Boon-docking/ battery life

[beerfor2]

We have a trip coming up soon and I waited to long to book a camp site and all they have left is rustic. (Lesson learned).

I figured we would be OK without electric and water seeing that there are toilets nearby. However my main concern is extending and retracting the slides without shore power. According to my manual it is recommended to be plugged into shore power (when possible).

I assume it's OK to run the slides out without shore power. But how much battery do I need to bring them back in?

[Skyliner]

Not really a questions anyone can answer. Worst case, if you can't retract them disconnect your tow vehicle from camper, and use jumper cables from your truck battery to your RV battery to get the power you need to retract the slide. Don't rely on the tow plug to recharge your batteries as the wiring is too thin to be effective.

You can get a cheap 2 stroke generator from Habor Freight for about 79 dollars with a coupon. It is only 800 watts but is enough to power the converter to recharge your batteries in several hours. It is NOT that loud because of its size and one could easily add another muffler to exhaust if needed. Having a backup power option is almost mandatory especially if you dry camp.

We dry camp in the high backcountry. We have 3 sources of power. We have solar for 99% of our needs, we use only 2 out of 3 of our battery banks and use the 3rd battery bank as a backup in case the other two die. We have a 3,000 inverter generator and also have a cheap 2 stroke generator as a backup to this. Losing power in the backcountry is not an option and I'm a big fan of redundancy. Did I mention my old disconnected converter can easily be reconnected if needed ;-) If our tow vehicle breaks down, we have gas powered mountain bikes to get back to civilization in the rare instance we didn't bring our UTVS.

True Story, before we got solar: Our truck (tow vehicle) battery died because a map light was left on. It was morning and our heater ran all night after bing watching TV (DVD) causing our two 12 volt RV batteries to be very low (about 20% state of charge) Our 3k inverter generator died earlier in the week and wouldn't start (plugged spark arrestor). We used our cheap HF 2 stroke generator to recharge our camper batteries and then pulled one out to jump start our truck. We were about 30 miles from civilization and the odds of finding someone to jump our truck was slim. Looking back, our only other option was to wire the truck battery to our UTV and take the UTV out for a long ride in low gear to keep the RPMs up (max charge occurs at 7000 rpm). My new truck has dual alternators and 357 amp-hour output and could easily be plugged into my RV with jumper cables to power a 120 volt AC inverter if needed.