Leaderboard

We just picked up our Elite and the end of last March. Had a fine time meeting many of the crew at Oliver, Anita made us a pot of killer bean soup, and it was beautiful in Tennessee! We took the long way home, taking 3 weeks and over 2500 miles to get back, with about 2/3 of that spent boondocking in various campgrounds. We absolutely love the trailer and it sheltered us well through freezing temps, snow, wind, and mountain squalls. One thing we began to notice while boondocking was that when the water level gets around 36% +/-, the water pump would cycle for a much longer period of time before shutting off (like a minute). As the level got down below 33% +/-, the pump would not shut off at all. After much head scratching, calls to Oliver, and checking for air leaks or any anomaly, I discovered the issue. The outlet tube that is at the "bottom" of the tank, is actually kind of high up. The tank itself (32.5 gallon) is 4.5" in overall height. The distance from the bottom of the tank to the top of the outlet tube is 1.5 inches! What this means is that as soon as the water level gets down to the top of that tube, the water pump will begin sucking air and loose prime. I was very careful to make sure my trailer was absolutely level while checking on this. This is a 33% loss of available water in the tank (10 gallons). The only way to get to it is to raise up the front of the trailer, but this has it's own negative issues (refrigerator, black tank/toilet, come to mind) I would be curious to hear from you boondockers how you have dealt with this. Has anyone modified their tank or has this not been such a big issue to you? To me, this seems like a big design issue that Oliver needs to look at. The problem now is that the adapter/fitting that the pex tubing attaches to is glued to the exterior of the tank and there needs to be room for the gluing flange all around the adapter, this moves the tube up the tank wall. There has to be a solution out there somewhere. 10 gallons is a lot of water! I would never expect a 100% discharge, but only 66% is difficult to swallow, no pun intended there ;-)! Thanks, and again, we love our Oliver and I would and will recommend it to anyone. Just want to make it even better, and learn more about this kind of travel (this is our first trailer). Regards, Dave