- We're gonna show you how to make moochdocking more comfortable. - Mm-hmm. We're gonna show you how
to mooch dock like a pro. - Like a boss. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) So what's the difference
between boondocking and moochdocking? Well moochdocking has the
word mooch in it for a reason. And that's basically because you're parking your RV on
friends or family's land, and you're mooching off of
things like their water, their electricity, whatever it is you may mooch off of them. So therefore moochdocking. - The key is resources, right? So you can see my
buddy's house right here. We're down here in
Florida for the holidays. My parents actually stay right over there. And we're actually using
resources from both. But what we're gonna get into here is the resources you have available when moochdocking that you
don't when boondocking. - That's right. - Mainly, water, you have
some water resources. In church with that. You've got maybe some Wi-Fi and various power options. And that's where we're gonna get into some cool, nitty gritty how tos. - Yeah, many of you might not know that you can do this. So we thought it was important to share. - Mm-hmm. This is something we've learned
over the last two years. In fact, right there is
where we parked our RV, I think one of our first
sites two years ago, almost to the day. And then we had nothing hooked up, we were really boondocking. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have the inverted. So we've learned a lot and we're gonna share all
these tricks with you. - Yeah and basically we have mooch docked in only two locations, but multiple times over
the course of two years. - Mm-hmm. - We mooch dock here and we mooch dock at my brother's house. - Right. And it doesn't necessarily
have to be at somebody's house. This can be anywhere where you have some resources like a standard 115 volt, 15 amp outlet available. Even that little bit
can help out quite a bit when moochdocking. - Okay. - And when I say power resources, I'm not talking about somebody, you might be camping at their house and they've got a really cool 30 or 50 amp hookup available. - That doesn't count. - That doesn't count. You're still moochdocking, but that's not what we're gonna talk about because that's really no
different than a campground. - Right. - And if hey have sewer, again, you're like at a campground. - So we're gonna talk about each resource that you guys can exploit
while you're moochdocking. - Mm-hmm. We're gonna start with water, so let's go check that out. - Let's do it. - Let's go. - Bring the camera right along with us. Water management when you're moochdocking is very similar to boondocking, but it does have some advantages. - Right, and the biggest one is hopefully you have water available. If you don't have water
outside from a spigot, then it's gonna be just like boondocking. - Mm-hmm. - But most places where you mooch dock they got a hose line. - Yeah, and if you're moochdocking you can wait till you get here to hook up your water, and you don't have to
worry about fresh tank. (upbeat music) - You might wonder why even worry about hooking up water when
you can bring your own. It's simple, you don't have
to carry it in with you, which is a weight issue. And you also don't have to really worry about how much you consume because a lot of times the
water you have available is less than the capacity
of your gray tanks. Using your water resources
at your moochdocking location isn't really that complicated. Hook it up just like you
would at a campground. The key thing I like about this way of doing it is you may remember from our water management video, which I will link up here, using this meter. So the cool thing about this is I can tell exactly how many gallons we've used since we hooked up. I just reset it as soon
as we hook up to zero. And I can see that right now we're at 35.6 gallons. So we've used 35 or 36.5, or somewhere around there. And, again, that's gonna be a mix. There's no way to really tell
how much is in our gray tanks. - Right. - Because, you know,
you're using the toilet, you're using dishes and you're dumping the water in the back toilet. We're not gonna cover a lot of this- - [Tara] 'Cause we covered it in our water management/double
poo poos video. - [Chad] Bingo. - [Tara] I know. - You do wanna hook up a regulator, like you normally would
for water pressure, 'cause you never know
what you're gonna get. I think one of the biggest advantages when moochdocking- - [Tara] Definitely the showers. You can take advantage of your friends or family's showers. - Mm-hmm. Sometimes it's nice to be in a house shower every now and then. - Yeah. - I mean we're used to our bathroom and our shower's the
perfect size, it's fine. But when you're limited on water storage or water resource, just go inside and take a shower. - Absolutely. Is it a little bit inconvenient
to have to gather up all your stuff and walk over and use somebody else's shower? It is, but it's a lot better than, like you said, having to
take quick navy showers. And that's just miserable. - Yeah. - It's a bonus. - You can just avoid that altogether. Shower at your friend's house. - Another tip is to spread the love` between two toilets, if you have two toilets in your RV. - Yeah, if you've got 'em use both. Why fill up one black tank and not give the other some love. - Yeah, and we actually
have another really cool tip that we mentioned in our
Lonerock Beach boondocking video. - [Chad] And our water management video. - And our water management video, but I think it's worth saying it again. - Mm-hmm. So if you have two gray tanks like we do, the trick is to have a Valterra valve on the output of your dump hole. (laughing) And close that valve and open up both gray tanks and let them connect in the middle. Again, this only works for
certain RV configurations, where you've got two gray tanks that connect out the same dump hole. And you know we've had some comments about well what if one tank is higher
than the other in the frame, and won't that cause problems? No because then one just fills up, then the other one fills up. I mean if you go above the level on the lower gray tank it's just gonna go into
the tube and be fine. - I think that's it with the water. - Mm-hmm. - Pretty simple. Another benefit sometimes,
depending on where you are, is Wi-Fi. - Mm-hmm. If they have a good connection, good Wi-Fi wherever you're boondocking, like when we stayed at
her brother's house, we hook our Wi-Fi Ranger up to the upstream Wi-Fi of her brother's house. Again watch our internet video. You'll see that our Wi-Fi
Ranger basically encompasses our own internal Wi-Fi, and then that connects upstream to cellular or Wi-Fi or whatever. - Yeah and when we are in
locations like we are right now, we're kind of in the middle of nowhere, so their Wi-Fi isn't that great. Our internet is a lot better in our RV than it is in the house
and stuff, I think. - Yeah. In rural areas, you know that sometimes getting good internet can be a problem. - In fact, our internet is a
lot better than his parents. His parents are struggling right now to be able to watch anything. - Come on. - Like Netflix or anything like that. So I feel kind of bad that
we have all the Wi-Fi. - We did try to share our Wi-Fi
with them while we're here, but they're just too far away. Too bad. (laughing) - Is that it for the Wi-Fi? - Yeah, let's go inside
and talk about power. - Okay. - A real quick note about 50 amp versus 30 amp RVs, and just a brief overview of the wiring. Don't wanna go into the weeds here and bore the crap out of you. A 50 amp RV really has twp 50 amp legs. Your wiring in your RV, you've got one leg that has Acs and stuff on and then
another leg that has Acs and stuff and microwaves. It splits it out into two 50 amp legs, which really makes a
50 amp RV a 100 amp RV. But it's not 100 amps total, you can't do 75 and 25. - It has to be 50 and 50. - Exactly. - Okay. - That's gonna come into
play when we start looking at how to hook up to your resources at your moochdocking location and connecting to a 15 amp. - So what about 30 amp RVs? - 30 amp RV is all on one bus, one leg, 30 amps total. - [Tara] Not 60. - Right. It's not 30 plus 30, it's just 30. So you're gonna find that
when you're talking about a 50 amp RV, which are
most of the larger RVs, you're gonna have to kind of think about what's on leg one and what's on leg two. You don't have to really do it so much under normal circumstances, but the things we're gonna show you you gotta kind of think
about what's there. - So how do they know what's on one leg? - Yeah that's pretty easy, you look at your distribution panel. - [Tara] Okay. - Most 50 amps are gonna show you, they're actually gonna have a top side and a bottom side, and you're gonna have a
primary breaker in the middle. And everything on leg one is above it, and everything on leg two is below it. And they should be marked. If not, play around and
figure out what they are and label them. - So do you recommend
that they do this before ever hooking up to power
from a moochdocking site? - Yeah. - Just to know. - Yeah. - Okay. - Yeah because once we start getting in to how to mooch dock and how to connect, you're gonna wanna know these things, and you'll see why. First off, it's really good to have some way to know how much power, how many amps you're drilling on each leg. You might have caught our total
electrical protection video, and we highly recommend
the surge guard products. Both the internal hardwired and the external units
have remote displays that will show you both flags like this. - Yeah, and you can still
use your Surge Guard units when you're moochdocking. - Yeah, they're gonna be there and they're gonna protect you regardless of what kind of power you're hooked up to. The key thing is knowing
how much you're drawing because you're gonna
wanna keep an eye on that. And we'll show you that over here. - Okay, let's do it. - So you may have seen some of our control panel
central in here before. The key things we're gonna focus on when we're talking about this are our Surge Guard unit right here, where you can actually
see line one and line two, both the voltage and the
amperage being drawn. We're also gonna focus a
little bit on our inverter once we get into some of
the advanced hybrid stuff. And our battery monitor, we're not really gonna mess with that. First, we're gonna talk
about the most basic of moochdocking power, and that is straight 15 amps. - Yes, this was actually
the method we were using for quite a while when we were moochdocking at my brother's
house, in his driveway. And then- - I decided to experiment. - Yeah. - So this is the most basic way, and you wanna remember
that hooking up to a 15 amp is just like hooking up
a 50 amp RV to 30 amp in that both lines are connected and you've got 15 amps total for your entire RV. That's very limited. But we found that a lot of times that's all we needed to maybe run the AC and
TVs and stuff at night. - Right. A lot of times for us, one of the biggest
downsides to moochdocking or boondocking is having to
run the generator at night, when you're trying to watch
TV or trying to sleep. - Right. We can definitely run most of our electronics off of the inverter. We can even run our AC off the inverter, but that drains the batteries fast. - Yeah. - When we're boondocking out west, it's not as big a deal 'cause
we can just open the windows, but when we're back east and it's summertime- - Or when we're back east
like we are right now and it's wintertime, but it's still really hot. - Yeah, you still want
that AC at night sometimes to stay comfortable. So let's talk about the basics. Let's go outside. I'm gonna show you how to
hookup straight 15 amp. - Speaking of humidity. - Yeah, let's go. So you might say how do you connect your 50 amp RV plug- - Move out of the way. - (laughing) How do you connect your 50
amp RV plug to a wall outlet? You need two adapters. Really you only need one, but we recommend two, and here's why. The first adapter you're gonna want is a 50 amp to 30 amp adapter. Again, remember when I talked about 30 amp only has a hot and a neutral and a ground, whereas you have four
connections on 50 amp. So really all this thing does inside here is bridge the two sides, the two hot, and put a 30 amp plug on there so you can plug this in to 30 amp. - Mm-hmm. - But we don't have 30
amp, we're moochdocking. So. - Da, da, da, da. - This takes your 30 amp
down to the standard 15 amp. And this is the most basic. And the reason I like
to have two adapters, because they do make adapters
that will go straight from 50 amp to 15 amp. I just like the flexibility. You know, sometimes you
do want your 30 amp, and then you don't wanna have a 50 to 30, a 50 to 15 and then a splitter, which we're gonna show you. It just gives you flexibility. So there's that. - Okay. It's right there. It's right there. - And then there's this. You see that there. And then boom, 50 amp to 15 amp. Extension cord and boom that's it. So let's go back inside and take a look at what we can do with a
straight 15 amp connection. - Yeah, as you can see it
goes all the way there. - Okay we're back inside. We've got 15 amp hooked up. You heard that clunk. That is the timeout on our Sure Guard. I think it's 126 seconds. And now we're connected. And this is where I was talking about you wanna have this to be able to manage and see what you're doing, see what's pulling. If you look right now you can see we've got three amps
being pulled on line one and one amp being pulled on line two, we're good. And you'll notice that
because they're bridged it's the sum of the two. When we get into the
advanced split 15 plus 15, we'll talk about them separately. - Right, and obviously
we turned off the Acs and stuff before we did this. - But when you're doing this moochdocking it's a lot like boondocking in that your appliances that you
can switch to propane, do that. So we have our refrigerate on propane and our hot water heater. Our hot water heater's actually off, and then we just turn
it on when we need it. - Yeah, sometimes we forget. - Yeah. You wanna remember amperage is drawn. You supply voltage, and then whatever is
there using it draws amps. So that's why you'll see a different number on
line one and line two even though they're bridged. The voltage is bridged, the
draw of the current is separate. Let's turn on an AC. And much like boondocking, much like boondocking, when you're running off the generator, you sometimes wanna start your ACs staged, meaning kick the fan on, let that spin up, and then kick on the compressor. So you'll go to fan mode and then AC mode separately
so you're not drawing a whole bunch of current at once because you can pull
maybe up to 20 amps or so. - And then- - Yeah, if it pulls it
for a little bit too long you blow the breaker and you're outside resetting breakers. So let's go turn the AC on. So I'm gonna go fan
high, let that spin up, wait a second, let the amperage settle. I'm gonna set it to cool. - [Tara] And then we hope for the best. - All right so ow we can see that the compressor is on and running, and we're pulling 13 amps on leg one. Leg one is where our primary AC is. And we're only pulling
about an amp on leg two, so we're at 14 amps. So we could run like this
as long as we need to. - [Tara] But in Florida we often need more than one AC going. - Right, which brings us to our next tip, 15 amp plus 15 amp split. And for that we have to shut the AC off and go back outside. - Oh. (laughing) uh-oh. - Let's go. For our basic 15 amp
we had a single 50 amp to a single 30 amp. We're gonna get rid of that. We're gonna use this. Woohoo. Single 50 amp to dual, dual 30 amp. So this can come in handy if you're in a site that has a couple of 30 amp circuit amps available, but not 50, like the fairgrounds. When we were at the
Florida state fairgrounds, we had plenty of 30 amp
connections available, but no 50s so we could
use something like this and do 30 plus 30. That's not what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about 15 plus 15. And all that is, the same
thing we showed you last time that goes from 30 to 15 times two. So- - Very cool. - You can see what we've
got here, two 15 amps, the 50 amp. This is gonna give us not 30 amps total, but 15 one leg and 15 on the other leg. - Otherwise known as one AC and one AC. - Two Acs. (laughing) So let's get this hooked up. (upbeat music) we're hooked up now, let's go inside and see what we've got. - Let's turn those Acs on. - We're back inside and this
is on it's countdown again from 126 seconds. Whenever you disconnect, reconnect power, the Surge Guard wants
to give the power time, give it time to do its tests and do everything. Also, if your Acs were running and you disconnected
and reconnected power, the time out is to protect
your compressors as well. Three, two, boom. - Wow. - (laughing) So now, just like before, this is gonna kick in and you're gonna see the inverter/charger go from a negative number inverting to a positive number charging. The big difference now is we have 15 amps available on each line. It's no longer the sum of both lines, but it's individual. So we have much more flexibility. So we're gonna go turn on the AC 'cause it's freaking hot. If you're curious, the fan by
itself pulls about four amps. We're pulling five total
on line one right now. We were already pulling about an amp just for stuff that's running. - [Tara] Stuff. - [Chad] Stuff. Kick the AC on. - [Tara] All right. - Once the compressor kicks in, you see boom. I don't know if you, you probably couldn't see it, but it jumped to 36 amps for one second and then back down again. Now we're running at
13-14 amps on line one once the compressor settled and everything's running. And we're only drawing
one amp on line two. - So that means we can turn
the AC on in the bedroom. - Mm-hmm. - I'll go do that. - The bedroom or the garage, they're both on line two. You wanna do the bedroom. - It's gonna be probably
hot Up here right now. - So you'll see that
when she kicks that on line two is gonna jump up. You see while the fan kicked in it went to eight amps and then settled back down on four amps. - [Tara] Tell me when. - Go for it. Switch it. There it goes. - [Tara] Yep, I heard it. - You probably caught that. Again, since I was
recording a little closer, that it jumped up to 39 amps and then right back down. And we're settled now at only 10 amps. I think the front and rear Acs are maybe 12 or 1300 BTUs versus the 1500 BTUs of our main AC. But now we've got two Acs running along with all of our other stuff. - Yay. - And that's pretty cool. That'll get us through
most summer days up north and most winter days down south. - Yeah. - Night time we can get
by with just one AC. A couple of really,
really important notes. When you're connecting both
legs to separate circuits, the biggest being separate circuits. - Yeah. - You can't have two 15 amp
plugs in the same outlet, that's not gonna work, you're gonna blow the breaker. So when you're connecting to a house, you may have noticed that we have one coveted to the main house and one, an extension
cord running way over. When we were at her brother's, I ran one into the garage
and one into the house. They have to be on separate circuits because no matter how you get there, if you try to pull more than 15 amps across a 15 amp breaker, it's gonna blow and it's
gonna shut everything off. Another key is GFI or GFCI, which stands for ground
fault control interrupt, which you may have noticed
the little poesy button thing on your outlet, like we have in there. - Yeah, pushy button thing. - The pushy button thing
is a highly technical term. What happens is if you try to connect two plugs on the same GFI circuit and then back down the
line they're bridged inside that adapter outside, GFI says whoa, I don't like that and it shuts off. So that won't work. So you have to have them
on two separate circuits, non-GFI, and just play around with it. You know we connected
to her brother's house and here, in the garage
we're on a GFI circuit and over across the street we're not. - So any tips on how they can determine what's on what circuit? - Trial and error. - That's it. - Pretty much. - Okay. - In a house electrical panels are sometimes gonna be wired and labeled really well. And most of the time they're not. Typically, if you're gonna be plugging, running some wires into a garage and plugging into two
outlets in the garage, they're probably on the same circuit. You're probably gonna have to have one in the house, way away from it, even on the other wall on the other side of the garage is probably on the same circuit. The easiest way to tell is to connect them up and see when it blows. - Yeah. - Circuit breakers can be reset. If you connect to what you
think are two different circuits and you fire up two ACs and a breaker blows, you're not on two separate circuits. - Right. Can it do any damage to the electrical inside the house? - That's a little bit of a tough question because if the house is wired properly a circuit breaker is always gonna blow before anything else. - Yeah. - Now, if your brother-in-law, sister-in-law, whatever, if their house and they've put on this illegal extensioN that hasn't been properly wired, and rather than blowing circuits they just upgraded the breaker and not all the wiring, (laughing) if they've done some
funky wiring in the house where they have perhaps
gotten around an issue by putting a larger break
in where they shouldn't- - Use with caution. - Use with caution. So one thing that comes into play when we're talking about all these different power scenarios is the inverter. Now I'm gonna try not to go way into the weeds on this 'cause otherwise we'd
bore the crap out of you. - How does this relate to our discussion of the uses of irony? - These inverters can do a
thing called hybrid mode. Hybrid mode means that
you can tell your inverter how much power's available
from shore power. And if you try to use more than that the inverter will kick in and add more power to it so you can actually, as long as your batteries can handle it, run more than just the shore power. So we can have 15 amp connected. - And that's very cool, but it's also, there's
a little catch to this. - Yeah, yeah. - It's tricky. - And that's the part
where I don't wanna ago too far into the weeds, but our inverter, as well
as others I've found, only do hybrid mode on line one. So this kind of makes you
have to start thinking about okay what have I got on line one? What have I got on line two? But this also helps when
we have split like this because I don't really
have to worry about two separate lines in that if
I want to turn on something right now on line one I can do that. - Do you want me to try the microwave? - Mm-hmm, let's give it a shot. Hopefully we don't blow things up. If you look here, you can see we've got 13 plus 12, we've got
25 amps being pulled, 13 on line one, 12 on line two. Tara's gonna put her coffee, (laughing) Tara's gonna put her
coffee into the microwave, and we're gonna fire it up. And we're gonna see that the inverter is gonna kick in and jump up and supply the rest. So now we're still only
pulling 13 amps on line one and the inverter is supplying the rest to run the microwave. Go ahead and kill it. Now you see the inverter drop down and go into charge mode. Zero right now, it has to time out. But we were able to pull more than 15 amps off of line one, but not really. The inverter kicked in. And, again, this might get
a little bit into the weeds. If you have any questions, please do feel free to comment below and we'll try to answer. That's really it. And, again, experiment, try to know a little bit about what you're doing. Definitely have a way to monitor your power on line one and line two so you can see what's going on. Take a look at your breaker panel and understand what's on line one, what's on line two. It'll probably be wired in a way so that AC one is on line one and AC two and/or three are on line two. They try to break those up so that you're not drawing more than 50 amps on one line. You might wonder well
what if it's really hot in the summer in Florida and you need three Acs? For us that's the generator. Our generator is basically 45 amps, so we can run all three ACs off of it. We have to stagger start
them like we showed you, but we have to do it three times. And then we can't turn anything else on. - And then we'll forget and we'll start the microwave to warm up some coffee or whatever. - Yeah and kick the generator off. - So, you know, you just
gotta get used to it. It it always an adjustment,
especially for me, when we go from full
hookups to moondocking or boondocking because
you do kind of forget that you have to limit yourself and monitor yourself a little bit more, but no big deal. It's pretty easy. - Yeah, that's just RV life in general. You have to pay attention
to your resources in an RV, whether it's water, whether
it's power, whatever. - We do have one little last bit of advice when it comes to
moochdocking in general, and that is make sure
you find a dump station near where you're moochdocking so you can dump before you get on the road for a long drive. - Bam. At the dump station. - Yeah, so we were lucky
that only a few miles away from where we were moochdocking
is a state park in Florida. And so we had to pay the fee to get in, and it came to about $15 to get in and use the dump station, but it's well worth it. - [Chad] Mm-hmm. Moochdocking is the way to go if you can. - Yeah, we save some money, so that took our 2019 average down a little bit, which is nice. - Thanks Doug and Tina and Cooper and Ethan and Abby. - Yes, and your parents. - And my parents. - Yes. We hope you enjoyed this video. We hope it was helpful. And we hope that you'll subscribe to follow us along on more videos. - Do it. (laughing) - He's bossy today. - I'm getting ready to do the dump thing. - We're trying to beat
the storm that's coming. - Yeah, it's not looking great. And there's a big storm
coming across the bay. - Right, and we have to take the skyway to where we're going next so that's a little bit- - We might have to go around it, depending on the forecast. - So anyhow, we're talking too much. He's gotta get to the dump station. We hope you liked this video. If you did, please click like, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, what else? - Website, changinglanesrv.com. - That's right. - Many times we will have additions and updates to our posts that you won't see on YouTube. - Right. And as usual we messed up a lot so there are some
bloopers coming right now. - Boom. (laughing) - Last word, I get it. (laughing) - Man it suddenly got freaking hot. - [Tara] Well it's
because the sun came out. - Sun came out and it's freaking blazing. - [Tara] Yeah, why do
you think it gets hotter? I'm having a rough time here. I think I'm gonna have
to start all over again. - Again. Take five. - Take 12. - (laughing) Sorry. I love you. But some other advantages in the realm of water management is- - I don't know what, I- - Oh, showers. - Oh, okay now it's the showers. Sorry, I was not listening to you at all, I was just zoning out and smiling. - Which means I'm now pulling 30 amps. Am I getting too deep? - Oh gosh, yes. - Okay, you can turn it off. - Black coffee's not done. It's not done yet, hold on. - Oh, it's so hot and sticky. - Yeah, it's freaking humid as hell. - (beep) wasn't recording. - [Tara] Shut up! - Hold on. - [Tara] Shut your face. - Yeah, let's do it again. You might wonder well what
if you wanna run (gibberish)? - Really? Good job. - Pay attention, know
what you're using and- (beeping) (laughing) - It has a mind of its own. - If you saw anything
that you wanna buy in here we have an Amazon store. - Nope, nope. (laughing)
