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Hi. My name is Chuck and I just picked up hull #297 on Thursday in Panama City, FL. Immediately pulled it up to Augusta, GA where I'm visiting my grandson and GDIL (that's grand daughter-in-love). Tomorrow I'll head towards Shreveport and then Allen, Texas for Thanksgiving with my Dad, sister and her family. My profile contains more of my story, but I'm looking forward to lots of great trips, learning a lot, sharing my experiences and meeting other Oliver owners. I'm currently camping at a Boondockers Welcome site in Augusta. Host has been great and I'm only 15 minutes from the kids. I'm towing with a 2019 Expedition Limited. I'll be picking up 2 Zamp panels plus the roofcap in Dallas next week for DIY install at home in Monument, CO when I get a stretch of good weather. I'll try to document that process for the benefit of others who may care to follow. I've already been following this forum and have gained some invaluable knowledge -- THANKS! BTW -- I can't figure out how to add a signature line. Anyone point me in the right direction? TIA 10FCC3B7-054C-4590-9447-333E0FF20452.heic

Welcome, Chuck, and congrats on your “new” trailer. Enjoy your trek across the US to California! Mike

Chuck - And NOW you really are a part of the Family. Welcome for real! About that "signature" thing - just click on your name and then on "edit profile". scroll all the way to the bottom of your profile and there is a section called "signature". Type what you want your signature to be in that box and save it and your done. Bill

Hi Chuck, Welcome to the Oliver Owners' Forums!

From my experience the urine tank is not an issue. Its easy to empty and replace. For me its not worth the effort to redirect. I did look at using the black water tank as a water storage, but as Overland commented, water has not been much of an issue. I carry a spare 8 gallon container in the truck, which has worked out well. I have repeatedly used it to transfer H2o into the trailer tank (it is very easy on the Oliver). If there was ONE thing I would change on the O it would be the 3 power source fridge - I'd go DC compressor- but until the current one really pisses me off or finally quits, it will stay. Next would be the jet engine on the roof called the ac. Urine tank never comes to mind. Happy Thanksgiving all.

Ahatter, like on any other forum you’ll find a lot of experts here who are dying to tell you what not to do with your trailer. As for the rest of us - get out there, do your thing, and report back. Preferably with pictures.

The black tank is indeed black ABS, not poly, which is actually fine for potable water. The main reason the factory cannot do this mod is that their “RV whatever” certification requires that sewer and fresh have to remain completely separate, but there is no reason an owner cannot modify it, as long as you get rid of the connections to the nasty parts. The pee tank in the Natures Head is fine, you add a few ounces of vinegar to it when empty, and rinse the urine each time with a couple of squirts of vinegar from a spray bottle. Smells are a non issue as long as your toilet vent fan keeps running. You need to keep the filters clean. Removing a full tank is pretty painless. Just be careful about spills. There is a big Natures Head thread here, I can get you a link if you like. John Davies Spokane WA

tl;dr - absolutely buy this, and depending on how you use your kitchen sink, maybe buy this. When we started looking at campers/trailers one of my requirements was that we should be able to go for a full week without refilling our water supply, using an estimated 7 gallons of water per day for both my wife and me, which included a daily shower for each of us. That was ~50 gallons, so we knew we couldn't get that with the Ollie, but were hoping that with some diligence and an extra 12 gallons carried in the truck that we could stretch a calculated 6 days into 7. That never happened, and of course we actually slid the other direction, getting more like 5 days - 3.5 from the trailer tank and another 1.5 from the extra water. I think if we really ran the tanks dry that we'd have gotten 6 full days but we never had a situation to really test that, mostly since we'd start to get nervous around the 20% mark and would go find water. Then last year I replaced the kitchen faucet, and the new one had an aerator that really had no flow restriction at all. It was rated at 2.5 gallons/minute vs 1.5 for the standard Delta faucet Oliver uses. And it also has a short little lever that made it hard to adjust to a small stream to save water. We could do it, but it was a pain. I realized last month though that the faucet would take a standard sized aerator, so I decided to buy a few to test them out. The ones I got were better, but made my cool kitchen faucet seem average, and I couldn't have that. But a little internet sleuthing led me to The Mikado. It restricts the flow to an amazing 0.35 gallons per minute and has the coolest spiral spray pattern you've ever seen. At only 0.35 gpm, I imagine you'd get pretty frustrated if you wanted to fill a glass of water; but we use bottled water and only use the kitchen faucet to do dishes and wash hands, so that low of a flow rate actually works out perfectly for us. We lost the ability to switch between two different sprays, but we never used that feature anyway. With that success, I decided to take on the shower. The highest rated low flow shower head I could find is the High Sierra. It's not a looker by any means - it's downright ugly. But it seemed like anyone who's ever rated shower heads has placed them at the top of their list, and it has a flow rate of only 1.5 gpm vs Oliver's 2.2, so I put my aesthetic sense to the side and ordered it. In its favor, it feels great in the hand - very heavy and solid, and it also has a trickle feature like the faucets Oliver used to use, which is great for keeping the water warm while sudsing up. Not in its favor is that I found it nearly impossible to connect to the hose from Oliver's faucet. I ended up having to order an oddball adapter and then modifying that to make it work. (It would have been easier just to have swapped out the entire faucet, which is what I'd recommend anyone else do.) But even with the adapter, it does slide back into the faucet just like the original, so apart from being a pain to make work, it does work just the same. But I have to say that this shower head is truly amazing. It has a surprisingly forceful stream that feels as if it's using twice as much water as before, if not more. It works so well that I didn't believe it was only using 1.5 gpm and had to test it myself - which made me even more surprised since I actually got a little less. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this really transformed the shower, and I highly recommend it to everyone, whether you're trying to save water or not. But it is ugly. After both of those mods, I thought I'd see if lowering the water pressure would make any difference, and found that 40 psi was about the point that I started to notice some drop off in the shower output. The sink stayed the same regardless what I set the pressure at. In fact it will actually run for a good while with the pump off, just from residual pressure in the pipes. So I've set both the pump and my external pressure regulator to 40 now, which I suppose helps my plumbing and maybe makes some dent in water usage though I doubt much. The result? 8 full days this past trip with both of us taking showers each day, split roughly 5/3 for the Ollie's tank and the extra gallons in the truck. So 2+ extra days of water while at the same time improving the quality of the water at both the sink and the shower and being able to lower the water pressure. Really A+ results. I don't know how often we'll actually need a full week's worth of water, but on this last trip it worked out well for us since only once were we someplace that we could actually hook up the trailer to a hose, which meant a lot fewer trips to get water. Also it means a little less stress and obsessing over water use, which is a good thing. By the way, the replacement aerator may work with the stock faucet, but I'm embarrassed to say that somehow I've lost mine* so I can't check. *Along with the sink. How do you lose a sink?