26 RV MODS & UPGRADES | GRAND DESIGN SOLITUDE TOUR (RV LIVING DOCUMENTARY)

somebody asked me on an online forum how much how much did all of this cost and i said frankly i don't want to know oh i can't show that to sheree right well i start a lot of marital fights in our facebook group look at the size of these panels i've never heard of anybody putting residential panels on an rv 4100 watts basically our entire roof is either solar or ac's so you're not going to go any bigger than that um well well so would you recommend a diy project like this or hire a professional how much money do you have for someone that's looking at this lifestyle for the very first time and they're thinking well i can't afford that what would you tell them what advice would you give to newbies just starting out people ask us all the time so when is this experiment gonna end hi guys we have a real treat for you today we met joshua and elizabeth here while we're free camping with this view right here the teton national forest what do you think of this view guys oh man it's amazing even with the few other trailers that are here it's just so beautiful to wake up in the morning look out the window see the mountains and the weather's been really great yeah right there's so many things we could talk about uh just the free camping right right here which is amazing but that's not why we're talking to you guys today because your story is so fascinating uh wait till you hear what elizabeth does for income on the road and the upgrades you guys have done to this rv yeah i mean you give us envy in so many ways i mean yeah it's so it's a real treat uh the solar setup my gosh i've never seen a solar setup like that you have starlink yeah internet yes we do and i just did a speed test this morning and we'll show you guys that in a little while that that is super cool and you've got a secret for hack for making that work yep that's awesome because all of us think it's too early for rvs and you've got a way around that plus again uh just i think you have every optional upgrade there is for this my wife would like us to slow down for sure but i'm always interested in cool stuff does the rv fly as well or not yet maybe 2024. okay all right that's awesome so what kind of rv do you guys have we have a grand design solitude 390 rkr which the last r for those of you who don't know stands for residential means we have a upgraded package for our appliances our stove and our refrigerator both residential size which you'll see in a little bit but also it's built for full-time living and that was really for us yeah okay and i know a lot of rvs say that and i put quotes with bill for full-time living because there's no perfect rv that's going to just exist and not break but uh this one has supposedly been built for us to put it through you know the ringer every day okay and the rk is the rear kitchen so that's one of the things that we liked the most about this is instead of having a kitchen in the middle like most rvs do where you have to have basically walkways on three sides so you're very limited we have one walkway in and we have a full wrap-around kitchen with an island so it gives us lots of space to do a lot of cooking and when you see it a little bit later you'll realize why my wife says that this kitchen is bigger than our first apartment in houston texas oh that's really cool to hear that and you guys are going to give us a tour yeah that is super cool there are multiple reasons why we picked this rig one was the residential one and the rear kitchen but really honestly like i wanted one that felt like when i was in the living room i wasn't in the kitchen and when i was in the kitchen i wasn't in the hallway i wanted to feel like i had spaces to be in because as my wife says if it feels too small i want to be somewhere else and so we picked one that had a very tall ceiling in the living room that gave me the seat the just the the feeling of being in a big space and the storage on this thing which you'll see is ridiculous massive massive i mean it's probably uh four times the storage that we have on our momentum the the the kind of naked truth about the amount of storage that we have is that you can't use it all or you're overweight and so there even though there is this cool feature you always have to moderate that with how much can i really carry right like we were talking about uh last night the third axle would be uh helpful on this model it would be a massive change if we had the triple axles on this okay awesome well you guys are not alone on this journey tell us about your uh other uh travelers here we got a couple friends with us when we decided um that we wanted to do this whole full-time thing which is right new year's of 2020 about a year and a half ago uh we said well it's finally time for us to get some dogs so we got dora uh she was a rescue in houston she lived in an apartment that didn't allow dogs and they got caught and had to turn her in and so she came home with us yeah when we went to visit there we knew immediately we walked in and all the dogs were losing their minds barking you know and all that and she just was standing in the corner of her little pen just smiling and i said that one that's the one yeah she's calm and yeah um and then she she was just having so much fun playing with my mom's dogs when we visited uh we were like she's gotta be lonely so we got this little guy who was a street dog in mexico his name is diego her name was dora so it just it worked and she's dora the rv explorer what are you doing buddy so he he uh he likes warm things so he loves boondocking because we don't have the ac cranked down like normal so he loves the temperature that's awesome yeah well that's very cool you've got your furry friends along yeah they have the back seat of the truck that's their domain and yep when we travel they get the whole spot and we always say that uh you know they they love their life because they get to pee on more things than the average dog they've claimed spots in 22 states always new trees yes new tires that actually you bring up a funny point when we first started taking dora um away from houston texas heading to arizona she had a hard time going to the restroom because there was no more grass she didn't oh for 24 hours because there was no grass so it it's even taking her a little while to get used to the changes in terrain what is all this sand and dirt yeah i love it now though and cactus oh yeah we've had some near scares with cactus because they don't understand it they get real close but her favorite thing is all the new animals she gets to chase some places have squirrels see your ears mothers up there a little bit so oh yeah whatever she can try to get swede yeah well where are you guys from originally um i'm from tucson arizona and my family was missionaries in mexico so i'm also from mexico i'm from southern indiana but i also moved to mexico as a missionary so i'm from both as well and then for the last four years before we decided to go full time we were living in houston texas so our plates and our registration everything's in texas our domicile address is still texas so legally we are still texas residents although home is now where you park it right exactly and i think texas is a good state to have is a good state tax-wise it's a good state business-wise and so you know all of our businesses are still registered there um you know if we were ever to change there are a few other ones but it really didn't make any sense for us to choose those other ones when we were already rooted in texas yeah so what made you guys decide this lifestyle the full-time rv lifestyle oh goodness so i'll go back to 2019 i've been growing several local businesses i had co-working facilities and a local coaching business and was growing really really fast and then a few things happened that were outside of our control that caused us to have to close those businesses and that was extremely devastating for me um i have this thing inside me that's always built bigger every time i do something it's a little bit grander than the thing i did before and what had happened was i decided that after that closure that i wanted more quality and less quantity right i wanted to be able to enjoy what i was doing and not feel as burdened as we had felt building these huge businesses and even the fact that you know nine years of marriage and we'd never gotten a dog because we were always working working working and we would never have time to take care of it even little things like that it's like you know we're spending our whole life spinning our wheels and we don't have time to enjoy the life that we're trying to build we were generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and not making money if you know what i mean right i i can really relate to your story because i was kind of the same way entrepreneur building this big dj company but the bigger i built it you know yeah the less money i made the more stress i had and the more time you're spending right you're not spending on anything with your family exactly yeah and so after that had closed and i got over my initial depression we'll just call it we were driving home from arizona visiting her family for christmas and in the new year's and i just off the cuff had been watching videos she had no clue i've been watching videos of like tiny home and rv living and i just kind of glanced over and i said what would you think of living in a tiny house fully expecting her to be like are you high keep in mind in all the places that we lived and we'd been moving about every year pretty much in the time we'd been married we had always had a room that was my harp studio usually a bedroom or a den or something i was used to having an entire room devoted to all my harps and all my music and all my everything um i would have my students come for their lessons in the studio so the idea of a tiny home was like how would this work right yeah but initially you were excited about it it was just trying to figure out the logistics so then you know when when i realized she was on board then it was it change to okay so what class a class c class b you know fifth wheel what are we gonna we're gonna build a tiny house are we gonna have a schooling i mean like there were literally so many options that it took months to figure that part out that is such a great story and i think that is really inspirational for so many out there that are in the rat race and no time for themselves for family uh and yeah to maybe have a pet and that you can change your thinking if you're willing to look outside the box yeah this living this lifestyle doesn't mean you can't build an empire it just means you literally own the land that your empire sits on right and i think and we're going to get into the technology that makes this happen here but we had this discussion yesterday about how off-grid living like this and free camping like this does not have to mean that you can't be glampers yeah you cannot have exactly all of the niceties that you had before fast internet right full kitchen right three acs right yeah you you bring up a great you know uh topic because people think that if you're going to live this lifestyle you have to like wear overalls and like be a farmer and the thing is the truth is we're not outdoorsy people like not that much we have pushed ourselves to enjoy some new things and maybe do a little hiking but before we were not dorsi people and we're still really not but we get to live in it and there's a difference between being a hiker and just enjoying the mountain view yeah yeah right i mean and we'll turn the camera soon too but i mean right out uh you know this slide here you've got mount moran yeah just right there with the glacier on there and it's just you know million dollar view zero dollars per night right exactly exactly and you know to those of you watching this video he has you know mentioned before that we can't worry about mistakes and instead of trying to this is our first boondock week like this is our very first week off grid with no backup plan we can't plug into a post that's right next to us so i mean we're definitely in the throes of figuring out mistakes and this works exactly that that is cool so initially it looks like you guys have everything put together but there was a lot of mistakes oh along the way for sure right so talking about like your goal of getting that thing you want maybe it's this lifestyle to go full time it's not like a straight line it's that meme of ups and downs and setbacks and things cost a lot more than you thought they were they always do they take more time than you thought they would um and just the fact that if you if you want something it's not that you go out and find it it's more like well this is what how am i going to make this work yeah so it's not so much like well this is what i have to you know just exist in but like well i need this so how can i make it work yeah how do i like like my my harp studio how do i record my videos in this setup and we figured out a way to do it so when you need it you find a way yeah right is staying positive and not thinking it can't be done and isn't the world full of that or you can't do that right right you hear all the time you can't live like that you can't do that thing but if you flip that to there is possibility something that helps with those possibilities is a phrase we use around here a lot which is done is better than perfect because if you wait till it gets perfect you never get to experience anything it never goes live you never get to take it anywhere test it or do anything with it yeah you know so done means you find the problems you fix the problem exactly so how long has it taken you to get to this point where you were set to actually go boondocking well we bought the rig 14 months ago so um just over a year and it's it's just been a constant string of modifications and changes and you know building desks and replacing the furniture and upgrading computers and just so many things um and the solar was one step along the way something he'd been wanting to do for a long time and opportunity presented itself we decided to do a diy it with some friends it'll take about a month sure and we were budgeting about 15 grand yep and neither of those two things turned out it took how many states it's three months basically our friends that we were working with were they do um jobs and so there are sorry construction projects and so the company when the company moves them they got to move and so we since we work online and we work from wherever we're like well we you know we can't do it on our own we don't have the technical knowledge so we gotta go follow them like oh they're in california now where all the rv parks are expensive i guess we gotta go get an expensive rv park for a couple weeks to finish this up you know so it it took about about three months yeah three months just for the solar project just the summer i mean that was nights and weekends you know and it was a lot of work and i would be doing the things i could do but as i've told everyone i'm like i'm the blunt instrument so he would say drill a hole cut a board and i would do those things but full-on i know you would say why did you do it like that like well you didn't you didn't spend it right so now we got to redo it yeah so i mean it was it was a long journey but as it's gone i've actually picked up more knowledge and you know watched the guys and figured out and we had an issue here not that many days ago here boondocking where we woke up and our 12 volt power was off and i had to crawl down in there with a handful of tools and a guy on a video call and just start working on stuff and i'm glad we had internet because that was the other thing people keep telling us like oh well you can't you can't go out in the boondocks you know because you won't have any signal and you're gonna work and like well but but we do have signals you guys have amazing internet and thank you for letting me bum off of that as well uh we've been joe i joked with her the other night and i said what i need to do is put a paywall on there so that all the people that pull in we share internet with so many people there you go that that's probably a brilliant idea right there somebody will take that idea into an income opportunity so how has your jobs or careers changed you talked about what you did before but you're still doing the same thing just you found a solution to do it on the road so tell us about that well i'll start with mine so i've had really two different couriers so i'm a professional harpist and all of my gigs and playing for things with the pandemic that'll kind of shut down so that took care of itself all but one of my clients that i had booked had canceled so i just found a sub for the one that didn't um and then i teach harp as well and i was already thinking well how am i going to convince all my students to go online especially the ones who are older because a lot of my students are retirees i'm kind of fulfilling their lifelong dream of wanting to learn the heart bucket list kind of thing and i was like these people aren't going to want to switch to online lessons and they're going to you know go move to some other teacher then the pandemic hit and everybody had to move online and a lot of these people were teachers themselves and they had to learn to teach online so suddenly it was very acceptable so that worked out really well for me and then the other part of my job is i'm also a certified teacher the visually impaired so i specialize in working with blind students on braille and assistive technology and i had been working in an inner city houston school district i was servicing 14 schools driving from school to school working with different kids on different things and again it was like well how what am i going to do i'm going to have to leave this job then everything went online so what i'm doing now is i have um several part-time jobs with different school districts i'm working with multiple school districts in multiple states but because i'm a contractor and part-time i'm able to control my own schedule i don't have to be working you know eight to three or something i can schedule my sessions with kids when i want to for example yesterday we were really close to yellowstone so we drove up and saw old faithful and some different things up there and i just rescheduled my students for another day so that we were free to uh make take advantage of the things that are around us and where we're staying right now so um that's been mine i'm focusing on building a lot of heart videos and and curriculum i'm designing a new program for beginning harp that's hybrid online with pre-recorded lessons and live video chat lessons i have my own heart curriculum that i'm finally finally publishing so um i'm staying super busy and really excited i've been able to take those specialties and all that experience i have and just adjust it to fit this lifestyle which i absolutely love you know it's funny that she says it that way because when we were driving to yellowstone yesterday i remember you said something along the lines of we never would have had time to do this before and i said correction we wouldn't have made time to do this before and so now that we have that opportunity to just kind of make the time everywhere we go no matter what our job is we take the time for at least one day to experience something take the harp out get some photos and really just enjoy our surroundings that's been really fun i bought this carbon fiber harp which is very light very durable and we have taken it to some of the most ridiculous places we have amazing photos from 22 states now waterfalls and up the top of lighthouses and just in in ridiculous places and it's it's so much fun so what do i do now well what i did before is i had co-working spaces as i said and i was a business coach and i worked one-on-one with local business owners who were starting their first business or who are growing and expanding and after we closed those physical locations and i decided to go online i was wanting to get back to my roots and originally many many years ago i was a digital marketer and a web developer and so i pulled those parts of my brain back to the front and i said what can i do with these that i will most enjoy and so what i have started doing along with developing a lot of things for my wife i build educational websites for people who really want to teach and share and help others around them grow these might be people who are in the coaching business these might be people who have a service business like say i've worked with a electrician who wanted to show people how to fix their own problems so we built an educational website when he does that eventually some of these customers get a little over their heads and they call him to come fix it why because he shared all this knowledge with them and has built this relationship through education and that brings the most reward for me helping people help people and so there have been clients that i've turned down because it felt more like they were doing a money grab they just wanted to share something so everyone would pay for it and it was all sizzle no substance and so we are really selective only take on a few clients a year and that allows me the time to not be the guy who was working from 5am to midnight every single day because he got a lot done but he was really not happy with his lifestyle yeah i really love this part of your story uh especially elizabeth you're talking about how there is these massive challenges to doing this lifestyle but then covet happened and it's a very negative thing in a lot of ways but there is positive things for you and like we've mentioned before that within every challenge there is a seed of an opportunity right yes and that's not our quote that's somebody else's quote and i don't have whose it is right now but uh so don't look at a challenge like you can't do something he's like what can you make out of that right it just fits into it definitely a mindset change like you have to shift how you think in order to take these opportunities because otherwise all she would have said is we can't go because none of my people will go online we can't go because i don't have a dedicated room for my heart studio or i would have said how am i going to build a physical business if i'm out there you know i it's but instead of those things we said okay what has this done to create this opportunity for us it forced her students online it made me re-examine myself and what it was i was going to do and through that introspection and all of our choices i mean i don't think we trade people ask us all the time so when is this experiment gonna end like when are you back to reality you know and and we're like when the wheels fall off like we're not we're not done with this until it's done with us you know so it's we're not on a trip it's it's a new lifestyle so and that's what people don't always understand you know even um i i play uh the the big petal harp that you see in orchestras and that was one of the challenges thinking about well that thing it's huge it's heavy it's fragile there's no way that it would survive traveling like this um but yet that's been my bread and butter for so many years and i you know studied it in college and and all of this and i decided you know what i'm going to rent it out not willing to sell it but i found a long-term renter for it and then i bought this other travel friendly harp using the the money the the rental income from the one to make the payments on the other one and so it you just you find a way even with those things like there's no way because the harp that i use that is my performance harp that i teach on that i do everything on can't handle this well then you would shift and you adjust and you find one that you can that is so cool well show us your harps sure um so this is the one that i bought um it's from a company called kamek in paris france it's made out of carbon fiber all of the black so it's very light it's only 17 pounds it's very durable it's handled all the shaking all the temperature changes humidity changes every time we've knocked it over it does have a wooden soundboard so you have that really nice wooden soundboard sound as opposed to ones that are all carbon fiber but it's the perfect size i'm able to teach on it i'm able to perform on it i've i've done weddings and funerals and parties and proposals and just the different places we go um sometimes something will pop up and i'll get hired to play for an event and even though we're only there for a couple weeks and so it's been really fun um and then i also have some other harps that i've gotten i have this little lap harp i've played that in the ocean uh you know strapped it on me and it's it's a lot of fun so i don't have the strap on it right now but i do have the lap bar so you can just set it on your lap and play facing the wrong way um and i apologize i'm not sure when i last tuned to this guy [Music] yeah it's a little out of tune but it sounded beautiful to me [Music] so it's a it's a fun little harp and i can do an awful lot with it as well so um i have most of my harps are still in houston texas i rent them out to my students that are now online um and so it's it's been really fun being able to uh just experience everything and take all these photos with all these harps and crazy places well and for those of you out there who are in uh the rv life or you know kind of the off-grid and trailer existence you know and some land who think that there's no way you can do this this is a really good size harp for getting started and we've recently become really good acquaintances with the company that makes these and we're trying to help make them available i think we may have three or four more coming in and so folks who are interested in this you know we can help you find a harp if they don't don't have one in your area and definitely if you don't have a teacher elizabeth would love to help you out with that and what we'll do is we'll put links for you guys which you want to share down the video description and also links to pick up a heart like this i know there's people out there that want to try this out because it's so beautiful and i just have to keep pointing out the view what is the view like for inspiration as far as you know practicing and teaching and and i've written a number of songs for my beginning card curriculum that i've named after some of the places where we were um that were just inspired me and i started playing stuff and i was like oh that's i need to put that in my curriculum and um so it's even fun looking back and as i see the names i i'm i'm remembering those places where that inspiration came it's a lot of fun i use our kitchen as my harp studio since we've got a nice big wraparound kitchen there's an eat-in bar that has been turned into my desk so i've got my harp i just stick it on a little uh crate my husband built for me that raises it up and basically i've got my my dual monitor set up here all my stuff so um i've got my camera i've got lights i normally have a backdrop here wow um so that it's really easy for my students to see things and then i've got multiple cameras so i can switch and they can see exactly you know i can zoom in on my hand position or something to demonstrate for the students so i try to make it really easy for them it's normally a little easier to see because i have a backdrop but what an amazing setup for teaching i mean you guys have like gone all out yeah it's got a lot it's definitely evolved over time but her camera and light in the center is now permanently fixed so it's not something we have to remove the only thing we do is this light fits down in this little hole and then her monitors get strapped down and we're on the road yeah it's it's nice and easy very cool i always have my my music up here i do screen shares i draw on the on the music so they know what they need to write on to theirs and it's just worked very efficiently yeah i mean and multi-purpose you got your kitchen here but you also have your desk and workstation yeah and then uh joshua you've got yours down here station is down here um i have a bad back so i like a nice chair some people come in and they're just like oh my gosh that's a big huge chair but it's the best for me we built this a friend of mine fabian who is a construction a home builder and a furniture builder in dallas texas he helped me build this from scratch to fit the space i have a keyboard stand that can be you know adjusted so that it's best comfort i of course also have two monitors but one of the cool things about mine is we took an old hospital table that would normally go above a bed and that's where i've mounted our printer and my desktop so that i could have an l desk because who said you can live in an rv and not have an l desk i said yes you can but when we're ready to go then this just of course rolls right back in and then everything gets strapped together that is very cool and i see you've got your speed up here right now so this morning and we were pulling down 270 mips and 21 mips up at a 40 millisecond ping which is a little high but still better than our pep wave because sometimes while my atnt i'm getting you know uh a pings of 65 and 75 which are really high and so people who are saying starlink isn't ready yet it's too still has too much latency i'm here to tell you it's getting better all the time so a lot of people think living in an rv means you cannot have decor or you have to put decor away every time you move and i'm the kind of guy every time i look at something i say how can i fix you permanently so i don't have to touch you again so these here these are just walmart frames and they have velcro on the back um so i can peel these off and change the photos but in uh i want to say thousands of miles they have not fallen down it's all according to not buying cheap adhesion products so if you buy the cheap walmart adhesive uh velcro the heat on the wall will probably cause it to fall away so go to home depot buy the higher quality adhesive that has velcro and the stuff does not fall down over here you can see a few that we have these have museum putty you can get that on amazon that holds this and this and these are velcroed the museum putty again nothing has fallen down in thousands of miles of travel i remember touring one of these with the rear kitchen at the grand design rv rally and oh man talk about kitchen envy and rv the space in these so elizabeth has her office in here but this is really my domain i do most of the cooking uh and i enjoy it and one of the reasons we got this rig was because of how much cabinetry we have in here and the surprise so the one we toured did not have this range it had the standard range top with the oven down here and i had accepted that that was going to be my life when we this came in and we came to look at it for the first time and i saw this i was in love because i it really you know the oven works great the stove works great we really enjoy it um the backsplash you know someone asked me all the time what are some things you don't like um we don't like how this is super hard to clean you know in between these crevices it gets a little greasy but elizabeth recently bought a new tool that she puts in my drill and scrubs into that thing really good so we have a lot of modifications on this side i'll start here and work my way over so they come standard with this drawer setup but these drawers do not stay where they're supposed to stay as soon as you move if you don't have this bungee shut they come flying out so we added these latches oh nice and that way we can carry heavy stuff and it's not there's no threat of it coming out we don't have to bungee this door anymore and i'll tell you the one reason this was most important was because on our very first trip very first trip where we made tons of mistakes the first mistake was not bungeeing this door shut and one of these came flying out so hard the ball bearings flew out so day one already ruined a drawer you know the second thing we did on that trip was we did not latch the fridge so we came in with slides out and there was food everywhere and i had like half a can of tomatoes and just like bad things oh so another mod that we did is over here i took this door off the the hinges and i replaced it with a was a regular door yeah just like that one there did not have a shelf in it and i put in this spice rack so that you'll find that one of the biggest battles isn't that you don't have storage space it's that sometimes it's weird sizes and shapes because they've chosen to cram a cabinet in a weird spot so it's about using that space to its best efficiency and for this one it meant trying to go as high as we could and again this one also has a latch so that we don't come home to spices everywhere really cool i was gonna say he made me a little place for my brooms and dustpan and vacuum and everything mop this this was just the piece of trim that was there and i just cut it and put some force closure hinges on it so that when it's closed it holds itself shut and just use the existing piece of trim because it was just wasted space right and and there's so many spaces like that in rvs you would think that they would utilize every single space and yeah i think that i think for them some of the feedback i was getting is it's it's just about they don't want to take the time to customize so much because then it increases the amount of time it takes to build a unit which increases cost labor and material which bribes the price up which makes us angry because when we go buy another one we don't want it to be a hundred thousand dollars more than we was supposed to be right another mod we did up here is all of our countertops were this uh you know formed countertop style this kind of like fake marble i took that off of here and i replaced it with some glued pine so that i had a nice cutting board area but also our trash can is just under here so i pull this out and during food prep i just toss everything down there and it makes it a little bit easier and simpler also i learned these things are incredibly heavy really i do not understand why the countertops are so heavy there when i replace this weighs nothing because it's just glued pine boards but these are so heavy i'm actually contemplating removing all of them just to shave some more weight because of the solar setup we have which we'll show you in a little bit added about 100 1200 pounds to our cargo that's a lot of weight to displace right we this came with just a trash can here but we went ahead and we put in our own trash can slide just built it out of plywood so that we could put the tallest trash can this is actually the trash can from our house the one this came with was like a little you know 12 inch office trash can and i was like come on i'm not emptying the trash for the kitchen um one of the other mods we did is there used to be some medium right here that would cover up the bottom of the sink i took that out and i put in a pot and pan slide so that we could have all of our pots and pans that's great and our lids right here easy to get to of course it would do that as soon as i show it now we did buy a smaller set to move in because before we had so many pots and so many pans and so everything went through a pair down but i did go ahead and buy a specific set that um kind of nests better it doesn't look as nested in this in this way but it does do that oh i can't show that to cherie right well i start a lot of marital fights in our facebook group because i'll do a mod and then i post it and then the husband is told he has to do it or the husband sees something technical i've done and he wants to do it the wife's not happy and so i'm i'm definitely a troublemaker in our facebook group over here what we did is because these are so deep i was afraid of things getting back there we put these little wire slides in so that we can access everything in the back we did it um all across these top ones here those are cool yeah and there are some people who are worried about the weight that these add these are very light they add very little weight the actual issue with installing these is the bottom of this cabinet is basically wafer board like it's nothing so don't put super duper heavy stuff in the front and then light things in the back and expect it to operate well make sure you even your loads um on these kinds of drawer slides that is amazing i mean you guys have really made some amazing upgrades to an already uh super spacious i think it's the best kitchen i've ever seen in a fifth wheel uh already so for those of you who say you can't have a high-end desktop in a rig you can um just what we do is it is permanently fixed i don't know if you can see this i have put a screw in here which screws into this cabinet and this cabinet is screwed into the floor so none of this moves at all during transit i do have a little bit of rubber under here just in case it decides to bounce or rub a little bit but you know it's just about fixing things that you don't need to move so that you can have nice things because when you don't fix them they'll move and they'll break exactly and so tell us about the pc what what are you running there so we are running msi desktops on both both of ours and also our laptops are all msi these typically are known for being gaming computers we're not gamers but we do a lot of video work and so that requires a lot of specialized power that's coming just for your videos just for rendering videos extra ram just for videos that your normal pc isn't going to be able to handle in fact she had a macbook pro that she was doing all of her work on and the fan was running constantly it just could not do it it was starting to die and so i convinced her to come over to the dark side and get an msi desktop and get a msi laptop because they're really well known brand for being powerful um yet durable that's a little bit like sheree and i i'm a pc she's a mac and oh you know so i'm constantly having to like re-learn things on the mac to troubleshoot things it has helped me it has helped me a lot with getting us both on the pc realm because now if i'm troubleshooting something on mine it's the same on hers versus before like you said the same software on both computers is radically different operates differently everything's in different places and that can be frustrating when you're trying to fix something or figure out why something isn't working which happens a lot with computers a lot and technology a lot yeah more than it should oh boy this this workspace again just so amazing yeah i'm i'm a cable management freak that's why i have this here it's on hinges in the back uh and all of her desktop cables just kind of fit underneath here so she can have as many cables as she want but it's not a mess i put this little guy on the back just because i wanted to allow her to be able to let this be as messy as she wanted but yeah it not bleed over into the living room space i have cable management down there everything's tied up it's i'm just a neat freak you don't have to be like this you can just get her done but that's more like me yeah do you guys have a big enough tv oh you know when we toured the rig like the salesman pointed out the big screen tv that was on the wall and he said it was 55 and i said there's no way it's 55 and i got out my tape measure and it was 49 and i said that's not a big screen tv so we originally upgraded to a 75 inch um that rode on this wall for nearly a year and then christmas last year i upgraded to a newer version of the tv and actually went down to 65 and i find the 65 is really a better size for this wall because the 75 would come all the way out and make getting behind the tv really difficult this one makes it a lot easier but tv is a big part of our wind down routine and so it's important to us that it's quality and well i should say it's important to me that it's quality i think elizabeth wouldn't care rather way but like the ultimate glamping right here huge tv when we were talking yesterday i had oh you've got this massive solar setup and you have starlink but then i come in here and you have so many other upgrades it's like yeah somebody asked me on an online forum how much how much did all of this cost and i said frankly i don't want to know because it's been over 14 months you know it's not like we bought it like this or we started like this it's every little thing has come in its own time um but uh yeah it's it's definitely a labor of love for me i get a dopamine boost every time i install something or change something that's better for us and that's part of this life that's really brought me a ton joy so you know sometimes when you're as technical as us and you want to have an actual interior network you're not running everything on wi-fi you need to run cables but you don't want to drop the underbelly and you don't want to you know get into the ceiling so i went to menards and i got some plastic snap-in c-channel and i found some spray paint that was very very close to our wood trim and i made this channel that we could run our wii boost cable in i run all my cat6 through it and it goes all the way to the back wall because on the back wall we have a exterior box where we connect we can take a cable out and actually connect into someone else's network or we can connect to our we boost and send that up if we need to so one of the things like we've talked about is the storage can be weird shaped sometimes and maybe not useful so these had uh hanging racks acro rods across them and that wasn't good for us so i took a jig and i drilled holes ever so many inches all the way down all four sides and then was able to put in these adjustable little brackets cut the plywood to shape so that we can have the storage that's exactly what we need and if our needs change we can change the uh the cabinets to do so and then if i can show you this jackets yeah i'll just take them out so this is how we access our batteries our batteries live behind our fireplace so all the way down here i've created a little bulkhead and i have a little door i take out two screws and there's a tray on rollers down here that i can pull my batteries all the way out through my door and maintenance my batteries replace a battery if i have to do so but now they're still out of the way and essentially kind of out of mind because they live behind all of our uh jackets and our shenanigans down there and what are you running for batteries uh what type of battery right i have 100 amp hour uh battleborn batteries okay and 10 of them we have 10 of those so we're running a thousand uh see 1000 amp hours which i think equates to 12 000 watt hours which is a lot most people don't run this many batteries but i don't do anything small as you can probably tell from the beginning of this video and i wanted to have more than we needed to be able to you know be able to boondock but have somewhat of security of still having power like this morning we ran two ac's last night till we went to bed and we still woke up with 77 battery and we're now we're at we'll just see and we have not turned our generator on we've been here what four days uh we've been running acs we've been doing our computers watching tv everything we have not had to turn on our generator yet so that's it and right now we're at 88 battery and we're generating 1600 watts well 15 14 it's you know it moves as the clouds roll by but we're almost to 100 um and which makes my heart happy right so i this is i think a part that people are really waiting for to hear about this solar setup and before we look at the panels uh first how long can you run two full air conditioning units in this rv so we did a test when we first flipped the switch and we turned both ac's on down to like what 60 degrees or something like that um and we actually ran into a low voltage issue before we ran out of battery what happened was we forgot the third ac was still on really and so we had two ac's on one line tried to come on and that caused my multi-plus to get a little unhappy with us and it shut down so but we were at 40 and it was like 60 degrees maybe 59 in here just constantly running we were running all kinds we had our electric water heater yeah we were doing a pressure test we were trying to like knock it down so i don't know that we have an answer question because we haven't we haven't i'd say since we've been boondocking um we've been running two acs for some of the time and i don't think we've ever gotten below 60 we've never dropped below 60 even the following morning so that's the first i've ever heard of anybody in an rv being able to run two air conditioning units all of the time and how hot of temperatures have you done that so we we have done that in temperatures up to 100 degrees not by choice we went to montana uh just uh just before here to escape the heat and to set up our starlight and to set up our starter link but when we got there montana suddenly decided to become 108 degrees so we were there we were still like at a park being able to plug in but stress testing our our solar and so we we're running we can run our kitchen in our bedroom or our kitchen and our living room can run at the same time it's just that our living room and bedroom are on the same line so we have to decide which one is right right when we're plugged in they can both they can all run sure right so it's just a matter of when we're on the solar or just running off the batteries then we have to essentially for those of you out there that have that have plugged into like double pole 30 amp because there was no 50m our solar runs a lot like that where we're kind of on double 30 amp if you will so i can't run everything like if our space heater was on the fireplace and the electric water heater and then ac kick on probably gonna trip out my my multi-plus my inverter and it's gonna shut down and then restart so you do have to be selective but we do have as much solar and battery as probably can be put on our rig so we we do run most things but i mean that again just if you're minimizing power on other items you pretty much consistently with full sun like this you could run two ac all day if i i could run two ac's all day because our top wattage up top is probably about 3 900 it's 4 100 4100 watts worth of power but we never get that we get more like 3 000 maybe 3 500 and just a couple of days ago or yesterday maybe it was i can't remember day before i got 4 000 and i was giddy right i just have to pause for a second did you hear that 4100 watts of solar i think the most i've heard of personally was around 2500 you know yeah it's that 22 000 to three thousand is definitely the range you normally see for reasonable people i'm just very unreasonable and like to go as big as i can so we got the 380 watt panels or residential size you'll see them shortly and we built an infrastructure and basically our entire roof is either solar or ac's that's it so you're not going to go any bigger than that um well so we have we have been toying around with a design uh david hughes from home on the road uh youtube channel he helped me install this and he also owns a 390 and we're best buds we admin the group together we've been toying around with double stacked panels and what we're talking about is using industrial doors uh drawer slides to mount one panel atop another so that when we're stationary we'll pull the second panel out and have a wing and effectively double our solar if we choose to go that far i don't think i'll double everything but i do think we're going to try to push it to like 5 000. and then there'll be wings so the rv can't it can fly like i said later on there's a lot of you know a design that needs to go into this because we need to make sure it's wind resistant and you know can handle all of that but the idea for us is we'd like to just squeeze a little bit more just so that our batteries always stay topped off because we're new at this i know there are those of you out there like josh stop freaking out you can take the batteries to zero and charge them up again tomorrow but what i've learned from our testing is our batteries only push up about five percent an hour so as i'm watching that um sometimes we've got them as good as five percent per half hour but that's only when the sun's directly overhead and we're getting the greatest angle we can get because ours are not tipped you'll see they're just flat mounted so if we're only getting five percent an hour i don't want to go too low because i know i'll never hit 100 before we go to bed uh here in our bathroom i i just i dislike kind of the wall texture everywhere and so i decided to do a slate wall install in here on our mirror and we were able to run it beautiful all the way up get it behind the medicine cabinets which actually these are i guess or something that isn't coming standard in all of them but for some reason we've got them so good for us oh really yeah some people don't actually have these and if you call grand design they want like 400 a piece for them which i think is ridiculous we did change out the faucets because they come with a waterfall faucet that we really did not like every time you turn it on the water would hit you in the stomach and spray out with air in the lines so i did switch out to these and they have a lot more pressure we really like having them cool yeah beautiful bathroom yeah it's not tiny that was one of my prerequisites i said i must have a bathroom i can fit in and as you can tell i'm not a tiny guy yeah i remember touring this and oh the bathroom so we we did get the king-sized bed this is the doggie domain during the day loves this spot as you can tell her toys get littered up here she brings them up but a couple things more about the the kind of use of space the dresser was here but there was no shelving so i came and put in a little bit of shelving right here so that we could extend it out in this little space that was just meaningless but now her uh you know clothes for the day my slippers and sometimes the very cool uh the dishwashing soap goes here because we have the dishwasher the yeah we really i mean this is one of the things that makes life a little easier for elizabeth it is heavy it does add weight but not having to leave and being able to get laundry done makes a huge difference in her day just gathering it and going somewhere else not even the cost of the of getting it laundered but the time loss for us is too much right and i've had that from my very first rv we paid to have it moved into the momentum the same exact setup and oh man yeah it is like one of the first upgrades that you need because yeah having to take your laundry to a laundromat yeah and not fun and i'll be honest we installed this ourselves um our dealer wanted to charge us way too much money for it so i bought them off amazon free shipping for 1600 bucks the whole shebang and we put it in ourselves now it's it's easy but difficult if you catch what i'm saying because it's not difficult to put it in but this angle and getting that in there was very hard we had to tip this up and hold the mattress out of the way take the door off the hinges because the washer is heavy the dryer weighs nothing but that washer was a pain right i remember the move with getting it from our columbus rv into the momentum and we hired someone to do it and yeah it was a struggle getting it moved over so yes props to you guys for for that and and all of these things and i hear you're going to do what first time going to do a load yes we're going to do a load of laundry on our batteries in solar because we want to see how much water it consumes there is a setting on this washer that is like a short half hour efficiency wash that should use nine gallons or less we are going to test that theory we're also going to see how much wattage the dryer is going to consume i told her always do it during the middle of the day i want to be taking off the solar not the batteries there you go this is the brain control center for all of our solar panels without these components we would be generating no power what we've got in here is we have twin 3000 watt multi-plus inverters you only see one because the other one is on the back side of this wall we're going to show you in a second these right here are shut offs for our solar panels so we can use these breakers to shut off the power to our unit um if we need to maintenance anything between those two points this right here is our main switch right now we're on batteries only one is generator two is short power so we have run everything together so that no matter if we're plugged in no matter if we're trying to run the generator we just have an easy way to switch between those um we didn't necessarily need it but we found it much safer to do because if i'm working on the 50 amp line i can disconnect that if i'm working on the generator i can turn and disconnect that so there's no back feeding of power through there so in here we have three charge controllers from victron um one of these charge controllers has a six six panel bank one has four panels and one has what we call the orphan it only has one panel now we went this way and you can tell this one is a 20 250 100 the other two are 150 100s we went this way because i wanted to have this one to be able to expand to more panels as you heard me talk about a little bit ago if we ever do that we don't have to upgrade and add a new piece of equipment this is our main shut off to our batteries if i turn this to off we would not be pulling any power from our batteries and just be pulling power from our solar panels these guys right here are what they call the lynx distributors these are like fancy smart bus bars so all of our wires from everything come into these and then distribute back to our batteries or into the multi-pluses back here we have one last one for our orphan panel or the new series of panels so this little guy down here this is our step down we're running a 24 volt system because 24 volts is more efficient when you're running a solar bank and a solar battery bank at our size but most of the rig a lot of the key components run off 12 volt so we have this to step it down this is the piece that stopped working on sunday when we woke up and we were getting no 12 volt power so all we did was disconnect it as you can see here ran the wires back behind and connected it back to our old converter that came with the the rig and i'll show you that in a little bit that pretty much ends us for this part right here oh i'm sorry i didn't talk about these these are actually interrupts for our uh for our multi-pluses so if i switch one of these to off it's going to turn off one multi-plus and the other multi-plus we have two because we have a 50 amp system and having two allows me to have one 3000 watt inverter per leg that is just i've never seen again a system this big before on an rv so for us to be able to open this wall uh i'm gonna right now i'm gonna take out this false panel that we have and i don't know if you have a solitude you may realize there's more space here than there used to be we've actually pushed this wall back and we've pushed this wall way back it used to be all the way out here it was right here and we've just shoved it back because it was empty space so to access the behind this wall uh we created a frame and structure that allows us to pull this open that has a hinge on the back side right here i'm on a magnet i keep the right ratchet that i need to get this open the reason we do that is if there's an emergency i don't want to be digging through tools to find the right ratchet to get behind here this entire wall will open up you now see our other twin multi-plus our wheel system that we used we bolted through the three-quarter plywood and used a really heavy duty shelf stabilizer to this is solid metal because we didn't want it to bend a lot of the other right angles so that we could see we're going to be too weak um just use a regular rubber caster not plastic wanted rubber to kind of absorb the bottom a little bit right back here i don't know how much you can see but we have two boxes the box right here on the bottom side is a 50 amp breaker that will interrupt between shore power and will interrupt between our generator that way if anything catastrophic ever happens at our shore power or with our generator it's going to stop before it destroys our entire system nice this box is a junction box where we bring together the power from both multi-pluses and then only ran two wires um over to our our distribution panel in the rig itself we could have run four but we wanted to be more efficient with wire because it's so expensive back here you can just see the behind the rig you know now before if i ever wanted to access any of these things i only had the one panel that came out and i had to have to crawl around now we have really unfettered access to maintenance anything back here can get to the water heater much easier and our other inverter that i told you that we stepped back to it's right behind here on the steps that gray box oh right that's the original is already in there yeah recognize that wow amazing setup i mean that is so cool it took like we said before it took us several months um a lot of power manpower and a lot of thinking and rethinking and rethinking but we finally got what we like and uh david hughes i have to give super props to him and uh he basically architected the system helped me put it together it was his brainchild and we learned so much on the way i know that he's very eager to install his system on his rig now that we've learned all of the mistakes on my rig we were the guinea pig but uh he's uh without him this wouldn't happen so would you recommend a diy project like this or hire a professional how much money do you have so if you have enough money to hire a professional and you're doing a you know something of this size you know hat let them do it but if you're like us and the retail price would have been so exorbitant that there's no way you could have gotten a set this size with this many panels and this many batteries then diy's your option but the key is finding someone great to work with you know find your david hughes maybe it is david maybe he's in your area and he can help you do it or maybe it's someone like him who can help you walk through because you'll learn and why is it important that you learn because your installer is not writing with you he does not live in your rv and when you have problems like we've had you need to have your have had your hands on it and understand it as much as battleborn and victron try to tell you that this stuff's bulletproof and it'll never break down it will and the more you know about it the better off you'll be so here's our generator this is my next project it's actually um exhaust hose and i'm going to be running my exhaust outside with enough coil for me to be able to pull this out we ran we basically bought a 50 amp plug that had wires on the other end we ran that all the way back to our power wall so when i'm ready i bought a generator specific for the fact that i already had a 50 amp rv plug on it so we can just plug this right in start the generator uh we ran hose so that we are actually connected to both of our propane tanks because i know propane's less efficient so if we're in an emergency situation i don't want to have to come out and switch tanks this guy opens up maybe and then can pull out so that i can maintenance the generator i can do my oil changes you can tell here i took the gas tank off one so it would fit but two because we didn't plan on carrying another fuel source so it's propane only now right now it's propane only okay that way we carry diesel and propane our old batteries actually stay intact our our entire temple system we didn't change it we left it in place we're just charging it through the regular mains okay so right now our 12-volt system thinks that we're on shore power because it's pulling from the inverters so what is that just because we live in an rv and just because we travel around doesn't mean we can't have a smoker we i wanted to get one of the travel ones where the legs fold up and it's super easy to get lifted in and out but of course when we were trying to buy they were all sold out so i bought a full-size trigger and i bought a more ride slide and now we just pull the grill out and when we're ready to cook look at that i open it up put my grease down and then on this side we put a little device in which basically puts it fixes a nut to the metal so i just take out this little bolt twist up my chimney and reattach plug it in and we're off um and to be quite honest with you i was concerned about how much power this was going to draw so we did a test it only pulls 200 watts really at 400 degrees it was pulling 200 watts wow so it's very efficient power wise and when you're in an environment like this where you're not wanting to run on your acs and you don't want to start the oven in the house we bake pizzas on it uh we put desserts on it um you know and of course i smoke meat twice a week on it but uh yeah we we love the smoker for sure that is super cool just rolls right out like that and it only needs uh i want to say like two to three feet clearance from the wall and it needs about only five feet six feet clearance um high so even with the awning out if we've done it in the rain and it's no problem the only time you get a little smoke inside is when it's in its preheat phase and it's ramping up you can get some white smoke inside but other than that when it runs you just get the the nice smell and then we just push it back away so over here on this side we've got a couple of things going on one our batteries are actually stored right behind here they slide behind the fireplace like we showed you and i wanted them to butt all the way up against the wall and my 50 amp plug on the inside takes up about that much room so we had to move it you want to know it's super easy it's color coded on the inside you really have to be working hard to mess it up so if you ever have to work on this plug or replace this if it's burnt up at a rv park where you're at be encouraged that it is not hard to do so i moved that up here and the old hole that was down below that's where my cable comes from my starlink and then this right here is actually i'll show you guys is just a coupler uh for cat6 and so you've got this is the cable going to the satellite and the other cable in here runs up to my starlink it is a special kind of cable it has to be 25 ought cat 6 cable because you can get up to 100 watts pushing through this up to the panel in cold times because it will self heat and melt the snow and ice off of itself obviously we don't have that issue right now but you always want to make sure you have the right kind of cables because if you don't send enough power to it you could cause it trouble so this is a weather tight seal that goes around that coupling so even if it rained out here or anything we got no problems it just tightens right on that rubber and where do you find something like that so i got this um off of amazon um i got the um a cable from a link that we're gonna add in the description below because i can't remember what it is but there is a company who has started making aftermarket cables and couplers for starlink stuff because you can't find it anywhere yet but i will say that you can find some of their stuff once you go there and you see what it is you can find it on amazon for quite a bit cheaper so we'll put some of those links below but this cable now you can see that i have all my slack is right here it comes the dish comes with a 100 foot cable fixed which kind of sucks but it is what it is it's the first design that's come out so we leave all our slack right here let's come on back and look at our our dish so our first iteration is a three-quarter piece of conduit that we got from home depot and then a couple of stacked hose clamps so that i could make a big enough area to grab with this uh u-bolt to really keep this thing steady why is it important to keep it steady because the dish only has about a two percent sway tolerance if it sways more than two percent it will lose connection with the satellite that it's talking to so normal like nylon poles or flag poles that a lot of people try to use they don't work because they have too much sway now we're already working on our second adaptation because they have a mount that you can screw into a roof and then the top the dish itself will actually just snap onto that just like it snaps onto the pole adapter that we have right now so if we change to that elizabeth will only have to run up the ladder click instead of this it's pull attach everything's steady run up the ladder click and we we always try to be as efficient as we can with all of our setup and tear down because when you do it 50 times and 100 times it gets all pretty quick right every little increase in efficiency saves that time yeah absolutely but it's the least full it's ever been oh yeah it was like we had this thing full and because we we only kept what we needed until we realized we didn't need it and so we've over time really shelled this down to less and less and less you know and so down here we keep like our overstock we have a case of our favorite chips a couple cases of my favorite drinks because we do use amazon a lot but when you start boondocking you have less opportunities to receive shipments than you did when you were always in parks who were always happy to receive your shipments um keep our ladder back here our washing materials and a lot of our leftovers so a lot of this stuff is left over from our solar install and we're just keeping it until we're for sure for sure we don't need to do any modifications but again one of the things about this solitude model is the massive massive storage it's like look at that the eight foot slide can hold 800 pounds distributed um obviously we don't have anywhere near that right now but there have been times in the past where we've had it pretty loaded down and after seeing this before we joked about just being like the guest bedroom just throwing a bed in there and it does it catches all you know it definitely ends up being a catch-all but it's nice to have a place that's a catch-all because when you're in an rv living full-time everything has to have a home and it has to go away as soon as you're done using it like in your house when you could afford to just set this thing here for a while or just set this thing here you can't do that in the rig because as soon as you do it it's in your way it is now in the way of something else that you're trying to do and it's annoying and so it's i'm always running after everything like okay if it doesn't have an easy home you won't put it away so make sure that your everyday use items are easy to store and easy to get to otherwise you either won't get them out um and forget about them or you won't put them away and they'll just annoy you they they look so impressive up there yeah solar panels protect the roof anyway to to use these type of panels to use residential panels you have to support their weight and most of important support their middle flex because this solar panels are glass and no matter you know what size you get so when they're the bigger they flex more in the middle so what we've done up here is we've both put a piece of a three-quarter aluminum tube down the middle of each one with rubber window gasket above that so the glass can move but it can only move about a quarter of an inch and it is supported so allows it to bounce as we drive without flexing so much that it cracks the second thing we did is on the edge of each one inside and out we put a standoff and a c channel with more of that rubber gasket so that the frame edges not just the glass but the frame can bounce but only about a quarter of an inch because before we did that we could move the panel now it's more rigid and we cannot so it does give it some leeway without them breaking on the way to our next destination that's important so we of course a lot of these solitude rigs come and most rigs come with one filter on board but that really wasn't enough for us because we have some special destinations we want to go to and just around the us water quality is really fluctuative so we bought a clear source filter system from amazon we cut all the metal off and mounted it directly to the wall it's a three-stage filter that we plumbed in line to run with our filter that came with the rig so effectively of four stages we go from 10 microns down to 0.2 why is that important 0.2 removes bacteria so you could go down to mexico pull some water in and be able to use the ground water that's pretty big yeah water is such an important thing we can go a long time without food but we can't call that water no right gosh we almost forgot to talk about one of your biggest upgrades yet tell us about your suspension upgrade okay so in the beginning we thought we had 8k suspension and uh the the axles that came from the dealer are they sorry that came from grand design but that turned out to be kind of a let's just call it extra uh narrative that the dealer told us thinking that we got a good rig so when we got it and realized that we only had 7k what was important to us was the extra carrying capacity number one and number two what was going to be important to us was the stability that a higher grade would offer us so we got the 8k independent suspension from more ride we drove all the way up to elkhart and we went there and what's really cool about that is they actually let you stay inside your rig so we went we we plugged it in overnight they start at 6am in the morning they pull it in and then when they're done in the afternoon we got to go stay inside their warehouse in our rig overnight so no need for a hotel super cool they gave us a place to sit while we were there they fed us lunch but let's talk more about the upgrade so what essentially happens down here is you have an axle but if you get independent suspension they're going to take that axles away they're going to cut them off and take them away they're going to put on the independent suspension module which is going to go right on the back of the tire and there's a beam that goes all the way across that provides some more support for this independent suspension each one of these now operates independently so if one tire hits a pothole before with the axle that vibration would have carried all the way across the rig maybe caused it to uh go back side to side which we know makes our dishes fall makes our cabinet doors come open so now when this hits a pothole it bounces all of the other tires don't know anything happened because of an air bag that's in the back there with your regular leaf springs and the the blue connectors forget what they're called what are those called shackles the shackles uh when one hits um you only have about two inches of play with the independent suspension you have five inches of play with the airbag that's back there that more right is put together so you have a lot more ability to absorb a ton of shock before it affects the actual rig so that to us was a huge improvement that we've seen in chucking a huge improvement in dishes and things seeming disheveled the fridge seeming completely like you know shook into death uh now we see a lot less of that you still see it especially boondocking on rough roads but you see less of that and that everything everything you can do to avoid that vibration is going to extend the life of the rig it's going to extend the life of everything inside the rig in addition we also got the hydraulic brakes now if you don't have them you may think man that's an expense i don't want to spend like the day we got them we're on the highway heading south back down to southern indiana and someone jumped on a highway in front of us and slowed down and i had to slam on my brakes which you know anytime you're in a rig when you slam them you think bad things are about to happen we had so much stopping power that the rig pulled my truck back and we realized that the the rig had more stopping power than our truck at that point and that just gave me such a feeling of assurance that i don't want to be in a bad situation but if i am now i have the ability both stability and stopping power that we didn't have before wow awesome and uh how did you find out about the more right independent suspension system so we found out about it because we started doing research once we realized we did not have what we thought we had was disc brakes and a higher grade suspension um i started searching and i found out that it was built by more ride and installed by more ride so i said who's more ride and we contacted them and we found out just a little thing for you guys if you can schedule in the winter you will get an additional winter discount because they have a lot fewer people wanting to come in when it's cold and snowy so we said fine we did it in december we did it a week before christmas uh because we wanted to get in there and we were already in indiana so know that if you can afford to be there that time of year you can uh save a little bit okay awesome and our friends chad and tara from changing lanes also have the complete oh yeah installation yes on this particular system they do an amazing video of writing inside their rig before and after i remember that it's very cool so we'll put a link down below to their video we were super wishy-washy about the installation because of its cost that video sent us over the edge like it made it where it was like okay this totally makes it awesome but yeah we were at the rally two years ago the national rally and uh jason and ray from getaway couple had just gotten theirs so it was pretty cool and what is the cost uh elizabeth we paid roughly 7 500. i don't know how much of that was their winter discount uh i think the winter discount is only about 10 percent okay so i think it might be around 8 000. okay did that include the brakes yeah yes that was all in oh wow i was expecting a lot higher price i mean honestly that was fine and if you're creative finance years like us they are willing to write it across several credit cards if you have to do that yeah so i mean upgrades are not cheap but man when you consider the longevity it's protecting the investment right sure yeah that's that's awesome we just got uh the disc upgrade as well and disc brake rate as well and yes stopping power and confidence on the road wow and and going up teton when you're writing that six percent grade it just brings i'm still on their wrist no matter how many times we do it but just knowing that i could stop we i forget we ran into another family at another place and they were telling us how he actually was smoking his brakes they were locking up trying to come down a mountain because one he had too big of a rig and too small of a truck and two he uh did not have the any sort of upgraded brakes on his and he was telling me how scared he was and i thought to myself i'm glad that's not us sheree and i have had many white knuckle mountain driving before we got the new truck and and now adding the yeah the new brakes is like so much more confident so what do you pull the your massive grand design rv with if if we get one question in our 390 facebook group a lot uh just underneath what internet you use it's what truck do you use this huge thing we went with a dodge ram 3500 one ton dually and the reason we did is because i had never pulled a trailer before in my life i'd never had a large truck like this but i knew i wanted the most truck i could get so that i would just be safe you know some people do pull this rig with a single uh single rear wheel i wouldn't want to i prefer to have the dually just because it gives me that extra stability and stopping power right oh love the dually for sure yeah do you guys pull with a dually as well uh yeah we've got a 450 uh ford um so that yeah yeah i mean a little it's it's overkill but you'd rather be that way than i wonder when we're going up a mountain and i can maintain 45 50 miles an hour i feel much safer than the guy who's dragging at 20 miles an hour because he doesn't have the power he needs to get this thing up a hill right and did you go up teton pass we did how did it handle that it did handle it well you know and the thing is is you just learn to respect what your truck wants to do right not forcing the truck to do what you want it to do you know if the truck decides it needs to go 30 i will let it go 30. and that's the biggest thing is pushing it i see people all the time well my tires on my rig are rated for 75 so i go 75. that could be a huge mistake yes i'm glad you brought that up and how fast do you normally travel we travel somewhere between 60 and say 70 miles an hour depending on okay the ground we're on you know if we're in nebraska and it's flat i might go 70 because the truck doesn't care when we're not on a grade but if we're on a grade you know we may go 50 we may go 45 but our average speed i would say is 65 miles an hour yeah we stay at 60 and we just leave it at that and partly that's you know fuel economy and we're sure but right it's it's so funny when you see other rvs go blasting past you and it's like whoa slow down man have you seen a tire failure on an rv and you don't want that you know we we actually just had our first blowout on the truck really on our way uh heading this direction and thanks to our tpms you know on the truck we were able to identify what was happening before it blew and were able to get off the side of the road as it was blowing so i mean we you know not that it's never going to happen but when it does don't freak out you know always pay attention what was our first indicator was that when my wheel started pulling heavily to one side my first thought was maybe i need an alignment but then i realized it was pulling really bad and so i switched over to my tpms and realized that my pressure was dropping went ahead and started making our way over boom my wife says that was a rock right you know and i said that's wishful thinking and we get over and of course the wheel's completely gone but our roadside assistance was there in no time you know maybe 45 minutes and we were back on the road and we had a tire at the next time uh town we went to within a half hour and i mean couldn't have gone smoother um i guess the key here is just don't freak out that's that's super cool was it a rear tire it was a front drive fire it was this one right here okay uh and it just uh on the inside must have hit something sharp because it had a massive blow out i mean it was just tines and then wires and i yeah so pay attention to your tires yes get a tpms system if your truck doesn't already come with it and make sure you have one on your rig as well because there's nothing like being forewarned you know the last thing you want is to see your back swinging because you've lost tire you don't want to ruin a rim because replacing a tire is a few hundred bucks replacing a rim gets into a whole new deal right and we have several videos out with our tire damage on our previous rv with several blowouts and so from experience right it's not just a tire that blows it's it could just be thousands and thousands of dollars you could you could ruin your axle you could ruin your leaf spring you i mean there's lots of things and so just knowing besides the safety danger to you yourselves and others on the road yeah so awesome well glad you got a truck that you're happy with because uh and and again we see this all the time is too big rv too little truck yes and the people say thing you know there's a saying out there that says you know don't don't buy when you're buying your rv you know buy the rv that you really want don't you know necessarily buy this one you're going to step into and if you do do that if you do decide to go that route don't buy a tiny truck like buy your forever truck because it will grow with you with your rv right exactly yeah you guys have such a beautiful home here what advice would you give to newbies just starting out the newbies were just starting out i think one of the most important things you do is you do it you do get out there you do tow your rig or drive your rig you do go to places that are a little outside your comfort zone because if you the longer you wait to figure out you can do it then the longer you spend not knowing what you can actually achieve and you know because the fear gets in the way it just does right and i was surprised to find out how many people as we post our pictures on facebook uh and youtube about how how much afraid people are of coming out here for safety they think this isn't safe right out here and i i think it could be more safe than an rv park yeah actually very much is and i'll speak to your point when we were finishing our solar install we had a somewhat tweaker person come up and linger looking at all the copper wire we had asking to come inside our rig oh very much casing our rig like he was going to steal some stuff and so we had to start locking everything down and you know even during the day while we were using it i've had zero of that fear and preoccupation here because the folks who choose to come out here they're typically more self-contained they understand the environment they're they're more aware of you and giving you space whereas at the rv park everyone's just kind of on top of each other and no one really respects your space i've seen people here um leave and leave their chairs or their generators sitting there and then come back hours later to get it like no one took it yeah right yeah we've seen people leave their rvs completely open just a screen door open right there to keep it cool off during the day i was like that's that's awesome when we bought and started interrupting when we bought this rig i remember saying to you well it's okay we're never gonna boondock yeah this kind of rig is fine for us to have because we're always going to be plugged into shore power we're never going to buy solar we're never going to do and we said those things we never know to the generator we don't need that we're always going to be plugged in you know and things changed in only one year of travel we decided we wanted more freedom we wanted to be able to come out here where we can really experience the outdoors even though like i said before we're not outdoorsy people that doesn't mean we don't want to appreciate and be surrounded by it we were tired of being in the inner city crowded rv parks and we wanted to be we're like this isn't what we got into this lifestyle for right exactly and it just and you can you can enjoy both there's benefits of both yeah i mean unlimited water is kind of a nice thing yeah and easy access to restaurants it's very convenient yeah there's no hat for the water yet you're kind of you're limited to that and what you can bring back and i think one of the things we wish we would have bought before we got out here is a water bladder that fits in our truck so that we can go get some water if we needed to we don't have a way to dispose of our black water unless we're dragging it back into town and so there are some things that we still don't have but we've talked about switching to a composting toilet so i don't know maybe that will happen there you go um like we just got a water bladder massive 150 gallon water bladder it works great yeah and yeah we've had the blue tote for years so uh yeah actually so we actually have a few things you guys don't have yet you do wow that's awesome what's been your biggest challenge uh to this lifestyle would you say so far i'll i'll go first on that um i think the biggest one is finding the balance between working and enjoying where we are because there have been times where i'm just stressing like i have all these emails and all this stuff and i haven't finished these projects and i will get to a beautiful place and i will just stay other than walking the dogs i'm in the rig i'm at my computer and i'm just work work working and then there's other times where it's like you know we're we're right next to two national parks here we gotta go so you know yesterday i rescheduled my my students that i only had two students scheduled so i just pushed them to another day and we drove around in the national parks and bought an annual pass and now we're motivated to go to some other ones nice you know and so finding that balance of how do i how do i enjoy my lifestyle enjoy the places i am meet new people like you guys um but still get my work done so that i can have money to pay for all this stuff yeah because just because you're free boondocking doesn't mean you have no expenses yeah exactly you know and i'll touch on that with uh people often in the groups will ask you know how much money do you save living in an rv and i will say after a year of math none at least this part because we keep because we keep spending it on upgrades right but we looked at it we're like yeah we spent about the same as we were doing when we were renting a house yeah we haven't spent any more but we found that our numbers very much matched up to what our our house but maybe going forward maybe this next year will be cheap so a lot of those are fixed costs right so what's the solar yeah yeah like we joked we said uh you know you said this week is zero cost actually this week cost me thirty thousand dollars the thirty thousand dollars in the wilderness because we'll start appreciating that over time because we're not going to continuously spend that amount of money on the solar but right one time will stretch and give us more opportunity same thing with a lot of the the more right install of the independent suspension we did that was a huge cost last year but that has really added a lot to our stopping power with the disc brakes and with our independent suspension with especially going down some of these roads and we wouldn't have been able to add the solar i don't think it would have put us way too overweight right having that extra carrying capacity allowed us to do that so hopefully here's crossing our fingers to the next year having zero huge expenses yeah there you go awesome for someone that's looking at this lifestyle for the very first time and they're thinking well i can't afford that what would you tell them i i would tell them to go rent an rv and spend a week out doing this before they even start thinking about you know buying one because we jumped in head over you know just right off the edge and went straight into a huge 43 foot rig with a truck that we end up being 60 feet long but that might be too much money or too scary for you so i would rather them get out there and start experiencing it because honestly unless you've owned different types of rigs you don't know what you want and you don't know what you don't like until you're living in it unfortunately if there were tons of things we hated about this rig we'd be stuck with it because we're in it you know and with these mods we're not getting out of it anytime right you know or maybe buying an older one and and living in it for a few months just to make sure that this is the lifestyle you want and the longer you're in it the more you'll discover what you like and what you don't like like here i thought that i was going to be really missing having a dishwasher that was something that i wanted i didn't get but you know what it's i don't miss it it's fine you know and for those of you who know you're gonna buy and you're gonna start moving into this i highly suggest you start treating your house like an rv limit your kitchen to two cabinets or three cabinets you know start taking away things like your dishwasher shut it off so you can't use it because you don't want the shock of getting in the rig and then suddenly realizing you're still reliant on a lot of those things that is great advice yeah and start early getting rid of things yes you know we had to liquidate we liquidated our house during the initial part of the pandemic oh it was right march april was ridiculous we had to do everything by appointment only on facebook marketplace answer dumb questions till the cows came home and people asking us to drive across houston for a 15 item you know oh wow so we it was rough but we got it done um we had two business locations where the stuff plus our home thing so we had wire shelving everywhere like a store we had people coming back two or three times so it took us wow a full-time job to get it done start as early as you can yeah people always underestimate that how long it takes and i mean here's an example uh we met some young ladies at our last spot i think they're going to stop by here i don't know if they're bringing their bus but three young ladies from 18 to 21 years old bought an old school bus yeah and converted it themselves and they did it all for less than five thousand dollars the bus and all the upgrades yeah and they're out here enjoying the same view yes in a five thousand dollar or less than five thousand dollars so i mean it can be this huge range and still enjoy it it's like it's about what you want don't start looking at rvs thinking like they're the measurement you know this brand or that brand or i need to be in a grand designer i need to be in a tiffin or i need to be and whatever find what really speaks to you go to a as many of the rv shows as you can walk as many of them as you can because really while they're all the same they're all incredibly different and you know there's little nuances that drew us to this one but there were other things we liked better about other ones find the one that is the closest to your desire that you can and then make the mods that you yeah and find the thing you know what are the things that are most important to you that really can't be modified like we really wanted a large shower we didn't want the little curved corner shower that would have been very difficult for us to modify so that was one of the things we wanted to get versus some of the other little things we could change ourselves yeah well gosh thank you so much for sharing your home with me and everybody else out there i mean i know you've you've got these amazing stories that are going to be very inspiring to help encourage other people to do this and uh for those of you that want to know more about uh what you're teaching and getting a heart getting started uh we'll put your information down below they can check that out and gosh it's it's just so awesome to run into you guys like this and and i think we've mentioned that before but you meet the coolest people on the road you really do i i think we meet more people here than any subdivision we've ever lived in because we lived in a condo housing in kind of the center of houston where there's thousands of people around us and we knew we knew the help we didn't know any of the people right but we made more people out here than we ever did in the third largest fourth largest city in the u.s just because here people want to know you and if you're open to that right and kind of like the time thing you said you've got time to connect with people you're not working 12 13 hours a day no commute right ish so i mean you know safe travels to you guys maybe we'll run into you again down the road thanks for watching guys if you're new here hit that subscribe button i know this was a different video from what we normally do but we always want to bring great value and i think there's just so much great information here so comment down below what did you think of this amazing tour let us know so uh until next time remember to all of you enjoy your journey

Channel: EnjoyTheJourney.Life

Views: 570,390

Keywords: RV, RV living, RV life, RV living full time, Travel full time, how to RV, RV upgrade, RVing, full time rv living tour, rv lifestyle, rv life vlog, full time rv life, full time rving with dogs, RV with dogs, RV desk, work from home, RV tour, Grand Design RV, grand design solitude, RV solar, Tom & Cheri, enjoy the journey, F450, ebike, Ram, rv kitchen upgrades, best rv youtube channels, best rv youtubers, rv documentary, best rv, rv mods, rv upgrades, rv mods and upgrades

Id: 4U9MBX8lLPA

Length: 94min 55sec (5695 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021