We’ve been hanging around southeast Texas for months now – all with the intent of avoiding the cold winter back home in Central Illinois. So much for that. We are hanging out in a Thousand Trails north of Houston. We did see it coming, sneaking up on us like a herd of elephants, unlike, it seems, many other people: WINTER!
Temperatures down here have been lows between 30 and 40 degrees and highs 50-60. Not great weather, but not terrible either. I even dressed in shorts some unusual days when temps were in the 70’s. Weather forecasts say we have lots of 70s days coming, but after a week more of this slush, ice and cold.
We started seeing references to Artic blasts, Polar vortexes and such, a week out. Having spent time in very cold weather and realizing just how ill-equipped most south Texans would be dealing with Real Winter Weather, we started prepping. Food and supplies were gathered. We knew from the get-go we didn’t want to be out on the roads when the white stuff hit the highways. Driving with these people on dry roads on sunny days was bad enough. The 100+ car pileups just confirmed how inexperienced drivers down here are. As the impending storms drew close, the forecasts continued to get even worse. A last-minute safari was deemed necessary as we realized our RVs were not going to survive on their own. The wives managed to snag another small space heater and a string of construction lights along with some additional extension cords.
When we went to Wisconsin in the dead of winter, we took 4 space heaters, pink foam board to put around our bedroom slide and a full RV, homemade skirt. We also left the main slide in to minimize exposed surface area and all the air leaks around the slide.
Now we had two small heaters in our RV and one for our daughter’s. We both have electric fireplaces. During the safari, no regular trouble lights could be found. These are a common way to keep water bays from freezing. A hundred watts here and there to keep temps above freezing. For our RV – we started with one light in our water bay. I also have battery warmers installed around our Lithium block. I have remote temperature sensors in a couple places, including the water bay and I quickly realized the one light wouldn’t be enough to keep the bay from freezing and had to move one of the small space heaters in there. It had a thermostat, so with a little trial and error, I could find the setting to keep the temps in there between 50 and 60 degrees. All well and good. But life is never that simple.
Our daughter’s RV had three water bays and a block of Lithiums in a separate battery bay. I took the string of 5 construction lights and cut them apart and merged them with a set of extension cords – creating 5 separate 100-watt trouble lights. Two went into her main water bay, one each in the other two (which just were tank dump locations) and the fourth went into the battery bay along with all my remaining Reflectix insulation to create a heated space around the batteries.
Our propane tank was nearly full, but our daughter’s wasn’t. Early in the process we packed up their RV quickly and managed to get the propane tank filled at the campground.
All ready for a bit of cold, right?
All our planning up to this point, ASSUMED that our 50-amp campground pedestals would continue working. Why wouldn’t they? We were not far from a major city (Houston), and near an interstate and a medium sized city. There were lots of power lines around, major power lines. Power in the campground was all underground, safe from trees. There’s lots of money in Texas for proper uilities, right?
The first morning of the cold wave, we woke shortly after 4 am – which was about the time my Victron power system says power went out. Now for many things in our RV, we can function without campground power. We have 400 amp-hours of lithium and a 3000-watt inverter and lots of solar. But, battery heaters, space heaters and the propane furnace use a lot of electricity. And in our daughter’s RV, there were all those 100-watt bulbs and a space heater and an electric fireplace – suddenly mother nature changed all the rules in a game we thought we had won.
It all became about resource management. We both have built in generators. But built-in generators use gasoline out of the RV’s main tank. But the pickups are set at about ¼ tank level so the generator can’t run the tank dry. So, we are told, and hope is true because one RV didn’t have a full tank of gas (one did). Generators use around 1/3 to 2/3rds of a gallon per hour, so running the generator for 8 hours a day or more starts to add up. When we can use the space heaters and fireplace, we don’t use nearly as much Propane as when we have to rely on the propane for ALL our heat. We needed to fill our water tanks and put hour hoses away. We needed to watch our water bay temperatures. We needed to watch our propane tanks and we needed to watch our gas tanks as well. Oh, and walk the dogs several times a day.
We have 800 watts of solar, but cloudy days and a thick coating of ice and snow meant little help from solar until the second day when we got just enough warmth and sun to clear off the panels. To top it off, there are different flavors of power, available and limited by the design of our RV system. Our generator provides two 30-amp circuits, not the two 50 amps we could get from the campground. Those two are divided up – one goes to the front A/C, the fireplace and the electric side of the water heater. No plugs, no other access. The other side runs to the rear A/C and the Inverter. When there is power from the camp pedestal or generator – that 30 or 50 amp can pass right through the inverter to the SIX breaker circuits. Six 20 Amp circuits. That means it’s not hard to exceed 30 amps and pop the breaker on the generator or the breaker panel in the bedroom. So, we end up watching our usage with rules like “One appliance in the kitchen on at a time with the space heater, or two on if the space heater is off.” The fun part is the inverter is rated at 3000 watts but will do up to 5600 for short periods – but while it is just passing current, it will handle a full 30 for a long while. But if we pop the 30-amp breaker on the generator, then the inverter tries to supply the full 30+ amps itself by drawing large amperages from the batteries. This actually works seamlessly so long as the draw when the generator breaker pops isn’t too big. The same goes for when campground power is up but we were afraid it might go out. I monitored our usage to make sure we were keeping the draw through the inverter low enough it could catch the load if campground power dropped. When we installed the solar and inverter, I also bought the Victron Color Control, which was quite expensive. But it connects both to my RV lan and to Victron internet servers, so I can peek at what is going on with the Victron equipmewnt from my phone either in the RV or out and about.
Watching the local news in Texas was no help. It seems Texas created their own power grid for much of the state. Reports came in about “frozen windmills”, which isn’t really true. Windmills have less wind on average in the winter so their output is down and some political hacks tried to use those numbers to blame the outtages on green power. Most explanations about power failures contained confusing and vague descriptions of power plant failures and LONG times it would take to bring the generating units back up to full capacity. So far, the only specifics are that power generating plants weren’t sufficiently “winterized”, I assume meaning insulated, and critical pipes and components froze. They talked about needing to do rolling blackouts, but the reality is that large portions of the Texas power grid were simply down. Down for days.
Now most campgrounds with power at each site don’t allow generators, but in cases when campground power is out, they do allow generators. Still, we tried not to use them during quiet hours. Fortunately, with our Lithium batteries, we could get through a night keeping the bays warm as well as us inside – as long as it wasn’t too cold. The first night it was only down in the 20’s. By then, there was nearly half an inch of ice on everything along with 4 inches of snow on top of that. Despite all the weather warnings, many people in the campground failed to make appropriate preparations. The campground Facebook group has people looking for gas for their generators, asking for help with all sorts of problems from frozen water to dead batteries.
We saw a number of water connections still hooked up, and after the second very cold night, with burst water filters. It seemed everyone was trying to get their propane tanks filled. Which was fine when there was campground power – but filling propane tanks involves a heavy-duty pump – that needs electricity! When power did come back on, it didn’t take long to empty the campgrounds propane supply.
Power was out from 4 am, until 10 PM the next day. Fortunately, we had power for the coldest night. My calculations showed we could make it through that night on battery but I wasn’t happy about how low the batteries would get (about 20%) which didn’t leave a lot of room for calculation error. It went down again at 9 am the next day for several hours, then came back that afternoon. While we could have barely survived on our batteries that second night with 9-degree weather, but I have no idea how many in the campground could – at least without running their generators ALL NIGHT, which for many would involve a cold, dark of night, gas tank refill…… if they had gas.
Late the second day, I was out front of our RV on the street and a person driving by asked if power was back on yet. I told him, nope. He relayed a story about trying to find gasoline. One store(Kroger) was open, but their gas station was out of gas. The nearby Loves station was open and had gas, but the line to get to a pump was AN HOUR LONG!
This morning I went out to fill the freshwater tank because there are neighborhoods in the area with boil orders due to low water pressure from all the broken pipes. Not frozen underground pipes, but frozen pipes under and inside houses or in the water plants themselves. I nearly had to wade to the side of the rig because there is an 8-inch drain from the hill behind us that empties right between our site and our daughters. The flow was spreading out and covering the concrete pad under our RV. I have plastic “steppingstones” for helping me stay out of the mud – I arranged them to help redirect the edge of the flow that was heading our way. Then I moved some mud around to more of the offending water headed toward the ditch instead of us. Water will be draining out of that hill for days, including after the temps drop low enough to freeze most everything flowing out.
Takeaways:
Texas power officials, including local power plants FAILED miserably to prepare for these winter storms. They know exactly how much power will be used whenever the temperatures drop to any level. These calculations are used by every electricity company, pretty much everywhere. There is zero excuse for power generating plants failing like dominos because it got cold. They already had this situation back in 2011, along with all sorts of investigations and commissions. They knew exactly what they needed to do to avoid this. There is zero excuse for the people responsible for Texas power to fail to plan, prepare and successfully handle the power demand. Explanations in the media attempt to blame windmills – and while wind product was down (always is in the winter), it was a small part of the reduced power supply. There does seem to have been a shortage of natural gas used by many of the power plants, but even that could have been managed better. Rolling blackouts could have started earlier thus avoiding total shutdown of some plants that seemed to take over a day to get running again. The reality is, Texas created their own power grid, without any Interstate connections precisely so they could avoid federal regulations about quality, backup etc. They created this situation, on purpose from the ground up. Own it.
I don’t want to sound like RVers need any special treatment. They should be MORE prepared because they are more exposed. They “should” be more prepared because they have to be more dependent on themselves on the road. Unfortunately, many aren’t. When it gets cold, all six sides of the house (RV) are exposed. They have slides and all sorts of air leaks. They don’t have the thick insulation or heat conserving mass that houses at least can have. I can personally say that having to be more self-reliant raises the stress a bit. I try to anticipate worst case so I can be ready – and while it has helped me be prepared, most of the time worst case never comes.
Another shortage – communication. Both from the state power grid and the campground. Estimates that were published as to when power might be restored were always late, vague and inaccurate. Communication from the campground was also missing. Perhaps they never had a way to notify everyone as to current issues. ALL campers should have been notified to empty their dirty tanks, fill their clean water tank, put their hoses away, to not dump during hours when power was out and seek gas and propane supplies in advance of the storm. All campers should have figured these things out for themselves, but many needed to be told but weren’t. You may wonder about the no dump rule. This park, because it exists across a valley, uses lift pumps for sewage. In several low areas in the park, there are buried tanks with power and pumps to take sewage from full hookup sites and pump it uphill to wherever the sewage system or connection to municipal system is located. One of these tanks had “water” overflowing out of it during the power outage. There were no backup generators on site.
While walking dogs, we saw a couple of dump hoses in the top of the dumpster that had been broken in half – with solid ice sticking out. I presume someone tried the “leave the faucet dripping” routine which is absolutely NOT the thing to do in an RV. We saw multiple burst water filters on our dog walks as well.
I’m thinking the next blog will be about power management in RVs.
Watching the local news, it seems we are lucky to still have our power now, over 48 hours without dropping. Perhaps because of how far south we are or simply the county we happen to be parked in.
