We are Nathan and Fabiola, and we did our boondocking education in public. Our first camping trip ever in our Brinkley Model Z 3515 was a 15-day off-grid challenge at DuPuis in Central Florida, no hookups, no experience, cameras rolling for our Nomads Amor channel. You can watch us fumble through day one of that challenge and decide for yourself how prepared we were.
Since then we have boondocked at a Hipcamp farm in Florida, a state recreation area in Wisconsin, casino lots, Cracker Barrels, and the parking lot of our RV manufacturer. Every one of those stays taught us something, usually about water or tanks, because that is what actually limits how long you can stay out.
This is the gear that makes those stays work for us. Solar and batteries are the other half of the story, and they get their own article, so this one covers everything else: getting water in, getting waste out, and the smaller stuff that stretches both.
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Getting water in
AQUATANK2 water storage bladder
We bought this water bladder before we ever boondocked, then hauled it around for over a year without opening the box. We finally broke it out at our first Hipcamp stay, a farm in Florida where the water spigot was a truck ride away from our site. We drove over, filled the bladder in the truck bed, drove back, and siphoned the water into our fresh tank. About 24 gallons made it in on that first attempt, which honestly went better than we expected.
That one refill is the difference between cutting a boondocking week short and finishing it. The bladder folds down to almost nothing when it is empty, which matters in a rig where every storage bay is spoken for. We show the whole first-time setup, siphon and all, in our water bladder episode. It is on Amazon.
Camco Tastepure inline water filter
When you fill from a farm spigot or a random campground faucet, you do not know what is coming out of it. The Tastepure is a simple inline filter that screws onto the hose and catches sediment and chlorine taste before the water reaches the bladder or the fresh tank. It weighs nothing and lives in the water bay, so there is no excuse not to use it.
Our full filtration setup inside the rig is more involved than this one filter, and we cover all of it in our water filtration article. For the fill side, the Tastepure is on Amazon.
The power half
We are not going to repeat the whole solar story here, but know that nothing else on this list matters if your batteries die on day two. Our solar and battery system is what let us attempt a 15-day challenge as complete beginners, and what let us run a full week in Wisconsin through a heat advisory without a generator. The panels, batteries, inverter, and what we would change are all in our RV solar and battery setup.
Getting waste out
Camco Rhino 36-gallon tote tank
Your fresh water usually is not the first thing to run out. Your gray tank fills first. The Rhino tote lets us dump without moving the rig: fill the tote, wheel it to the truck, drive it to a dump station, come home, repeat. Ours got its first real workout after two weeks parked at a family property with full tanks, and the learning curve was steeper than we expected. Use the side fill port, mind the venting, and do not trust a cheap sewer hose.
We filmed the entire messy process, including the mistakes, in our tank dumping episode. The tote has big no-flat wheels and a built-in gate valve, and it is on Amazon.
12V macerator pump
The macerator is what makes the tote practical with a fifth wheel like ours. It grinds up waste and pumps it through a small hose, so we can move black and gray water uphill into the tote instead of relying on gravity and a fat sewer hose. It runs off 12 volts, clips to power near the tanks, and turned a job we dreaded into a routine.
It stars in the same dumping episode as the tote, and you can find it on Amazon.
Getting parked and staying aired up
Tri-Lynx leveling blocks
Boondocking sites are rarely level and often soft. Our Brinkley has auto-leveling, but on grass or sand the jacks need something solid under them or they just sink. The Tri-Lynx blocks interlock like big Lego bricks, so we can stack them to whatever height a low corner needs. They earned their keep in Wisconsin, where we backed a 40-foot fifth wheel down a tiny road onto soft grass. That whole scene is in our Wisconsin boondocking episode.
They come with a storage bag and they are on Amazon.
VIAIR 400P portable compressor
Off-grid spots do not come with an air hose, and our trailer tires run pressures that gas station compressors struggle to reach. The VIAIR 400P clips to the truck battery and tops off every tire on the truck and the rig before a travel day. Checking pressures is part of our standard pre-departure routine now, which you can see in our undercarriage maintenance video.
It is not small, but it is fast and it has never let us down. It is on Amazon.
Staying online
Starlink Gen 3 Standard Kit
We both work from the rig, so internet decides where we can boondock. Starlink was one of the first things we set up when we brought the Brinkley home, back in our first hitching episode. It has also saved a travel day or two. When our planned overnight stop fell through on the way to Kentucky, we were searching for parking from the passenger seat on Starlink while rolling down the highway. That scramble is in our Louisville travel day post.
At a boondocking site, we set the dish out with a clear view of the sky and we have full-speed internet in the middle of nowhere. The Gen 3 standard kit is on Amazon.
The small stuff that stretches your tanks
Collapsible dish basin and buckets
Washing dishes under running water will empty a fresh tank faster than showers will. Fabiola washes in a collapsible basin instead, so a sink of dishes costs a gallon or two instead of ten. The collapsible buckets do everything else: hauling water, catching gray water, and, in one memorable experiment, measuring exactly how much water was still hiding in our fresh tank after the gauge said empty. That test is in our first-week boondocking recap.
All of them fold flat for storage. The basin is on Amazon, and so are the collapsible buckets.
Zevo insect traps
Boondocking puts you closer to the bugs, and the bugs know it. After one campground stay, a crowd of flying insects hitched a ride inside the rig and we spent a whole evening at a Cracker Barrel fighting them off, which you can relive in our CAT scale episode. Now a Zevo trap stays plugged in near the kitchen. It uses UV light and a sticky cartridge, no zapping and no spray, and it quietly collects whatever gets inside. The traps are on Amazon.
The whole kit in one place
Everything above lives on our Boondocking idea list on Amazon, and our storefront has the rest of the gear we carry.
These articles cover the systems that this one leans on:
- Our RV solar and battery setup
- Our RV water filtration and water gear
- RV sewer and tank gear that keeps it clean
And if you want to see the next boondocking spot before we write about it, our newsletter is where we share it first.