RV Tech & Tips

Why This Page Exists

Most "off grid RV power" guides are written by someone who spent a weekend boondocking. I'm writing this from a 2021 Thor Compass parked in a field, where the two of us run full workdays, mine on a laptop and hers as a court reporter, on Starlink and an EcoFlow battery. That's a different problem than keeping the lights on for a weekend. A dropped connection during a work call matters. A generator that quits at the wrong moment matters. So this hub is built around the specific failure points that show up when RV tech has to survive a real workday, not just a getaway.

Starlink and the EcoFlow: Why We Run a UPS at All

From our rig: Starlink doesn't officially require a battery backup, and most weekend campers never need one. We run ours through an EcoFlow anyway, because the thing that actually kills the connection isn't weak signal, it's power surges. When the RV's AC compressor kicks on, or when the generator cycles, the voltage dip is enough to cold-reboot the dish. That means a full re-acquire cycle in the middle of whatever you were doing. Running the dish off a battery instead of straight off the coach's power smooths that surge out before it ever reaches the Starlink hardware.

How long the EcoFlow actually rides out a surge or a short outage depends on the model and what else is pulling from it that day. I broke down the exact watt-hour math off my own unit, not just the spec sheet, in Starlink Power Consumption, and the backup logic itself is covered in Does Starlink Need a UPS? and My Starlink Backup for the RV. If you're setting this up for the first time, the EcoFlow is the piece worth buying before the surge protector: this is the EcoFlow line I use.

When the Generator Has to Run

From our rig: The Thor Compass generator draws off the RV's own gas tank rather than a separate fuel source, and it has a built-in cutoff at 25% fuel so you can't accidentally run the coach dry chasing generator hours. The tradeoff is that when it cuts off, you lose power and Starlink at the same time, so it's worth watching the fuel gauge instead of just trusting the generator to tell you. Under heavy generator use we've had to fill up after about a week. It's a detail nobody mentions until they've been caught by it once.

The Real Data Math Behind Starlink Roam Unlimited

From our rig: Working from the RV full-time, the two of us were burning 20 to 30 GB a week between video calls and evening streaming. That was closing in on the cap of our old plan, about $50 a month for 100 GB, and hitting a data cap mid-workday is a worse problem than it sounds. We upgraded to Starlink Roam Unlimited, roughly $150 a month, and now see real-world speeds of 200+ Mbps down and 50 to 70 Mbps up with no cap to watch. The extra $100 a month buys peace of mind more than raw speed: not wondering if you'll run out of data four hours into a client meeting. If your weekly usage is anywhere near that range, the math on the unlimited plan works out fast. Here's the Starlink plan page if you want to compare current pricing against your own usage.

30-Amp Power and Surge Protection

From our rig: Our coach is 30 amp, and the pedestal gets a surge protector before anything else gets plugged in, every time, no exceptions. Campground power is inconsistent enough that skipping this step is how you find out the hard way what a bad pedestal does to sensitive electronics. The exact unit, the ritual, and the questions people ask about it are in 30 Amp RV Surge Protector. If you want to check current pricing on that model, here's where to look it up.

Solar Sizing: Size the Day, Not the Panel

Worth knowing: Solar comes up in almost every off-grid power question, and most guides jump straight to panel wattage. That's backwards. The number that actually matters is how many watt-hours your day costs, laptop, monitor, Starlink, and everything else pulling power, before you size anything else. I lay out that math and the point where solar quits and the generator has to take over in How Much Solar to Work From an RV.

The guides below go deeper on each of these, from picking a waterfront site to running video calls with none of this drama showing on the call.