Over a year ago we bought an RV water bladder, told ourselves it would save us someday, and then hauled it around the country without ever taking it out of the box. This week it finally got its chance. We booked seven days at our very first Hipcamp, a Florida farm with a pond, beehives, banana trees, and a flock of chickens that treated our campsite like their personal sidewalk, and we planned to go fully off-grid the whole time.
Settling in at the farm
First order of business was parking. We ran the Brinkley's auto-leveling, set up the X-chocks and the gooseneck stabilizer tripod, and took a proper tour of the property. The beehives were a highlight, the chicken parade was constant, and since this is Florida, we spent the week eyeing the pond with a healthy level of alligator paranoia. Nothing surfaced. Probably.
The bladder finally comes out of the box
Boondocking for a week on one 75-gallon fresh tank was never going to happen for two people, one of whom (Fabiola) is firmly committed to washing her hair regardless of what the gray tank thinks. That's the whole reason we bought the AQUATANK2 water bladder in the first place. The farm had a spigot too far from our site to reach with hoses, so the plan was: drive the truck over, fill the bladder in the bed, drive back, and siphon it into the fresh tank.
Figuring out the siphon setup for the first time took some trial and error, all of it on camera. But once the flow started, it just worked. We measured 24.1 gallons transferred into the fresh tank on the first run, no pump required, gravity and a full truck bed doing all the work. If you boondock anywhere your hose can't reach, this thing earns its storage space. We just recommend testing yours before year two.
Where the plan fell apart
We'll be honest about the second half of the week. The goal was seven full days off-grid on solar and batteries. Then Florida served up a couple of cloudy, rainy days, our solar intake dropped, and Nathan, who was on vacation that week, had his gaming PC quietly eating the battery bank every evening. By day five we had a decision to make, and we made the comfortable one: we plugged into the farm's 50-amp hookup.
By day seven we'd run out of fresh water anyway, so the week ended as a lesson in all three currencies of off-grid life: water, energy, and tank space. You're always spending one of them, and the budget is smaller than you think.
What we'd do differently
Next time we'd start with the bladder run on day one instead of waiting, budget the battery bank around actual usage instead of ideal usage (the gaming PC now has a solar-hours allowance), and watch the gray tank as closely as the fresh. None of this made the week a failure. The bladder works, the farm was one of our favorite stays yet, and we now know exactly where our off-grid limits are, because we found them.
Watch the whole week, the bladder test, and the chickens on YouTube. We also send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week. The signup form is on our newsletter page.