A rare 3 day weekend cropped up so we buttoned up the RV, made reservations for a tour of Hearst Castle and took off after work.
We wanted to shake down the boondocking systems so we had no reservations anywhere and just took off.
That's why you have RVs right?
So after work, we took off, headed down I-5 till about 10:00 and then started looking for a place to spend the night. Shortly, we pulled through the roadside rest just as a truck was pulling out. So we slipped into the spot he just vacated and settled in.
On I-5 the roadside rests all have signs saying "No Overnight Parking". That was a bit puzzling since the whole purpose of the roadside rest was a chance to give sleepy drivers a chance to get some sleep. Caltrans own websites say it ok to stay 8 hours out of 24.
So whatever. Depends on your definition of overnight.
We only put out the passenger side slides so we could stay within our parking space - which happens to be the side that includes the bed. Walked the dog and off to bed we went.
It wasn't bad. Trucks are noisy, but it wasn't unbearable. The worst noise was the motorcycle club that came through in the morning. We could hear the steady drone of the reefers, but truckers apparently don't like leaving their trucks idling for extended periods of time like they used to.
It was that night, about 4AM, we experienced failure of the 12V electrical system.
When we first pulled in, we set the Genset to "AUTO" and it kicked on and off as expected. But when we went to bed we turned the Genset off so we wouldn't have to hear the genset while trying to sleep.
We have the "residential" (aka non-fire starting) refrigerator. But with that refrigerator we also got a impressive set of batteries that should be able the refrigerator for at least 1/2 a day. Apparently during the night the battery went below "LBCO" and the invertor kicked off, leaving us without any 117v power.
We still had 12v LED lights, but none of the 117VAC equipment worked. And worse, the batteries were so low, we could not start the generator. So it became, start the RV main engine, let it run a bit and then start the generator and then once the generator was started, shutdown the RV main engine.
Ok, manageable issue - maybe I did something silly to kill off the charge.
From I-5 we drove over to the coast near Cambria and up highway 1 to San Simeon State Campground. Our line of thinking was that since California was in serious drought and the water had been cut off to this campground, it would be sparsely used.
We drove up to the campground and asked the ranger manning the booth if there was room and he said "Sure. How long is your rig?"
Since California State parks have a 35 foot maximum our rig magical shrunk 2 feet. I could see a 40 footer in the upper camp ground.
The sites were very nice albeit no water, sewer or electricity. Quiet hours (no generators) were 10-8. We discovered that night the batteries would not even cover the quiet hours. Ok - there is a problem there.
We took the toad to the San Simeon visitors center just down the road. Extremely interesting, extremely nice. Highly recommended.
Battery Epilogue
After the trip the batteries continued to deteriorate. We took it camping world and in two minutes they pronounced the batteries dead. We took it home and orders 4 top of the line Exide AGM-2 batteries at $1200.00 from the local auto parts store.
We don't know the root cause. I did find the magnum invertor was set for "flooded" batteries - that might be the cause. In any event the invertor is now set for AGM-2 and we are nervously watching those batteries.
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