intake (at the left in the photo below) as well as the sewage output (on the right; more on that in the next section). That blue cylinder on the right is a water filter, and the faucets and sprayer in the middle are for outdoor cleanup (say, if things don't go well with the sewage output).
Sewer
The sewer hookup allows you to empty two holding tanks: "gray waste" from sinks and shower and "black waste" from the toilet. As you can see in the wet-bay photo, both use the same hose outlet; you pull the designated handle for the tank you want to drain. In this photo, the drain hose is not hooked up, as you probably figured out.
When you have sewage hookup at your site, you run a sewer hose (connected to the orange-tipped housing, in the photo above) to a sewer pipe in the ground on your site. Notice the hole in the bottom of the wet bay to run the hose through so that you can close the door to the wet bay.
Our hose looks like a millipede because it's up on a support that makes the flow a little smoother.
4 Kinds of RV Hookups
A campsite will generally fall into one of these hookup categories.
Full Hookup
A site with full hookup lets you connect to electricity, water, and sewer. Sometimes a full-hookup site will have only 30 amps of electricity available; sometimes 50. These are the easiest sites to be on (you'll see why in the next sections) but also generally the most expensive. Your "utilities" are included in the price of your site if you stay only a few days, but some parks will meter the electricity and charge you by your usage is you stay a month or more.
Water and Electric
If your site has only water and electric hookups, you'll need to empty your gray waste and black waste tanks at a dump station (usually located near the entrance to the camp; more about how that works in another post.) So far we've stayed at sites without sewer hookup for less than a week at a time, so we've simply stopped at the dump station on our way out at the end of our stay, which is no big deal. It would be a little less convenient to camp at a site without sewer hookup for a long period of time because our waste tanks would fill up before we were ready to leave, and we'd have to do all the stuff involved with getting the RV ready to travel (unhooking from water and electric, pulling in slides, turning off propane, etc.) just to drive over to the dump station, then do the set-up process again (rehooking to water and electric, leveling the RV, etc.) when we got back to the site.How do you know whether you need to empty the waste tanks? This handy set of gauges:
Electric Only
A lot of state and national parks have only electric hookups. If you know in advance that you won't have water available on your site, you can fill your fresh-water holding tank in advance. When you get to your electric-only site, just flip on the water pump, and your sink, shower, and toilet will all work normally. You'll want to watch that handy set of gauges pictured above to make sure you don't use up all your stored water. And here's something we learned the hard way: water in a holding tank doesn't stay good indefinitely! More on that in another post.
No Hookups
Even with no hookups, life in a motorhome hardly qualifies as camping, because—for a limited amount of time, anyway—we can get pretty much all the electric power we need from this impressive bank of "house" batteries (as distinguished from the chassis batteries, which power the automotive functions), with help as needed from a generator.
At some point, we may add solar panels to the roof to further reduce our dependence on electric hookups and extend the amount of time we can live off the grid and still enjoy the luxury of a working refrigerator. So far, we haven't been without an electric hookup; I imagine it will be another learning experience the first time we try that!
Photo credits:
"Hooking Up" http://www.hercampus.com/school/miami-oh/drunken-makeouts-sober-hangouts
Robin Williams: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449089/mediaviewer/rm2762905856
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