There are some wonderful overnight trail rides here in VA. I would love to go to them or even go to the state parks with trail riding. Unfortunately I have severe sleep apnea (109 incidents an hour) need a CPAP machine to sleep safely at night. Anyone else have this problem and what do you do other than get a horse trailer with LQ (and even then most places won’t let you run a generator overnight.)
You can buy a CPAP battery online for a couple hundred dollars - just make sure it’s compatible with your brand of machine. It looks like they’re rechargeable via your car charger.
ETA: This is from Googling and patient experiences – I haven’t used a CPAP or battery personally.
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This site lists State Parks in VA with horse camping, and 4 of them offer sites with electric hookups. http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/document/horse-trails-camping.pdf
You might also look into other commercial campgrounds, some of which offer stabling and also have more modern accommodations such as cabins with electricity, have their own trails or access to public trails. A simple Google search for Virginia horse campgrounds is bringing up several of these.
If you’re really set on tent/primitive camping, you’ll have to look into the battery as suggested above or something like a large solar powerbank. I have no idea how much power a CPAP pulls so you’d have to do the research to make sure whatever you have will last through the night.
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I’m not a camper, but after enduring 11 nights without electricity following a hurricane a number of years ago, I got the stuff I needed to run my CPAP off a marine deep cycle battery. It stores enough power to run a CPAP for a couple of nights. But, the battery is large and heavy, like a car battery, so not something you can easily carry around.
It takes a lot of power to run a CPAP plus humidifier. If you don’t need the humidifier, it’s a bit more feasible but it’s quite expensive (by my standards) to buy everything you need to run on batteries and get enough power to last all night.
Go to CPAP.com and click on “Power Solutions.” I’ve been buying all my CPAP machines and supplies from them for years and have been very happy with the company and their customer service staff are generally very knowledgeable and helpful.
If your CPAP has a humidifier, turn it off. This will save power. A small inverter will run a Resmed S10 for 2 nights on a 78 sized auto battery. We tried it at home before camping. Some CPAPs have a 12 volt DC option. That will last even longer on a battery since the conversion to 120 AC and back to DC is eliminated.
If I could find the Resmed 10 connector, I would just use two 12 volt batteries in series. (S10 runs on 24 volts DC)
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My husband prefers a campsite with hookups, but uses a marine deep cycle battery if there is no electricity. The longest we’ve tried was four nights, and that worked ok. It is true that the battery is very heavy though.
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Good idea, but it runs from a Greenworks" 40 volt battery only. That battery only has 4 AHr at 40 volts. Not enough for any of our CPAPs to operate 8 hours with a reserve. Would have to get a battery change in the middle of the night.
Amazon has tons of different battery/ power supply packs listed for camping. Almost all of them have several reviews from CPAP users
I like camping with my horses also. Most of the state parks that I have camped at have hook ups. Just run heavy duty electric cord from the power at the camp site into your trailer. I rough camp sleeping in the back of my horse trailer after cleaning it out. Put a tarp down, then camping mat. I set up a cot. You could get a little folding table to set near the head of your cot.
Okay everyone thanks for the ideas. The primitive camps will generally be ones where it’s an event trail ride and the camping is in someones field. There are some really great trails around here that are only open the the public during these weekend rides. On thing I’ve been thinking about is the resmed mini air but they don’t have the battery working with it yet but it provides humidification without a humidifier it might not draw as much.
