What's going on guys!
Welcome back to the channel.
If this is your first time with us,
welcome to our 1988 Scamp Travel Trailer. We custom-built it for full time
off-grid living and boondocking.
Over here's my beautiful girlfriend Andrea,
making jewelry as usual, and this is Zeus. But in today's video, I wanted to take
you guys through some of the main reasons why a travel trailer is the best
choice for off-grid living.
Now I want to start by clarifying that this video is really meant for those looking
to get off the grid, and kind of live among more remote locations,
while boondocking like we do.
It's not really meant for those who are looking to do
the traditional camping of kind of campground to campground.
before we started our journey, we did look into other vehicles like
vans, and buses, and even like shuttle buses and things as our living space. But
ultimately, we came into the decision of buying a travel trailer. And having the
travel trailer, what it really comes down to is the ability to detach.
So to be able to detach your living space from your vehicle is an amazing aspect of
living in a travel trailer, because it's pretty much like having a home. It really
is your home on wheels, so if you go out to places like national forests or BLM land,
you can detach your trailer in one place and leave it there for two weeks
at a time. And that's amazing because it really does feel like home base, and you
can take your vehicle to and from town while running errands and doing the
things you need to do. That one simple aspect of detachability has so many advantages.
For example, one of the biggest reasons I'm glad I have a travel
trailer, is that I meet people all the time who boondock with a van, and they
either get their spots stolen or they get their campsite gear stolen when they
have to go to town. Or they have to leave somebody at the campsite without a
living space and they have to run to town. So having that simple
sturdy home base of a travel trailer always there, you don't have to worry
about someone swooping in and snagging your spot. Which is a very big reality!
Especially in the summer time, campsites can get packed.
Even the ones that are out in the middle of nowhere, people will swoop in and they'll
take your site. They don't really care if there's a tent there, or a chair there
that you left behind, they might even steal it while they're at it!
So we like having the entire home base set up, and just kind of feels more secure.
And if one of us needs to run to town, but the other might take advantage
of being able to stay here. Like Andrea is doing jewelry, if I need to go and
upload a video to YouTube, I can go to town for a few hours and Andrea can
still be productive back here at home.
Now, in the near future we do plan on
investing in a signal booster just to get rid of that problem. I only have to
go to town to upload videos because I don't have Wi-Fi out here with my laptop,
to do editing and things like that, so that would be a great investment for us
to maximize our efficiency a little bit more.
But for now, I am taking trips to
town so we cram as many chores into that trip as possible.
Andrea comes with me sometimes, sometimes she'll stay behind to work on jewelry,
but we'll do laundry, go grocery shopping, go to the post office, whatever we need
to do, we try to cram it into one trip to be more efficient.
and I think another thing to consider with something like a travel trailer over something like a van,
is that there is a little bit more space. You're not quite as crammed. So you do
have an external vehicle to use for storage and things as well, and you've
got a little bit more of a larger living space which if you're doing it full-time,
you're gonna want that little bit of extra room. You don't want to be in too
tiny of a spot. Some people can do it, God bless you, that's amazing.
That's not for us. We needed a little bit of extra space because we have a large dog, and two people.
So we weren't going to do it in a tiny little van. It just didn't seem like
it wouldn't be fun for us, and we built a fully customized stamp travel trailer. So
it still kind of has the same basic layout as even the new scamp travel
trailers, it's got all the same general things in same places. But we were able
to customize it completely for full-time living and exactly what we wanted like
the wood stove over there.
I think the scamp was probably one of
the harder travel trailers to customize just because it is an egg-shaped
fiberglass camper. So that "rounded corners" was really hard to work with.
I put in all-new 2mm plywood walls with two layers of reflectix and a
1/2" air gap between them. So we're really well insulated in here,
and we can pretty much adjust the temperature down to five degrees
whenever we want to now that we have the wood stove. But also converting it to
off-grid was pretty simple. We ripped out all the electronics that used to be
hooked up to the campgrounds, and just threw in an electronic system.
215ah AGM battery, we had a folding solar panel that somebody stole a few weeks
ago in Florida, if you've seen the last few videos. And now we are upgrading to
200 watts of solar power where we only had 120 before. And if you were looking
for some great solar information, you should definitely check out Will Prowse
on YouTube, I'll leave the link to his videos in the description, but he's got a
great way of explaining to the beginners and the experts how a solar system works.
If you're starting your journey on a budget like we were, you can click on
this video right up here... and that will take you to our more detailed breakdown
of what it took for us cost wise to buy the travel trailer, and to customize it
into a full time off-grid living space.
So I hope that this video gave you guys
a little bit of a better idea on why a travel trailer has so many advantages
for off-grid living and boondocking.
A van or a bus might still work better for
your specific lifestyle, but if the lifestyle that you're aiming for is kind
of what we're doing, I think a travel trailer is honestly the best option.
But thank you guys for watching this video,
and if you enjoyed it, please remember to
click LIKE and SUBSCRIBE on the channel to keep up with more videos like it, and
our personal journey as well.
Thank you guys for watching, and take it easy!