A very brief thunderstorm came through Sunday with 50 mph winds and heavy rains. We never lost power, but … the local water plant did.

• It is Trump’s fault for pulling out of the Paris Agreement!
• Extreme weather is running rampant!
• The end is nigh!

Whoever is to blame, it is just a fact of RV life. In (nearly) a year of RVing full-time, we have lost power three times and water once. So far, the utility outages have been handled promptly. Two of the power outages and this water outage were less than four hours. The power outage in Harrison Bay State Park, TN was more than a day long, but the storm took out multiple power poles in the middle of the woods. Fortunately, the weather was not miserably hot at the time, so life was bearable.

RVs have fresh water tanks. If you want to be super prepared, you can put some water in the fresh tank when you arrive and drain the fresh tank when you leave (preferably, not in your campsite). Even if you do not do this, you can buy gallons of water from the store, as long as you have a way to fill your fresh tank. Smaller travel trailers have a pour spout opening, so you can use a 5 or 6 gallon camp jug with a spout to fill your tank. Our travel trailer had this, and it was convenient. Our current 5th wheel has a hose hookup, which is more of a pain. Our intake pipes are slanted down, so some water drains into the compartment after filling and disconnecting the hose. This is not ideal. We solved this using a 4′ drinking water hose with a water bandit to connect to the camp jug. This allows us to pour water into the tank and let the fresh water plumbing drain back into the jug or ground instead of the compartment. We also use the 4′ hose to connect to city water, so that it can drain from the 4′ hose onto the ground rather than the compartment. The solution is not perfect, but it works OK for an emergency. A better solution might be a spare fresh water pump for your trailer. In an emergency, you can connect it to a 12V supply to pump water into your fresh tank. Just make sure the spare pump dries out before you put it away.

During a power outage, the most important appliance to keep running is your fridge. (Yes, my food supersedes your life maintaining medical equipment.) There are three main fridge types – Propane+A/C, D/C, and A/C only.

If you have a RV propane fridge, you are golden for a week or more on a full 20 lb propane tank. Our travel trailer had one of these, but the trade-off was that some fridge space is lost to the propane powered chilling unit. Depending on the model, you may have to flip a switch to make sure the fridge starts using propane.

If your RV has a DC only fridge. Solar panels can keep your batteries topped off for running the fridge for at least a few sunny days.

If you have a residential (AC) fridge or no solar panels, you might want to invest in a small inverter generator, such as the Westinghouse iGen 2200 or Honda EU2200i. (We own a Westinghouse iGen 2200, but we have not used it enough to give it any significant recommendation.) Inverter generators are quieter and more fuel efficient, but they can be very pricey. Being quieter means you are less likely to get complaints. Being fuel efficient means not getting up at 2 am in the morning in your underwear to add fuel. Unless you sleep commando, then you get an ticket for indecency … or a date.

In most cases, a small quiet generator will not run your air conditioner. We have a 1800 sustained/2200 peak Watt generator that shuts down when the air conditioner starts up. The sustained current appears to be around 10-12 amps, and the generator can handle about 14.5 amps. The peak for our air conditioner claims to be about 18 amps, but the generator peaks at 17.5 amps. A soft starter on the air conditioner might allow our generator to run one of our air conditioners. We have not investigated this, yet.

The utility outages we have experienced have not been severe. At some point, we expect that we will have to deal with a longer term outage that requires us to move the RV to another campground or spend a few days in a cabin or room with air conditioning