We got 99 problems but the view ain't one! Things take a frustrating turn at a favorite campground

We found one of our most scenic campsites at Las Vegas Bay Campground and fell in love with the Lake Mead region. So, when we were given the opportunity to return, we drove full speed ahead. Anthony's parents told us that, if we're ever back in the Las Vegas area, let them know and they'd fly out to visit. We had no immediate plans after our stay in Williams, AZ, but we knew we needed to start heading north. We could either go up through Arizona towards Page, or skirt around back through Nevada and into Utah along I-15. We made our plans to enjoy Lake Mead once again, while being only 35 minutes from Vegas fun with the parents.

Las Vegas Bay Campground is in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and offers boondocking spots for $20/night. For us, it's well worth the price to reserve ahead of time, choose our spot (we have two sites with our favorite views), and let our solar do its thing. We had already given our new solar setup ample testing with three straight weeks of boondocking, including here at Las Vegas Bay, and so we were surprised and perplexed that, when we pulled into our campsite, something was wrong.

Our solar wasn't pulling in the amount of power we'd expect from the sunny Nevada desert. We had a direct comparison point, given that we had recently stayed in the site next to us, on a less-than-stellar week sun-wise, and yet, here we were drawing a mere 700 watts max when we should have been getting much more. It was later in the afternoon when we arrived, so perhaps the sun was lower than we thought. We waited until high noon the following day to dive deeper into troubleshooting.

Sure enough, our suspicions were confirmed the following day. We seemed to be getting only 2/3 the amount of power from our panels. It was time to begin checking all of our solar components, from the panels themselves, to the wiring, to the inverter and charge controller.

At the same time, because we were boondocking in Nevada in springtime, temperatures got hot and we purposely got a powerful inverter so we could run our air conditioning. Thankfully, that all worked fine, but it meant more running of our generator to keep our batteries charged. Not a huge deal; we were in a campground loop where generators are allowed. We were just frustrated that we needed to waste generator fuel at times we typically wouldn't, if we had our full solar capacity. One of the reasons for investing in such a hefty solar setup was to have exceptional off-grid capacity, so we could get a return on investment. Every gallon of generator fuel used is more money spent on gas.

Our solar woes quickly went from bad to worse when we started getting error indicators that our batteries were low when they weren't, and that our inverter was reading too high a temperature. The storage bay that houses the inverter isn't climate-controlled and also happened to be facing south at our site, so we weren't surprised that it was heating up quickly and intensely. But our inverter should be able to reach max temps of 150°F. We opened our storage bay doors and stuck a portable fan inside to get airflow. That's when we noticed not just the inverter being extremely hot to the touch, but it also smelled like it was burning, and the fan and motor were running loudly.

We dove into lots of research and troubleshooting to try and figure out the source of this overheating. Could it really just be the temperature in the storage bay? Did it have to do with us overloading the system? We decided to test a long list of combinations of appliances to see how they'd affect the inverter's performance. We quickly discovered that the air conditioning + microwave combo was a no-go, as well as the AC + Instant Pot. All other combinations seemed to work fine. We understood this better after doing some reading. Even though we have a 3000 watt inverter, if we're drawing more than 2400 watts, the inverter can't keep up. Because the microwave is an inductive load and the Instant Pot runs on high wattage more instantly than our other appliances, both of these appliances cause an overload when running in conjunction with the AC. Basically, we were running on too high a wattage in those few seconds, which caused a small brown-out in our electrical system.

We have no problem needing to turn off our AC temporarily while we use the microwave, and perhaps Instant Pot meals would need to wait until cooler temperatures. Because this was our first time running our solar on hot days, we hit a learning curve, but better to learn everything now than later.

We thought we were out of the woods at least as far as the inverter was concerned, but even when running smaller loads on our system, we still got error messages and cuts to our power. Soon, Anthony had an epiphany and realized the error of his ways.

We have a converter/inverter hybrid, which runs our new system, but we also still have our old converter. When we use the generator to charge the batteries, we can turn the old converter on to help us charge faster. Anthony had done this, but he forgot to shut off our old converter when he turned off the generator. This meant the converter was empty voltage running into our new inverter, which created a deadly cycle: the batteries provide 12V power to the inverter, which creates 120V AC power. That power then gets fed into the old converter, which turns it back into 12V power to feed into the batteries. What this does is creates a whole lot of extra wasted energy, and therefore a whole lot of extra heat. This also meant that we had even less allotted power when running our appliances, which caused our max load to be reached even faster.

We dodged a bullet on that one, and thankfully caught our overloading mistake before irreparable damage incurred on our inverter. The inverter is the powerhouse of our whole system. Without it, we wouldn't be able to boondock with any power.

So that solved our inverter issue, but we still had less solar energy coming in. We had been texting with our solar contractor to figure out what we could do. We feared a faulty panel would send us right back to his ranch, which was in the opposite direction we were supposed to be traveling, but we still had some tests to run. Anthony spent the next few days up on the aluminum roof at peak sun (and therefore hot temperatures) cleaning the panels, checking the electrical connections, and running voltage tests.

While all this was happening on the roof, more problems ensued at ground level. Las Vegas Bay Campground has an underwater irrigation system that runs on hot days to provide water to the campground vegetation. The pipe nearest our campsite sprung a leak, and suddenly a rush of water was running into our site and pooling under our trailer. We had puddles over two inches deep in some areas - which just happened to be the same places Anthony needed to place his ladder to get up and down off the roof. We called the park rangers to alert them to the problem, and they said they'd send someone out to look.

No one came out for over 24 hours. We didn't push the issue because the irrigation system only ran for a couple hours and then turned off. It was so hot and dry out that the water evaporated rather quickly. We always lower our stabilizer jacks onto plastic blocks so they don't get ruined in soft ground, but now we have an additional reason: so they won't be sitting in water and rusting! We also needed to move our extra propane tank so the bottom wouldn't rust. The only other worry we had was our Starlink wiring, which we needed to move out of the water's vicinity. When the ranger did come out, the irrigation was off, so there wasn't anything he could do in that moment. The pipe-turned-fountain was also sitting in a large bush so it wasn't easy to access.

Over the course of our stay, every time the irrigation system turned on, our site would flood. The park staff were probably waiting for us to leave so they could go into the bush and repair the leak. They'd be waiting a long time.

We initially booked Las Vegas Bay for 6 days, departing on a Wednesday, but Anthony's parents weren't able to get a flight out until that Monday. To give ourselves more time together, we extended our stay until that Friday. On Monday, we got a call from Anthony's parents. Floods in Florida grounded a bunch of planes, and their flight got canceled. With no way out to Vegas, they canceled their trip. Since we were already booked to Friday anyways and we were smack-dab in the middle of troubleshooting, we decided to finish out our week. We couldn't leave until we knew whether or not we'd need to go back to Boondoctor Ranch to get a replacement solar panel. In the meantime, we had ordered some connectors for the panel wires to see if a connector might be faulty. We sat and waited for the parts to get delivered.

At one point when Anthony was busy on the roof, Nicole chose to be productive, tackling some needed repairs inside. When we got vinyl flooring, we wound up with a pretty sizeable gap between the flooring and our entryway floor mat that comes stock with the trailer. We can see the light of day through this gap, so to keep critters from coming in, we always want it sealed. We have changed the transitional piece a couple of times before, ultimately eliminating the original piece and replacing it with an adhesive strip. Over time and with all the foot traffic coming in and out of the rig, eventually this strip wore down and broke apart. We had extra, so Nicole decided to peel up the strip and adhere more down. This time, the solution worked less favorably. We didn't have as much material as we'd need to do a thorough job, and shortly after Nicole laid down the replacement strip, Tanner - who likes to lay by the front door when we're out - got his fur stuck in the adhesive and ended up pulling the strip up along with him when we stood up. We came home to a crumpled up strip lying on the ground, with clumps of fur stuck to it. We needed a better, more permanent solution.

During one of our many Amazon locker and hardware store trips into Henderson, NV, we bought a metal transition that we felt would match the coloring of our flooring. We had only recently bought a multitool with attachments that would cut both wood and metal, and having never used it, thought cutting the transition would be good practice. It wasn't easy, given that we have no workbench or vice for precise cutting, and we needed to cut the piece on a curve to hug our wall. But, after about an hour of work, we had a sufficient cut, sanded down the rough edges, and Nicole got to work placing it down and reinforcing it with adhesive and tacks. (We found no nails or screws that were the right size because we can't easily nail into our metal floor. The tacks provide a little more security, but they're mostly just aesthetic to plug the holes where nails are supposed to go. The bulk of the transition piece is held down by Nano Tape, and while we don't think this solution will last forever, it's been surprisingly secure so far).

Nicole's next task was to figure out the toilet pedal. In case you don't know, many RV toilets flush by using a foot pedal. This pedal connects to a series of levers that will open a fresh water valve for flushing, and when pushed further, will open the toilet flap to let the waste into the black tank chute below. Anthony had recently replaced the seal to the flap as routine maintenance, but since then, the foot pedal was getting stuck and grinding whenever we pressed it. It still flushed fine, but there was definitely something wrong. Nicole figured it might be a quick fix before things got worse. Whenever plastic is grinding on more plastic, it's only a matter of time before something wears away or chips, and we didn't want a mountain of trouble if we could fix just a molehill.

The momentum of repairs made Nicole a little too overzealous, and in her troubleshooting of the toilet, she learned the hard way that she had forgotten to shut off the water pump. All of a sudden, the foot pedal got stuck in the "flush" position, and then bowl started filling with water. Panicked and unable to reach the pump switch in time, she forced the stuck pedal up manually and a little piece of plastic flew off. She did get the water to stop running, though! Silver linings. After that, the foot pedal was stuck even more than before and was barely usable. Crap!

After alerting Anthony (still on the roof) that she "broke the toilet," Nicole quickly went to the internet to get all the information on RV toilet repair. Unsurprisingly, RV toilets break all the time, because in typical RV fashion, the parts are made with cheap-quality plastics. For something that RVers use multiple times a day, cheap plastic can be a problem. There was a bright side, though. We have a Thetford toilet, which we learned to our delight is a great brand for replacing components. Dometic toilets, not so much. Basically if you're an RVer with a Dometic toilet, if one little piece breaks, you're looking at buying a whole new toilet. Thetford, on the other hand, sells extra water valves and lever parts. Anthony took the toilet apart to investigate where the plastic piece broke from. As we feared, it came from the little lever that allows the flap to open when flushing. That's why the pedal got stuck in "position 2" - filling with water and not actually flushing down into the chute. So, it was time to place another order and patiently await its arrival to the Amazon locker.

Let's take this moment to comment on how fortunate we were to actually be close to civilization when all this mayhem ensued. We had no shortage of Amazon lockers, hardware stores, Wal-Marts, and more, where we could get all our supplies. Another reason to stay at Las Vegas Bay until we had everything sorted out. As such, we extended our stay another two days, giving us until that Sunday to get everything squared away.

Here's the recap at this point:

1. We had solved our inverter overheating issue and remained prudent on which appliances we ran in conjunction with our very necessary and appreciated air conditioning.
2. We were waiting on parts for our solar panels to see if we could deduce what was causing the lower input levels.
3. We were also waiting on replacement parts for our toilet lever, and in the meantime making many trips to the bathhouse which thankfully was only a minute's walk from our site. We were able to half-use our toilet, but we'd need to manually turn the little plastic lever part to flush, which got a little wonky. Also, we were already boondocking for a while...in the heat...which can get a bit smelly when the flap in our toilet is open too long. We'll spare you the details on that, though.
4. We successfully replaced the transitional piece between our entryway and vinyl flooring, and no longer had a gap where desert critters could get in (sorry, scorpions!)
5. We had too much going on to care about the sporadic flooding of our campsite, which was occurring every 2-3 days.

To be continued...