We’ve been going to Burning Flipside, a festival a few hours away in Texas, for a number of years. We bought a generator to power a large art project back around 2018. After staying away for a number of years because of the pandemic, we decided to go back this year, and take Tourtoise and Hare with us.
There are no RV power hookups on the land that hosts the festival, so the plan was to use the generator to run the A/C and fridge. We’d never actually run the trailer off of a generator before, so I did an overnight test to make sure our Honda EU2200i could run the A/C overnight, and gauge how much fuel we’d need. That test indicated it would take around 20 gallons to run the A/C full time, so I bought a couple of large fuel containers that fit surprisingly well around the tongue box. They’re “Scepter Flo N’ Go Duramax 14”, if you’re shopping for something similar.
We made sure we could secure them to the front of the trailer. We used ratchet straps around the tongue box and both cans, threaded through the Aluminum tubing on the back of the platform, and also straps through the holes in the deck to hold the cans down and reduce vibration. A quick, ironic, trip to the gas station in an EV, and we were fueled up and ready to go.
We headed out a few days before the festival began to help set up. Adrienne needed to do some work, and we’d gotten a new antenna (Peplink Slim 22G) for the Peplink receiver described in Wireless, so we got the generator up and running and everything was working well.
It was nice and cool the first couple of nights, so we didn’t even worry about running the A/C.
But after a few days it did heat up and we did try to run the A/C. It immediately overloaded the generator! It was frustrating because I’d tested this at home, but maybe the fridge and other things pushed it over the edge. We temporarily traded with one of our campmates for a bigger generator, and that ran fine.
I won’t talk about the festival much, but suffice it to say that a good time was had by all.
When we were packing up to go, we discovered that we had brought way too much gasoline. Of the ~26 gallons we’d brought, we probably used less than 15, and that included filling all of our campmates’ generators as well as our own. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal. “Just pour the extra into your car’s gas tank!” Of course our car has no such thing, and our motorcycles don’t get enough use to run through much gas. It was well into August before we finished using it up.
For future generator-powered trips, I’m going to get a “companion” generator for mine that will let us double the power output when we need to. We can use that system to power our house in case of another failure of Texas’s power grid. I’m probably also going to get an “extended run” fueling setup, which runs a hose from the fuel can to the generator so that you don’t need to keep refilling it.
