Off-Grid. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
After six weeks in Sherwood, it was time to move on.
Our house sit had come to an end, the screen door had survived Cheech's renovations — and my subsequent repairs — and the Melbourne house was under offer.
Things were actually looking reasonably promising.
Which, by now, we probably should have recognised as a warning sign.
Col needed to be based closer to Brisbane Airport for work, so we found a farmstay at Narangba, north of Brisbane, and moved Loki out there.
And when we arrived, it looked pretty bloody good.
Green paddocks.
A full dam.
Views off into the distance.
Hardly another camper anywhere near us.
We were up on a hill with plenty of space around us, Col could head off to work each day, and I could hang out with Wal and Cheech and enjoy a bit of peace and quiet.
We were going to be camping off-grid.
No problem.
We had lithium batteries.
Solar.
An inverter.
A Victron system.
We were practically professionals.
We were not practically professionals.
First problem: water
Our site wasn't connected to water.
Again, no problem. We had water tanks on Loki.
Apparently after successfully repairing Cheech's screen door in Sherwood, I'd decided I could now solve pretty much anything.
Twenty litres, thank you very much.
When it wasn't raining, things became slightly more labour intensive.
I had a beach cart and some water jerry cans, so I'd load them into the cart, trundle off down the road to fill them, drag the bloody things all the way back and pump the water into Loki's tanks.
Glamorous?
No.
Effective?
Absolutely.
At this point I was basically running my own tiny water utility.
Who needs town water?
Not me, apparently.
Then there were the mozzies
The farmstay had mosquitoes.
Although calling these things mosquitoes feels slightly misleading.
They were approximately the size of birds.
Going outside around dusk was basically an extreme sport.
Wal and Cheech needed walking.
And somewhere out there, an entire squadron of Narangba mosquitoes was waiting for us.
Still, we were managing.
We had water.
We had mozzie coils galore.
We had a lovely spot.
We had peace and quiet.
Then Loki's electrical system decided it would like another turn.
Remember the chunky milk?
On our way north we'd already discovered that Loki's fridge wasn't operating properly while we were travelling.
We'd discovered this via a fairly unpleasant bottle of chunky milk.
We'd even had an auto electrician look at it in Dubbo, but nobody had been able to work out what was going on.
A few months earlier we'd spent quite a bit of money upgrading Loki's electrical system.
Lithium batteries.
An inverter.
Victron solar.
All the things that, to us, suggested we should be able to camp off-grid quite comfortably.
Except now...
everything stopped working.
The fridge was okay because we could switch it over to gas.
But we basically had no power.
And we had absolutely no idea why.
We checked things.
We pressed things.
We looked at the Victron app with the confidence of two people who had absolutely no idea what the Victron app was telling them.
Nothing helped.
The owner didn't have a powered site available for another week.
Excellent.
Then one of the good people appeared
One thing we've discovered since being on the road is that when things go pear-shaped, quite often somebody wonderful appears out of nowhere and helps.
The owner knew a bloke staying at the property who had previously worked with caravan electrics.
She gave him our number.
He came over and went through the system with Col.
He showed us how to actually understand what we were looking at in the Victron app and worked out that our solar panels simply weren't getting enough power back into the system.
Then he loaned us another solar panel.
Just like that.
We also had a solar blanket, so between everything we started slowly getting some charge back into the batteries.
During the day, things improved.
Nighttime was another story.
Eventually we realised one of our biggest power users was sitting right there in front of us.
Starlink.
Starlink was fantastic because Col needed it for work.
Starlink was less fantastic when we realised how much of our precious battery power it was chewing through.
So Starlink started getting switched off at night.
We were learning.
Slowly.
Sometimes expensively.
But learning.
Never fear. We have a generator.
We'd bought a generator not that long before.
Perfect.
If the batteries were struggling, we'd run the generator in the evenings, put some charge back in and have lights.
There was just one tiny issue.
The generator wouldn't start.
Now, in Col's defence, what happened next wasn't something he'd done at Narangba.
The crime had actually been committed several months earlier.
On a previous trip, the generator had mistakenly been filled with two-stroke fuel instead of normal unleaded.
At the time, it apparently hadn't occurred to anyone that this little incident might come back to haunt us.
It did.
And because our timing is impeccable, all of this was happening over Easter weekend.
Somehow, we managed to find a repairer willing to look at the generator on the Saturday.
We dropped it off.
About two hours later, it was ready.
The fuel system had been cleaned out, the generator was alive again and we could finally use it in the evenings.
WE HAD LIGHTS.
Honestly, our standards for excitement had dropped considerably.
Meanwhile, 1,700 kilometres away...
While I was hauling water around in a beach cart, fighting off prehistoric mosquitoes and we were borrowing solar panels and resurrecting a generator, there was another little drama developing back in Melbourne.
Our house sale.
The buyer was having trouble getting their finance sorted.
They needed an extension.
We agreed.
Then things still weren't sorted.
Another extension.
And somewhere amongst all of this came another request.
By the time Easter rolled around, our supposedly straightforward house sale was starting to look anything but straightforward.
Because apparently a failing electrical system, no water connection, bird-sized mosquitoes and a generator poisoned several months earlier weren't quite enough entertainment for one family.
Finally — a powered site
Then came the news we'd been waiting for.
A powered site had become available.
Hallelujah.
No more nursing the batteries.
No more obsessively watching the Victron app.
No more worrying about whether Starlink was sucking Loki dry.
We moved onto the powered site.
Surely life was about to become easier.
😂
No.
The powered site apparently came with another feature.
A $10-a-day charge for use of the shower and toilet.
There was just one problem.
We didn't need them.
Loki had a toilet.
Loki had a shower.
I'd already told the owner we wouldn't be using the amenities — and, more importantly, she'd previously told me that including them was our choice.
So I said we didn't want them.
Apparently our choice was no longer our choice.
She told me it didn't matter whether we used them or not. The powered site came with use of the shower and toilet, so we'd be paying the extra $10 a day.
Right.
Just to add a little perspective here, the shower in question was outdoors.
And its door?
A tarp.
I pointed out again that we had our own perfectly functional shower and toilet approximately three steps away inside Loki.
Didn't matter.
We were paying for the tarp.
There are some battles in life worth fighting.
And then there are some where you eventually think:
Whatever.
So we paid the extra $10 a day for the privilege of not using an outdoor shower with a tarp for a door.
At least we had power.
And somewhere in all of this...
Our Melbourne buyer was still trying to get finance.
Our furniture was still in Victoria.
We were still technically supposed to be moving permanently to Brisbane.
And we still believed that once the house settled, we'd buy a place up here and life would finally become a little more settled.
We just had to get through this bit first.
And eventually, things did start moving with the house.
Enough that we began making plans.
Real plans.
We even arranged to have all our furniture moved from Melbourne to Brisbane.
What could possibly go wrong?
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