In the beginning, I wanted to explore.

I wanted to see around every bend and over every hill. Then it became so much more. I realized my thirst for knowledge was a creature all its own. Here are some snippets from my journey.

My wife and I love to travel. She also loves camping as much as I do. We both enjoy new scenery and adventure. J is much more the organizer than I, but I love building things from scratch, so we are a really complimentary pair.

Lately, I have been working on building one of the smallest and most complete offroad campers that you possibly can. I have a diesel Gladiator Rubicon with an Alu-Cab camper installed. This gives me basic shelter, but I wanted more. First, I needed power. Six 100 amp/hour LiFePo4 Battle Born batteries later, I had it. After deciding how to mount them and constructing the box, other components could be placed. I surely needed a freezer/fridge, so a Dometic was installed with a homemade wall track riveted holder. I wanted to use the power to filter water, so I plumbed a Seaflow 12v water pump to push water from 2 inlets on the back of the camper through a Royal Doulton 6 candle ceramic filter into the 13 gallon water tank from Alu-Cab. One inlet is a stainless steel barbed fitting for a slide on hose with a mesh filter, the other is a thread camper water inlet for a hose connection. I can filter water from a stream easily and quickly. Few viruses and no bacteria can pass through that filter. I love hot showers, so I fitted another pump to take clean water from the tank and push it through my 10 liter calorifier tank from Heatso. This tank has a 12 vdc element, a 120 vac element, and an internal copper coil which heated water from an Espar Hydronic heater circulates through. The Espar D5 Hydronic heater uses approximately a tablespoon of diesel by my guess, to heat 10 liters of water to 187 degrees F. If you do the calculations for mixing with cooler water, this is more than enough for 2 short showers. I decided to do plumbing for 2 water outlets, one for a shower on passenger side, and one for cooking water on rear drivers side. Next was an Ogo composting toilet. It has a powered stirrer. I’m adding a pump to empty liquids. With the addition of a 3000 watt inverter, we can make morning coffee without leaving the camper. All this had to be wired with the proper wire sizes and instead of just switches, I used Blue Seas series A breakers to turn most things on/off. There are exceptions. The 120 vac calorifier element has to be wired with an additional switch that allows for connecting a thermostat. I have a 20 amp ac inlet on the drivers side back on the camper with an outlet above. Both have small pilot lights.

The batteries are charged with a 320 watt solar panel on the camper roof and a Victron solar controller. They are also charged with a Sterling dc-dc charger from the trucks alternator. The third charger is a 120 volt Sterling charger that can be used in shady campgrounds. You can connect several modern chargers to these batteries if it is done correctly and you don’t exceed the batteries charging rate.

So thats it for the first post. There is so much more. I plan on posting photos, trip details, organizing efforts, inventions, and other thoughts. So subscribe, and see whats up with MarkOnTheMap

Mark's diesel Gladiator outside of Asheville Vehicle Outfitters with a new Alu-Cab camper