Boondocking power

The first night without hookups teaches you which loads you really need. The 2019 Fleetwood Class A gas manual has a short dry-camping note that saves you a few of those lessons.

Habits from the manual

• Arrive with charged batteries, a full fresh tank, a full water heater, and empty waste tanks.
• Run an absorption refrigerator on propane, and open the door less often.
• Heat water about twenty minutes before you need it, then shut the heater off.
• Drop the thermostat a little so the furnace cycles less.
• Open windows before you reach for the roof air.

Those are habits, not a watt-hour promise. The numbers come from the calculator.

How the battery calculator thinks

The battery bank calculator counts only the boxes you leave checked. Its weather buffer is 1.5 days of your daily load, even when solar covers the math on a sunny afternoon.

Net storage is the larger of “load minus solar” and that buffer, and it never drops below 1,280 Wh.

Solar inside that widget is panel watts times 4 hours times 0.75, times the number of days. The separate solar calculator lets you pick 3, 4, or 5.5 peak sun hours, and the forecast swaps those guesses for real irradiance at your ZIP code.

The air conditioner question

Air conditioning is the load that ends a quiet camp. The luxury preset puts it at about 11,000 Wh a day.

Most roofs can’t make that and most banks can’t hold it, so plan on a generator or a hookup for hot-weather trips. The payback calculator shows what that costs with your own fuel price and hookup fee.

Watch the wind, too

Parked doesn’t mean safe from weather. The wind calculator gives a rough tipping estimate with a wide disclaimer, and the radio it links is a good one to keep in the coach.