Our boat has dual Cummins 370HP 4-stroke diesel engines, and we tend to be averaging about 1.8 nautical mile per gallon.Ĭertainly not great fuel ‘economy’ for a vehicle, but actually not bad for moving a house around the country.Our bus, with a Detroit Diesel 8v71 2-stroke diesel engine has averaged about 7-8 mpg.Fuel to us is part of our housing costs as nomads, not just a transportation cost. Or as we prefer to call it – pouring rent into the tank.
Fuel Filling the tanks… we prefer to look at it as rent. we’re not paying $248 + $164 every month in fuel – it’s one or the other each month). So the monthly costs below can be treated individually, they don’t stack on top of each other (ie. I’ve taken our life to date totals for each category & vessel and divided by the service months. Service is months we’re traveling/living aboard the boat and the bus is in storage. We’ve owned Y-Not for 39 months, however only 29 of those have been in service. Service is basically months we’re traveling/living in the bus and the boat is in storage. Those costs aren’t being compared here – but obviously, the van is the cheapest of all our options to operate.įor the purposes of trying to compare the costs, I’m using service months as opposed to owned months in the monthly averages below.Īt the time of this writing, we’ve owned Zephyr for 103 months – but have had her in service for 75. We do also now have a van conversion that we added to the fleet a year ago that we use for short camping trips, as a daily driver, and for transport between our boat and bus seasons. Our 2016 Winnebago Travato is our cheapest home to operate. We intend to cruise from spring to fall, and then return to RV life for winters. Thus far, we’ve been covering about 500-1000 miles a year. When traveling in our boat, we’ve found a delightful pace of cruising for a week or two spending most nights anchoring out, and then finding our next extended monthly stay at a marina in a cool new city to explore. Zephyr is now our home part of the year and will be spending her foreseeable future seasonally roaming around the desert southwest, with a basecamp at our Co-Op park in Arizona where we have a lifetime lease to a lot. We would mix up our stays between boondocking on public land, moochdocking with friends, Harvest Hosts (save 15% with our affiliate link) and stays of several days in public parks (state, county, city, federal, etc).Ībout once or twice a year we’d take a monthly spot to get caught up on life, and mixed in some volunteer hosting.
#MOTORHOME VS. RV BOONDOCKING IN COLORADO FULL#
Differing Travel Styles Bus Travelsįrom 2011 – 2017, we traveled full time in our bus typically covering about 6-8k miles a year. And while our boat cost more to acquire than our bus, there are boats and RVs of all price ranges out there.
#MOTORHOME VS. RV BOONDOCKING IN COLORADO FREE#
We own both free and clear (just paid off the boat – woohoo!), so we have no payments on either. Our boat is pretty ‘standard’ issue as far as motor yachts go – being one of the more mass produced models on the market. Two bedrooms, two baths (one with a bath TUB), four stories tall, dedicated kitchen, salon, pilothouse and flybridge. She’s 47′ long (as per documentation, but really 52′), 15′ wide and 30k lbs. Y-Not had been maintained & loved by her prior owner. Our boat is a 1999 Bayliner 4788 that we acquired for $152,000 in 2017. Get a tour of Zephyr Y-Not – our 1999 Bayliner 4788 She’s far from being a typical modern day motorhome to maintain or operate. A single bedroom and bathroom, kitchen & office combined, and living room with couch & chair. Zephyr came to us already about 15 years behind on general maintenance, and had been sitting in a storage yard mostly abandoned before we found her. The RV we’re comparing is our 1961 GM 4106 vintage bus conversion that we acquired in 2011 for just $8000. The two vessels we’re comparing: Zephyr – our 1961 GM 4106. They’re just so different – not just in the costs, but in how we approach each lifestyle. Or heck, apples to screwdrivers (wait, isn’t that a squished orange with vodka?). It’s important to note that trying to compare our boat life to our RV life is like comparing apples to some other fruit of your choice. We’re going to break this down in to four primary cost categories: it should come as no surprise to anyone, the boat costs more.īut the more detailed analysis of the costs is very interesting to dig deeper into.įirst, our video explaining things (19m): Now that we’ve had our boat for three years (3 years?!?!), we have enough numbers to do a proper comparison of the typical travel & operating costs.Īnd spoiler alert. Ever since we purchased our motor yacht to start exploring the Great Loop after over a decade of full time RVing – we’ve been asked the question “which costs more?” multiple times.
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