I went camping in a heat dome, and these five gadgets saved my vacation

I recently returned from a family camping trip to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I live in South Carolina, so in mid-July, a trip to the mountains is usually an excellent way to seek out cooler temperatures. Not this year.

Thanks to this summer’s heat dome, I was facing a week of feels-like temperatures upwards of 100 degrees — and no air conditioning. I went into planning mode.

We were camping in our Rockwood Mini Lite RV, which meant we had a fridge, access to power outlets, and water. But the campground didn’t have electrical or water hookups, so we needed our own power and some portable cooling.

Normally, you’d expect an RV to provide all of that. Not on this trip. Camping can get messy when things go wrong, and it’s a good thing that I review gadgets for a living, as I brought along five that saved our vacation.

Our camping spot was in Cades Cove, a wide valley deep in the western range of the Smoky Mountains, about 10 miles from the small town of Townsend, Tennessee. We arrived a little after 9PM ET, which was too late to start our generator; campgrounds limit when you can run them due to noise, so we switched over to the RV’s 12-volt batteries.

Or so we thought. Something was wrong with the trailer’s wiring that connected to the battery system. We were going to have to be creative to make it through the next seven days of sweltering heat.

Smart gadget save number one: I pulled out the Govee Table Lamp 2 Pro X Sound by JBL and placed it on the table in our RV. The large, battery-powered LED lamp provided enough light to unpack, and, as a bonus, its speaker meant that I could stream some tunes over Bluetooth from my phone while we were working.

Next, I set up the Switchbot Smart Circulator Fan; its oscillation and powerful airflow created enough of a breeze to move air through the RV, which was a sweat box after seven hours of driving through the Carolinas and Tennessee in the blazing sun.

Some light, a breeze, and music. Things were looking up. A little.

With no power, our RV fridge stocked with a week’s worth of food was in serious danger. That’s where a portable power station came to the rescue. I’d recently started testing the EcoFlow Delta Pro 3 for home backup power, and I’d brought it along to see what uses I might have for it while camping.

One thought was to test how long it could power the RV’s air conditioning (something we never use unless we have full hookups in a campground). We had fully charged both the main power station battery and its expansion battery before we left the house, and when we plugged it into the trailer’s AC shore power port, everything silently powered up. It was a huge relief.

At this point, using the EcoFlow for the trailer’s power-hungry air conditioner was off the table. We wanted its 4000Wh of stored energy capacity to last as long as possible. So, it would be tasked with just keeping the RV’s main electrics going, including lights, outlets, a 5-gallon hot water heater, and the refrigerator. We planned to juice it back up with our gas generator (as I didn’t have any solar panels to recharge it, or much sun in the forest).

This is where the portable fans I’d hastily purchased when I first saw the forecast came in handy.

My daughter, on the top bunk, had this fairly basic Koonie Clip Fan, which I picked for its clip-on base and decent 10,000mAh battery. The $40 fan easily lasted her through the night on one charge, running on its medium setting. It was also whisper-quiet.

My son got this Koonie Camping Fan, with a beefy 16,000mAh battery, bright orange color, and built-in power bank for charging other devices. I mainly chose it for its integrated hook, which meant I could hang it upside down from the bunkbed ladder. It also oscillates, has built-in lights, and comes with a remote control. It worked great for him, but it was a bit noisy on its highest setting. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking someone had left their generator on.

I set up the Switchbot fan for my husband and me. He scoffed at my insistence on packing this. It’s not exactly compact, and while it has a handle and works on battery or AC power, it’s nowhere near as portable as the other fans. But we would have slept miserably without it, which my husband gracefully conceded after the first night.

The base of the fan can rotate 90 degrees, and the fan itself can move vertically, allowing it to circulate the air, helping keep the entire sleeping area comfortable without the drying feeling of having a fan blasting at you. It’s super quiet, has a built-in LED, and I could control it with my phone over Bluetooth.

The next morning, the EcoFlow was down to just 10 percent. I was surprised it only lasted 12 hours despite the relatively light loads in our RV and, obviously, we hadn’t run the air conditioner. But I later learned that because we were using AC power and not DC, the idle consumption of the inverter in a big power station like this is fairly high.

My husband set up the gas generator to recharge the EcoFlow. It took about six hours and two gallons of gas to charge it to 90 percent, where we stopped because we needed to turn on the power.

It turns out that we couldn’t charge the EcoFlow and simultaneously power the trailer; it was too much of a draw on our small Honda generator (the now-discontinued EU2000i). We also couldn’t charge the EcoFlow power station while the extra battery was connected, as that also overloaded the Honda.

It’s possible we could have lowered the charging input threshold of the EcoFlow using the app, but I hadn’t researched this before we got into the middle of the mountains, and with no Wi-Fi and no cell service, we were out of luck.

So, we put away the expansion battery and set up the generator to charge the main EcoFlow during the day while we were out biking the 11-mile Cades Cove loop, exploring waterfalls, trail riding, hiking through the Smokies, and spotting more bears than we could count.

Without its extra battery pack, the EcoFlow lasted us about seven hours, just enough to get us through most of the night — keeping the fridge chilled and the fans running. When it died, the fans fell back on their batteries, so we stayed cool until morning.

We continued this cycle for the rest of the trip, and it worked really well, allowing us to focus on enjoying our family time together rather than coping with the elements.

Yes, we would have survived without power; we were camping after all, but these five battery-powered devices, with the help of the gas generator, ensured this was a family trip to remember for the right reasons.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge