RV vs. House: 3 Big Differences
Mari
I recently took a break from our RV and spent a couple days at my girlfriend, Carol Dysart’s, house in La Jolla, CA. (Ty enjoyed a week in Lima and Cusco, Peru with a team of investors researching a hotel project!)
I became acutely aware of three primary day-to-day differences between living in a regular "bricks and sticks" house (as us RVers like to call regular homes!) and a motorhome:
1. Water usage.
On board our RV with partial hookups, showers have to super short! In a regular house, though it’s good to be mindful of the gallons of water used in showering, it isn’t as critical to only use the minimal amount possible.
I stepped into the shower and automatically went to turn off the flow as soon as I was soaked down to lather up. Thing is, when Ty and I are on partial hookups, waste water is going into the holding tanks: 40 gallons of gray and 35 of black. Whenever we don’t have the luxury of full hook ups with full drainage, we have to be very mindful of water consumption - especially gray (from shower/sinks)… as I talked about here: Yikes! What’s That Coming Up The Drain??!!
2. Electricity usage.
We often have the luxury of our full 50 amps (the max capacity of the RV), but typically with a partial hookup site/park, we get just 30 amps for the whole coach. It doesn’t take much to blow the fuse with one too many appliances on!
While making dinner, I went to warm up some bread rolls in the toaster oven. As I already had some other appliances running, my immediate thought as I reached to turn the oven on, was, "how many amps am I already using here?" I almost laughed at myself when I realized this is really a non-issue in a regular house. Though, like water consumption, it’s also good for the environment (and your bills!) to be mindful of power consumption. See also my post here: Does RV Living Help The Environment?
3. Internet speed.
It’s rare we have the luxury of super high-speed internet on board the RV. We tend to rely heavily on our EVDO system from Verizon Wireless. That frequently provides relatively speedy upload/download rates. Though sometimes if we’re in the sticks, the connection can be only marginally faster than dial-up. Ugh! With a slower connection, I have a tendency to open a browser window, start a project and buzz off to quickly do something else… then end up coming back ages later to the first project. It’s actually a very inefficient and time-consuming way to function!
With DSL, sites load ten times faster and there’s no need to go off and start something else while waiting for loading. I noticed I’m able to be much more effective with the higher speed internet connection. (Duh!)
Isn’t it funny - do you ever find yourself waiting around 20 seconds for something that "should" only take 2-3 seconds to load in your browser? I get so impatient. I want to click a button and it loads instantly. Jeez, remember back in the day when we had, um, faxes, snail mail, telexes, telegrams, pigeon carriers? Ha ha. Hey, maybe it’s just me that needs to slow down?!
I could add more RV vs. House differences here - e.g. having instant access to a land line and corded phone (oh, how I wish!) vs. having to rely on spotty Skype connection and dropped cell phone calls. But, those can wait for another post.
Still, all is thoroughly enjoyable in our mobile lifestyle! Everything I wrote about here still applies: Living In A Motorhome: Top 10 Things I Love!
Tomorrow, we move out of Reflection Lake RV Park, in San Jacinto, near Hemet. Thankfully! It’s not a particularly pleasant park at all–though it certainly looks lovely from the pics above–it’s not the ‘ritz’ as I noted here, and I’ve since discovered we’re right next to two mega dairy farms… which means heavy eau d’livestock wafting over a lot! Eek).
Who knows where we’ll go next. Today, we’re taking the toad out to visit Silent Valley Club - Southern California’s Best Kept Secret. Hmm!
Posted on: Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 10:38 am 
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Cool site….I just discovered you through twitter! I can relate because we are 20 months into a free life on an open ended trip, traveling the world as a family. ( http://www.soultravelers3.com)
We kind of get the best of both worlds since we rent a beautiful place in a little village in southern Spain for the winter and travel in our RV ( with some hotels, inns & riads along the way) the rest of the year.
We are looking forward to shipping our RV to other continents, something few realize is fairly easy and a great way to go. Like you, we have found it much easier and rewarding than we expected. We love it so much that we have become perpetual travelers. My daughter wants to beat the record of the couple that have been doing it around the world since 1984! lol.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:52 amOK Ty, do I have a place to stay in Peru or not?:) I hope you had fun.
Geoff
March 27th, 2008 at 9:35 am