Zero.....

The only way I can take a picture that captures a big portion of the interior of Tom's Newell barn is get on top of the 'man cave' and take a panoramic shot to get it all from front to back, it is that big inside......the picture below gives you an idea of how big it is......it is at least 10' from the front of the Tom's 46' long coach to the roll up doors, and over 10' from the rear of the coach to the back of the barn.....

Tom's 2002 Newell - 46' with two slides (drivers side)

......we were on top of the 'man cave' Wednesday to wrap insulation around the air conditioning duct work which Tom recently installed himself.....Tom is one of those guys who can teach himself to do almost anything.....he researches online, talks to experts in the field, then does it himself.....every time I visit Tom I learn something new.....

 'Before'

  'After'

.....it took us about 3.5 hours from start to finish.........the victory picture.....one more item checked off Tom's list.

Finished!

The view out one of the upper windows....my coach looks like a 'Tonka' toy next to the barn

I spent part of the afternoon getting ready to roll our wheels once again on Thursday as we will be heading back to Los Algodones, Baja California, Mexico for the extraction of my 53 year old root canal on Friday.  From there we will make our way north back to Riverside, CA and the birth of our youngest daughter's first child.  Since we will be dry camping and/or boondocking all of the succeeding days until we arrive back in Riverside I first topped off our fresh water tank by adding 70 gallons, then dumped our black tank.  

So, to turn back the page a few days, we only used 70 gallons out of our fresh water tank while boondocking in Quartizte over a 10 day period for a total usage per day of 7 gallons.....while we used only 60 gallons at our Borrego Springs Desert encampment over 10 days.  Previously when boondocking we would buy a lot of bottled water for personal consumption and just use the water in our fresh water tank for flushing the toilet, washing dishes, taking showers, etc.  We averaged about 2-3 gallons of water consumption per day.  This time around we decided to utilize our 'Zero Water' purifier to produce drinking water resulting in the increase of water usage from our fresh water tank.  The result is less refuse (plastic 1 gallon water containers) to find a place to dump, which leads to more independence.....over a two week period we would typically add 12-13 one gallon water containers to the local municipal landfill.  Our cost for one Zero Water filter, which lasts 2-3 weeks depending on the water quality where we fill up, is about $16 (4 for $65 from Amazon), and our cost for a gallon of bottled water is about $1......so it costs us from $12-13 for bottled water compared to $16 for a Zero water filter.

.....it does cost us more to use the 'Zero Water' system as the filters are somewhat expensive, but we think the small extra cost is worth having a smaller impact on the environment. To be fair, we could probably have reduced our water consumption below the 70, and 60 gallons at each location, but we knew we would only be there 7-10 days so we splurged a little.  Ultimately how long we can stay disconnected depends on how we manage our water supply, and we do manage it differently depending on how long we plan to be disconnected from utilities.

As always we've had a wonderful time visiting with our friends, and parting on Friday will be bitter sweet as always as we say our 'until next times'.....

Thanks for stopping by!