Tips and Tricks From Season Three 2021
It’s time for our annual Tips and Tricks blog post. Even though we have been traveling for three seasons now, we are still learning. The tips are in no particular order. Hopefully you’ll find at least one little tidbit that you find helpful.
Tip One: Add pasta to water before adding heat. We used to wait until the water was boiling before adding the pasta. Adding the pasta at the beginning allows it to cook faster and saves on fuel. We ran a little experiment on cooking a pound of whole wheat pasta on our butane stove with an air temperature of 72 degrees (the air temperature affects the cooking time). The old method of waiting to put the pasta in until the water was boiling required 29 minutes and 78 grams of butane to cook the pasta. The new method of putting the pasta in the water from the beginning required only 22 minutes and 59 grams of butane to cook the pasta. That’s a time and butane savings of about 24%.
Tip Two: Use a portable monitor to allow two people to watch the same thing. Our camper van is not arranged to allow us to sit side-by-side comfortably, so it was difficult for us both to watch the same YouTube video at the same time. We purchased a 15.6 inch USB-C Portable Monitor (paid link). It is thin, light-weight, fits in Right Buddy’s (RB’s) laptop bag, and does not have a separate power cord. It connects to a laptop with just a USB-C cable. We set a laptop on our Lagun Table facing one of us, connect the monitor and have it face the other person. Then we can both watch the same video while sitting facing each other. RB also likes to use the monitor for a second screen while creating blog posts and editing videos.
Tip Three: Sew hem tape on bottom of screen door to hold bottom magnets in place. When we originally made the bug screen for the side door, we used hot glue to hold the magnets in the bottom (Preparing Our Camper Van for Season Three 2021). Hot glue did not hold up in the heat. Then we tried gorilla tape, but that didn’t hold very well either. Holding the magnets in by sewing hem tape onto the bottom of the screen seemed to do the trick.
Tip Four: Use ratchet straps to secure the awning to a heavy picnic table. The awning on our camper van does not do well in the wind. We’ve had to fix it in the past after being caught in sudden wind gusts (Campervan Lessons Learned from Season Two 2020). For a little extra security, we strap the awning to a heavy picnic table when there is a chance for the wind to kick up suddenly.
Tip Five: Pull Instant Pot liner out of pot when done cooking. The heating element at the bottom of the Instant Pot (paid link) stays hot for quite a while after it is turned off. Removing the inner pot when the food is done (especially if most of the food has been removed) will prevent the food from burning onto the pot and make the pot easier to clean.
Tip Six: Drink iced drinks from a well-insulated cup or mug to reduce the need for ice. This is handy when you have a tiny freezer and ice cubes come at a premium.
Tip Seven: Fill up ice cube trays in the evening so they will freeze over night before traveling. Even though our ice cube trays have lids (paid link), we do not feel comfortable driving down the road with water in the ice cube trays. Making sure they are frozen before we start traveling makes us feel better knowing we won’t have water spilling into our fridge.
Tip Eight: Stop drinking liquids an hour or two before going to bed to reduce chance of having to get up in the middle of the night. We travel with an emergency toilet in our camper van, but we’d rather not have to climb out of bed and use it. This may not be as much of an issue with younger people, but we normally get up during the night at home. However, we prefer not to when we are on the road.
Tip Nine: Put a strip of Gaffers tape on bottom of fridge to keep items from sliding out. The bottom of our fridge is rather smooth and, due to the small size of our fridge, we pack it pretty full. Sometimes, when we open the fridge door, items come sliding out, especially when van is not level. A simple strip of Gaffers tape (paid link) provides enough friction to keep the items in place.
Tip Ten: Use silicon to attach metal plates to windows. To hold our window shades in place for the front doors, we attached magnets to the shades and metal plates to the windows (Preparing Our Camper Van for Season Three 2021). Initially, we attached the metal plates to the windows using VHB tape. However, when the van is sitting in the hot sun, some of the metal plates pulled off the window. It was less likely to happen if we slid the magnets sideways off the plates instead of pulling them straight away from the window. A better solution turned out to be using silicon adhesive (paid link) instead of the VHB tape. The silicon was also good for attaching the cell phone mount on dash, since the dash can get pretty hot.
Tip Eleven: When iced tea pitcher is emptied, refill it with water and put back in fridge. Pouring the steeped tea for the next batch of iced tea into the chilled water cools it down quickly and reduces the need for ice.
Tip Twelve: When the batteries are low, use the electric tea kettle (paid link) to heat water for dishes instead of the water heater. The tea kettle will use less electricity to heat up the smaller volume of water, but yet provides enough hot water for dishes when mixed with cold water to bring the temperature down from boiling.
Tip Thirteen: Use gorilla tape to repair a plastic bin. At the beginning of the season, even before we hit the road, we accidentally left our plastic bin out on the counter. When we drove away, the bin fell to the floor and busted a quarter-sized hole in the corner. We use the bin to hold the rinse water when we do dishes. Covering up the hole with gorilla tape (paid link) worked like a charm. The tape made a water-tight seal and held all season long.
Tip Fourteen: Switch the fridge over to DC power so that the inverter does not need to be on all the time. The inverter creates a small drain on the batteries, even when no AC devices are on. If the fridge is hooked up to AC power, it internally has to convert the power to DC and requires the inverter to be on all the time. There is a small power loss when converting from AC to DC, so running the fridge directly from DC power is more efficient and allows the inverter to be off most of the time. We switched our fridge over to DC in the middle of Season Three (Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia - October 24th, 2021).
Tip Fifteen: Put a strip of tape over the fridge temperature control so the setting doesn’t change accidentally. We pack our fridge pretty full, so we were constantly bumping the temperature setting inside the fridge. We marked our normal setting on the dial with a sharpie so we could easily see when the setting changed, but we still had to remember to keep checking it. Placing a piece of tape over the control knob kept the setting from changing and solved the problem.
Tip Sixteen: Bring a printer/scanner on the road if you need to sign documents while traveling. RB had some family issues that required her to sign a lot of documents during Season Three. Instead of always trying to find a place to print and scan documents, we purchased a small, inexpensive printer/scanner and secured it inside our van with bungee cords. It saved a lot of time being able to electronically receive documents, print them, sign them, scan them, and send them back electronically. The printer was well worth the space it took up in our camper van.
Tip Seventeen: Knives, screw drivers, and Allen wrenches are not good substitutes for a cork screw. It is possible, even with a synthetic cork, but you may end up with wine in your eyes and on the ceiling when the cork finally pushes into the bottle. This was a lesson we learned the hard way when we wanted to open a bottle of wine for our anniversary, realized we did not bring a cork screw, and couldn’t find another camper with a cork screw to borrow (Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan - July 20th, 2021).
Tip Eighteen: Shield external mic cord with aluminum foil to eliminate radio station interference. When we were recording an intro to a video in a campground, we kept getting music recorded with the intro (Adirondack Balloon Festival, New York - September 23rd to 26th, 2021). It perplexed us for awhile, trying to figure out how the music ended up on our video as we did not hear any music while we were recording. We finally figured out that the microphone cord that connects the mic to our camera was acting like an antenna and picking up a local radio station. Once we discovered the cause, it was an easy fix. Wrapping the cord in aluminum foil solved the problem.
We hope you found at least one good tidbit in the bunch or one that gave you an idea for a solution to a problem you might have.
Check out our related video: Tips and Tricks Season Three
(RB)