By Don Bradley
John House, a retired IT guy, liked to camp. Off grid. Into the wild.
So did Paula, his wife of 34 years. Albeit in an RV with air conditioning, a flat screen and an air fryer.
What to do? Because RV parks are neither off-grid or into the wild.
The answer sits in front of their south Kansas City home. A 45-foot Grand Design Momentum RV with six solar panels attached to the top.
John and Paula can go anywhere they want and stay as long as they want. They don’t need an electrical hookup at an RV park.
Campfire stew is nice. So is linguini and clam sauce.
“The goal was to be able to run the air conditioners all night and we can do that,” House said on a recent afternoon at his home.
He’d heard about the solar power concept for RVs a couple of years ago and paid a company to install some equipment.
They didn’t do it right.
“Well, I can do better than that,” John figured.
So he took a lifetime of working in computers and electronics, combined it with a degree in automotive technology, and integrated enough sustainable solar energy into their RV that they no longer need RV parks that can charge $100 a night.
People want to go off-grid, but they still want technology.
“That was our goal: to travel self-sufficiently and comfortably and drive right past the RV parks,” he said.
And just to milk as much electrical power as he could into the rig, he also installed a deployable wind turbine on the side of the RV.
Convenience is the big appeal of going solar and when you throw in a reduced carbon footprint, even better.
And now, it’s a business. John’s company, JHC Solar, offers the same technology to others that he did on his own RV.
Not cheap. If you want done to yours what John did to his RV, the cost would run between $18,000 and $22,000.
But that price makes more sense when you factor that RV parks can charge as much as $2,000 a month.
Solar power for RVs has been around a while and is getting more popular, according to magazines and websites that cater to the RV community.
A recent piece on RV.com talked about how solar power can solve the problem of noisy campgrounds and the “ever-present hum” of other people’s generators.
Harvest Hosts, a network of 10,000 or so farms, wineries, breweries and even businesses such as Lowe’s, helps to make the lifestyle work.
For an annual fee of $150 or so, these “hosts” let travelers park an RV in a parking lot.
John says life is good for him and Paula. Three kids, all grown and gone. The couple just left on a three-month trip.
They are the quintessential “empty nester” couple.
Only now they get to move the nest anywhere they want to go.