Leaderboard

We got our OLE2 in May of this year. My original thought was to get lead acid batteries and then upgrade to lithium later but found out you need a 3000 W inverter for lithium. So we got the 390 Ah lithium batteries with the 3000 W inverter and have been happy with them. We didn't get solar panels but did get a plug for a portable solar panel. In WI most campsites are shaded so I didn't think solar would be all that helpful. I have found I can run off batteries for 5-6 days and the batteries will be down to about 50%. I found out you can't run the microwave unless the batteries are over 80% but you can run a coffee maker. I didn't use A/C boondocking but found that with the awnings out to shade the sides and running the fan with the windows open in summer kept the trailer comfortable given it is well insulated. I did get the easystart so I can run the A/C with a 2000 W generator. Running the refrigerator off batteries when driving will take the batteries down to about 70% in 6 hours. The lithium batteries do charge quickly. When running the refrigerator on propane it is very efficient. I have had no trouble towing the OLE2 with my 2017 Tundra 5.7 L crew cab. It tows much much better than the 3 box trailers we had rented. In the about 5000 miles I have towed the Oliver I have gotten 10.2 to 11.9 MPG driving in the midwest. Overall I have been very happy with our Oliver LE2.

Our Progressive EMS system has a 'lifetime' replacement warranty, and it DOES monitor low power. It will shut off power to the camper. When power is restored to enough voltage it monitors for a while and then allows power to our unit. This feature is especially important in older CG, during peak usage or brownouts. Inconvenience, but better than replacing "stuff" on my nickel...

Foy's shower mat for ours we hope to take possession of in Jan 2022 🙂

Something isn’t right. Your batteries should be able to put out full power up until they’re almost dead. My guess is that the low voltage cutoff on your inverter is set too high. Larry and Linda, if you picked up your trailer in May, and if you have not updated firmware for the Lithionics batteries, I'm willing to bet that your State-of-Charge values are incorrect. Here is a thread that might help...

What a nice guy. That doesn't happen, everywhere.

Uneventful story. About 30 minutes after leaving Oliver Service, TPMS alarmed that my back left tire had a slow leak so I turned around & went back to the Oliver campground. That was the wonderful roadside assistance man from Libby's Auto & Diesel Towing who, instead of simply swapping out bad tire with spare (which is what he is supposed to do per contract with Progressive) fixed my valve stem in the freezing rain so that I would not have to continue my journey without a spare. So thankful! Chris

Something isn’t right. Your batteries should be able to put out full power up until they’re almost dead. My guess is that the low voltage cutoff on your inverter is set too high.

I have a 2019 Oliver #475 and there was this spot open to use for mounting the monitor. I admit that the app for the phone is much more user-friendly but for a quick look or for some reason your phone is not working or available I still would not want to be without the monitor. The shunt for the monitor is located in the battery compartment so the area I picked for mounting the monitor is directly above it, although it was challenging to connecting the wire between the shunt and the monitor. Looking into the pantry door, the inside corner to the front of the trailer is where you will drill down through three layers of fiberglass, pantry inner shell, pantry outer shell, and base cabinet. Then drill a hole through the side of pantry inner shell. Now use the drill to cut a trough between the two holes. The drill needs to be sized to allow the plastic terminal on the end of the cable to pass through the hole. Now using a fish tape pull the cable up from basement into the pantry. Then from the access hatch on the top of the pantry side wall feed the fish tape down between the walls to the hole you drilled in the side of the inner pantry shell. Now you can pull the cable the rest of the way up to where the monitor will be mounted. You will notice that the back side of the hole for the monitor is in a area that transitions to a different wall thickness in the middle of the hole so I used the threaded ring on the back in combination with the front mount that is provided with the monitor.

Last week before we picked up it was suggested that a "Where's Ollie" thread might be good for folks to post pictures of where they've been, maybe with a few comments about the location. I'll get it going.... This is Hillman Ferry State Park in KY at Land Between the Lakes. Nice campground, with lots of lake water activities. You can get a site right on the lake to fish from!

Not one single thing to complain about, Thus far its everything I expected and more. Tows like a dream behind the One-Ton (no anderson hitch just a 2-5/16 Ball.) My tongue weight is 610 Lbs. Fresh Water Tank is Full rest empty. My Hitch provides the actual weight on the spot. I can imagine others have a much higher tongue weight as I am single and pack very light in comparison to most. I do have two 15 gallon water jugs in the front box that I bought filled and strapped there to increase the tongue weight because at 490 Lbs. (This was the exact weight when I pulled it out of the factory and for the first 500 miles before I put any of my stuff inside of it) I was feeling a bit more feedback from the trailer than I appreciate and I figured the additional weight would change its attitude. It did and having the extra water along is a plus until I hit cold country next week then I may change them out for a couple sand bags. Before JD tells me the front box is only rated for 150 Lbs... I know... Its fine and I will beef it up before my next trip. I will post a couple pics when I get better service or home I think this Weigh Safe hitch may be something others find helpful especially if your in a situation where tongue weight is critical due to your tow vehicle. A quick google of "weighsafehitch" and you will be looking at it. I can attest to the fact that it works well and is much faster then finding and weighing on a CAT scale at a truck stop especially if your experimenting with different weights to find your comfort zone. At any rate Props to Oliver for building a quality product in a time when that is not so common anymore and I was very impressed with their staff and how I was treated by them on my pick up day. They are all working hard to push these units out the door but they are doing it with Grace and I appreciate that a lot and they deserve the credit for it. I have attended three Nascar races in a row now (I did not have the Oliver yet for the first two) and will be dry camping in the infield of Kansas City Speedway this weekend, this will be my first time dry camping and I am sure I will exceed the tanks capacity but they do have service running there to pump and fill so I am REALLY not dry camping but I will give it a go and see how long I can get by.... Trouble is that insta hot water heater works very well and it only takes a handful of showers to top off the grey when the water does not get cold. Oh, and the towel hooks somebody was hating on in their blog? they work perfectly, my towels have not fallen off in over a thousand miles and I doubt they ever will but you DO have to know how to hang the towel properly on this style hook..... thanks Grandma for that lesson years ago! Happy Trails Everyone, From Guthrie Oklahoma... For Now...

While I think the lithium package is really nice I don’t see how the 3k inverter is required for a lithium battery upgrade down the road. I hope this misinformation, along with $25k service department lithium upgrade estimates, are not being used to up sell right now. The response by @Minnesota Oli is really helpful in two ways. My guess is using an external transfer switch will keep rewiring to a minimum. Also his AC upgrade would provide another huge benefit to your 2k inverter because of the low power draw. It might be a better investment vs upgrading to the 3k inverter w/ longer battery endurance as well.

Thanks so much, Minnesota Oli, for your detailed, illustrated description. That is exactly the spot that I wanted, and my tech and I discussed completing just about exactly the same procedures as you describe for placing the monitor in that location. Yours looks sharp and just the way I imagined it would look. Others considering this location will benefit for sure from your help. However, I finally decided on a different location, mostly due to the oft-repeated reminder that the new product is blue-tooth enabled. Also is the consideration of avoiding putting another hole in the interior fiberglass, when in the future, for example, a different monitor may be desired. I have requested my tech to place it alongside the shunt, which will be placed under the dinette seat next to the pantry. There is, he discovered, a piece of wood over the wheel well under the hatch where he will secure the shunt and the monitor, placing the monitor in such a way to make it easily visible when I lift the hatch. I instructed him to leave the long wire attached in case I want to move the monitor elsewhere in the future. If I am unhappy with this placement, I may indeed use your great illustrated description to relocate it. Thanks again.

We really like our Nature Head compost toilet in our Oliver. My wife and I have never had a problem with urine going into the urine tank, athough I do sit down to make sure it goes into the correct spot. Yes the compost toilet does set several inches higher than the regular toilet. I bought a "Squatty Potty folding Bamboo toilet stool" so when we sit down our feet are placed on the stool for better comfort. I espically like not having to deal with empting the black water waste tank and not having to use fresh water in the regular toilet.

My Ollie got the Dexter EZ Flex suspension installed. While I was doing the install I decided to change out all the wheel bearings and seals to Timken roller bearings. The original bearings had “Made in China” on them and I simply could not rest well knowing that. There is just over 20k miles on the Ollie so it was probably a good time to change them out anyway. While the brake drums were off I did a complete inspection of the Nev R Adjust brakes. I was not pleased at all with what I found and decided to pull the brakes completely apart, clean them thoroughly, re-lube all the contact pads and actuators. The drums looked great and showed very little wear. The brake pads have less than half the pad wear of a new brake shoe……so they went back in. Two of the wheels had a brake drag I was not pleased with and when I inspected the brakes I was very disappointed in the action of the Nev R Adjust system. They all appear to move much better now that the system has been cleaned and lubricated as it should be. I was very surprised that the backing plates had no lube on them at all at the brake shoe contact points. We will see how they now work and adjust; if not working well, I will change out the backing plates to the regular manual adjust system. Not very impressed with the Nev R Adjust system as it just does not appear to be a very robust adjuster/brake system. I did add a new tool to my collection. It is a Milwaukee 2 speed electric grease gun. The battery is the same 18 volt I use on some of my other tools so this was an easy choice to make lube much easier. The EZ Flex has 8 zerks on each side and even with the angled zerks installed it still is somewhat of a pain to lube. I must mention that the electric grease gun will also make it much easier to lube my Kubota tractor and my Kubota zero turn mower as well. Tools Plus had the Milwaukee grease gun on a BlackFriday sale for $139, so that helped in making my decision. Lowest price around before the sale was $199, so this was a great buy. It even includes free shipping. Steve

This doesn't have anything to do with the original post but it's good heads up info for anyone using the less expensive PI portable surge protector. For about 6 months we were using the PI SSP-30XL Portable RV Smart Surge Protector instead of the onboard one because the onboard one frequently tripped our power. Conveniently, about two weeks prior to our Ollie service appointment our 30 amp shore power plug quit working. (We have another one by the propane tanks that we used instead.) According to Oliver service, the shore power plug quit working because the relay switch burned up &, that low power most likely caused the relay switch to fail. Most importantly, the portable surge protector does not monitor low power. Diagnostics on our onboard surge protector showed it was working fine but after digging a little further, the Oliver tech noticed that our shore power cord was dry rotted near the prongs. We replaced shore power cord & have had no problems.

Lots of great info here as I will be install a victron controller also. The zamp controller just doesn't cut it for me. Thanks to everyone for sharing ideas. PerryG

Thank You everyone. We are going to stay with the Lithium Package. Everyone's posts gave us great input and helped us make the decision to stick with Lithium. We found four (4) items to cut-out $1,500 (Laguna Table, shower curtain/track, the powered back flow control for gray water, and the extra front 30amp outlet). We spent 8 years playing the AMP Game. We now have the real peace of mind. After everyone's posts here and on Facebook, we got the answer we wanted. Enjoy the rest of the Thanksgiving Weekend. Happy and Safe Travels😊

We only have 10 days worth of camping, and haven't emptied the compost yet. We just got back from our last trip and I need to do empty the compost now because of the colder temperatures the defecation will not break down. I think we could make it at least 15 days without emptying the compost. One day was diarrhea. Have had no problems with smell or urine in the solids, nor clean up. Again as other have stated, a spray bottle of 25% vinegar/75% water used after urinating keeps all odors away. JohnL, WOW 3-4 days of Urine tank fill. We get about 32-36 hours if using the Oliver for all of our bodily functions. I never dreamed we would fill the urine tank that quickly, I guess we drink a lot of water. We did buy an extra Urine tank for longer trips, I am glad we did. One of us just carry the urine tank to the outhouse/park bathrooms to empty it without a bag. I figure this is camp ground. no big deal. If I have to go into a McDonald's in order to empty, I will put it inside a bag. Both my wife and I are nurses. Dealing with our own bodily waste, is preferable to dealing with someone else's waste products spilled around the dump stations. I really hate walking through waste at the dump station and then transferring that stuff back into the vehicle/Oliver via my shoes. Had that happen a couple of times when we had a Greyhound bus conversion. We dump the gray back at home. Planning on using a pump to fill the Black tank with gray water to expand our ability to stay out longer without using a dump station while on a road trip. I will get to find out this next summer our alternatives for dumping while on a 3.5 week trek. The only negative so far is feeling like you are sitting in a high chair. The compost toilet sets several inches higher than the regular toilet. The Compost also takes up slightly more space in an already tight space in the bathroom. The decision to compost or not is totally a personal decision and what you are comfortable with. No right or wrong answers, only different choices in the way you deal with the waste.

This is how I ran the AC with the 2000 watt inverter. I added anther transfer switch to operate the AC circuit on my 2019 built Oliver. Posted September 7 Besides the huge improvement in the sound level there is also another area where it surpasses the Dometic AC that I had replaced. The Houghton with the compressor running draws 10 amps while the Dometic was pulling 16 amps. So I decided to install a second transfer switch for the air conditioner to test it running off the batteries. It was 11 o'clock in the morning on a cloudless sunny day the temperature was 88 degrees. I had my batteries 400 Ah fully charged with 340 watts on the roof and 230 watts remote ready to feed it. I set the thermostat at 70 degrees and turned on the AC. Once it brought the temperature down to 70 I noticed it was cycling four minutes on with the compressor and four minutes off. I left it running until about 5 o'clock and was surprised to see that the batteries were at 97 percent. So I was happy with those results but time will tell if that is the norm. I put the picture in to also show it's nice low profile. Paul

My daughter has an eleven year old AGM battery in her Subaru, and it still works fine. That doesn’t mean that is anything near normal. She and you have both been very lucky. My Ollie batteries were acting up by the third season, and tango uniform by the middle of the fourth. Two were shorted out, so I tossed those and limped along on the other two until I bought lithiums…. John Davies Spokane WA

Honda 1000 has been our lightweight best friend for over a decsde.

Here is Muncho Lake BC. One easy mod you can do is remove both Exit stickers from the glass, and put a single one above the window opening. That way your eye does not focus on the stickers. I also removed the screen permanently, we never open that window, so that improves the view. John Davies Spokane WA

My wife and I are taking delivery of an Elite II next summer as well. We haven't yet been required to make a final commitment on upgrades, but we are leaning toward the Lithium Pro Package over the Solar Pro package. In response to an earlier, similar post inquiring whether to go with wet cell or AGM, I stated the reasons we have tentatively chosen the Lithium Pro Package. I have edited it to more specifically address your LIFePO4 vs. AGM query: "We are presently planning to spend the extra $$$$ on the Lithium Pro Package [over the Solar Pro Package], for many reasons: (1) we view it as "future proofing" (it's a lot easier to have the more robust 3kw inverter and wiring infrastructure installed during construction); (2) we hope to be able to run the AC with just our 2kw generator, which requires the Micro Air Easy Start [included in the Lithium Pro Package] (which is also much easier to install in the factory before the AC goes on the roof); (3) we want to be able to run the AC, albeit for only a short time, on the batteries; (4) LiFePO4 accepts a full charge much faster than lead/acid, and so is more efficiently recharged with solar; (5) 390Ah of LiFePO4 provides much more usable battery capacity than 400 Ah of [lead/acid/AGM batteries], because only about 50% of lead/acid capacity is usable before recharge compared to 85% with LiFePO4; (6) payload,and therefore trailer weight, is an issue with our 2019 Tundra 5.7L Double Cab tow vehicle, and LiFePO4 saves a couple hundred pounds vs. [AGM] and (7) the increased cost is offset to some extent by the 10-year probable life of LiFePO4 batteries." I will add with regard to the first point, future proofing, that we plan to own our Ollie for a couple of decades, and we believe that the price of LiFePO4 batteries vs. AGM will continue to drop over that time as lithium R&D costs are recovered. We do not plan to spend the additional $4400 for the 630 Ah Lithium Platinum Package because we believe 390 Ah will be enough. But, if, over time, we decide we really want more battery capacity, it will likely be less expensive later, and we can add it without having to also upgrade the inverter or any internal wiring. I expect you know you will likely get between 3 and 5 years of service from AGMs. So, over the probable 10-year life of the LiFePO4 batteries, you will be required to replace the AGMs at least once, maybe twice. Today, you must pay at least $800 for 400Ah of AGM capacity. And, I note you have purchased a Honda 2200i generator. If you plan to run the AC using that generator, you will still need to spend the extra $400 for the MicroAir Easy start if you don't opt for the Lithium Pro Package. So, over time and considering the cost of the MicroAir Easy Start, the "net" cost differential between the Solar Pro and Lithium Pro packages falls more in the $2400-$3100 range, not $4300. For these reasons, we are still planning to spend the extra on the Lithium Pro Package. Hope this helps with your decision.

The other town i recommend visiting is Franklin. Not far from Hohenwald, half hour or so south of Nashville. Beautiful town, some really great restaurants, and more hotel choices than Hohenwald, without the Nashville prices or crowds. Check out 55 South (my personal favorite Franklin restaurant), or more upscale dinner only Red Pony, same chef owner, or any of the other highly rated Franklin spots. Franklin has become a kind of restaurant hotspot for Nashville and surrounding areas (We also like a couple of the local restaurants in Hohenwald , especially Junkyard Dog, if you stay in Hohenwald. ) I just don't have a hearty recommendation for most accommodations in Hohenwald. You can easily drive to Nashville, enjoy the fun, and leave early or late and stay in Franklin. The southbound rush hour traffic from Nashville can be pretty awful, so try to avoid it.

We're getting our OLLIE for Christmas! 😀 And all the accessories..... mb

A new tow vehicle!

She is getting a tow to warmer climates

New to Oliver (828), I noticed that there is a continuous draw on the batteries (lithium), about 10% drop overnight when practically nothing was on. What I learned, is the Zantrex draws on itself when left on, it when turned off, there is almost no draw. So, when 120 is not needed, turn off the inverter!

We have used our Houghton extensively this summer in the hot NC climate as well as on several camping trips. First, I run our Houghton off of the Lithium batteries (as Minnesota Oli mentioned above) all the time. I also run it off of a small 2400W generator with no issues - and no Soft Start. I have very little experience with the original Demonic AC that came with the Ollie because after trying unsuccessfully to run the AC and sleep (or think or talk for that matter), the Houghton was virtually my first (and in hindsight still the best) upgrade / mod. I talked to Houghton a while back about the cycling and they said it is working as designed (4 minute cycles when close to the set temp). I have the proprietary formula they use and they asked me not to share it publicly, but if anyone wants it PM me and I'll find it. I typically put the AC on 60F and it cools quicker without the cycling. Then when it's close to the temp I want I back it off and let it maintain with the cycles. The dehumidifier works amazingly well too. Actually, both the AC or the dehumidifier set low (like 60F) take out tons of water very quickly. Water does run off of the roof with the Houghton, so I just used some EZ gutters to divert the water to the back - rather than running down the sides and/or and getting into the window tracks, etc. It has a heat pump that I haven't used yet, and I'll likely stick with the gas furnace for heat and only use the Houghton heat as a backup. So far I give the Houghton a 10 out of 10 when compared to the competition.