Working From the Road

Why I Started Writing This Down

Most "work remotely from an RV" content comes from someone who tried it for a long weekend. I run a full technology leadership job out of a 2021 Thor Compass 23TW parked in a field in Tennessee: video calls, code reviews, AI agents running overnight while I sleep. Starlink works fine. The internet was never the hard part. What actually breaks a workday out here is the water tank, the fuel gauge, and the fact that two people cannot share one thin-walled box and both be on a call at the same time.

This hub is the field manual I wish someone had handed me before I started. Seven parts below, each one built around a problem I actually hit, with the real numbers that came out of hitting it. Below the list is the short version of what those numbers add up to, in case you want the highlights before you go read a full article.

Some links below are affiliate or referral links, if you buy through one I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend gear I actually use, see my full kit on the My RV Setup page. Full disclosure.

The Real Bottleneck Is Power, Not Wifi

Starlink itself is not the problem. On a good day I see roughly 250 Mbps down and 50 up on the same Starlink dish two of us share, plenty for AI coding sessions, video calls, and evening streaming at the same time. What actually kills the connection is the RV's own air conditioner. A rooftop AC compressor pulls somewhere between 3,000 and 4,500 watts for a fraction of a second every time it kicks on, and that surge is enough to brown out a generator and reboot the Starlink router mid-meeting.

Two fixes actually work. The first is putting a battery between the generator and the gear so Starlink and the laptop never see the surge at all; that's the whole job of the EcoFlow unit I run as a UPS, and it buys about 4.5 to 5 hours of runtime if the generator quits entirely. The second is fixing the surge at the source with a MicroAir EasyStart soft-start kit wired to the AC compressor, which can cut that 4,500-watt spike down under 2,000 watts. I also keep an AT&T prepaid hotspot as a dumb backup, because redundancy is not paranoia when a dropped call costs you a client.

The 72-Hour Water and Waste Clock

Every 3 to 4 days, work stops, no matter what's on the calendar. In our Thor Compass the fresh tank holds about 41 gallons, gray and black run about 32 each. With two people showering, cooking, and making coffee every morning, fresh and gray fill up at nearly the same rate. When either one hits its limit, that's the schedule now, not the meeting on the calendar.

The number that would have saved me a mess the first time: dump at 75 percent, not 100. The black tank holds 32 gallons and the portable waste tote we drag to the dump station only holds about 30, so a full tank overflows the tote before you're done. Dumping a little early keeps you under the tote's limit and cuts down on what you're hauling.

What the Generator Actually Costs

The generator runs off the same fuel tank as the engine, which I didn't think about until it mattered. It's built to auto-shutoff around 25 percent fuel so you're not stranded with an empty tank and no way to drive to a station, but that also means the generator, and with it Starlink, can go dark mid-workday if you're not watching the gauge.

Running two RVs, more on why below, roughly doubles the fuel bill: about $200 to $315 a week in spring with the AC barely running, climbing past $440 a week once summer heat means both air conditioners are on most of the day. Nobody selling the "cheap nomad life" mentions that number.

Two People, Two Calls, Ten Feet Apart

My wife is a court reporter. She transcribes live legal proceedings and can't have a stray voice bleeding into her audio; I'm on Teams and Zoom calls most of the day running a technology team. We tried sharing one RV for about a day before we admitted it wasn't going to work in 200 square feet.

The fix was two RVs parked about ten feet apart, one Starlink dish on the ground between them covering both at that same 250/50 connection, no buffering even with live court reporting, AI coding, and video calls running at once. It costs more in fuel and setup, but it's the difference between two people who can both actually work and one household where nobody can take a call.

Mice, Mud, and the Cardinal at 6 AM

The stuff nobody puts in the brochure. Cold nights brought mice, and the fix that finally worked was cheap and a little strange: wrap a full ring of LED string lights around the RV's undercarriage, mice want dark corners, not a lit-up floor, and sprinkle peppermint soap around the perimeter as a second layer. Within a week of doing both, zero mice inside.

Mud season turns level ground into a problem for a generator that needs to sit flat and jacks that need solid footing. And for a few weeks, a cardinal decided the RV's driver-side mirror was a rival and attacked it every morning at 6 AM. Socks over the mirrors at night solved that one. None of it is difficult work. It's just work that never shows up in the "remote work from an RV" listicles.

Last updated September 19, 2026.