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johnwen

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Everything posted by johnwen

  1. We met them just this afternoon and they indeed made us feel very welcome. We showed up this year before the "big show" is over with hopes of becoming a little more knowledgeable with our solar setup by hanging out with the solar experts/vendors. But after talking for a while with Steve, I think I got lucky concerning all things solar . John
  2. Welcome Scott and Connie! Wen and I are AF retirees as well and have been fulltiming 4 years now (2 in a Casita). Our Ollie (twin beds) seems like a mansion with the extra 6 feet inside vs the Casita. We picked ours up 2 years and 1week ago and have not looked back. This Oliver community is quite amazing and we are very thankful to be part of it. We'll be at the "Q" in a couple of days to reunite with good friends. I know you will be pleased with your new Oliver. No trailer, as you well know, comes problem free but I can tell you that this Oliver community is quite amazing and experienced with handling just about anything. Congrats on your retirement :) Wen and John
  3. You are absolutely right Mossey, I don't know how that last sentence in my last post popped into my head.....a very senior moment
  4. Ollietime, Just for clarification, my problem was on the fwd end (hitch end) of the awning. The rear appeared to be ok throughout the process. If your issue is on the rear end my suggestion may not work for you, I never removed the rear cap so I don't know if there is an adjustment there as well. You should be able to contact Girard if need be. I know their branch in Florida was closed down after their terrible tragedy a couple years ago. John
  5. Ollietime, Read conner77's post as well. It was very helpful to me. BTW, as of today everything is still good with the awning. I have no idea what went wrong with it initially.
  6. Hi Ollietime, My 2022 Hull 996 has the Girard as well. It has a fwd end cap and an aft end cap. I took off only the fwd end cap, you'll see 2 ss screws on the end cap. I don't remember if there are any on top of the end cap. With the end cap removed I found the adjustment screw and rotated it half way in one direction, which made the problem worse. So I went back to the original position and rotated the screw half turn in the other direction and it was good to go. You may need more or less of an adjustment to get yours adjusted to your satisfaction. One word of caution...adjust in small increments as the motor must shut off automatically and you don't want the motor to continue running when the awning is fully retracted as you can burn up the motor. As I recall, I contacted Girard and they walked me through it. Best of luck :) John
  7. Good product and now I take them off to service as I lost one during a recent refill. John
  8. We lost one of ours and didn't realize until we saw the rust ring. Ordered 1 and will keep an eye out for future loss..
  9. How long did your Briteways last? We have them in our 2022. So far, so good. We have the Zamp solar controller. We'll be switching to lithiums when we have to. John
  10. I want to put a future Victron MPPT controller underneath the twin bed and am exploring options to eliminate the Zamp connector as it seems flimsy and loose to me, with the added reverse polarity connection for my non-Zamp portable solar panel. The Zamp SAE connection seems to pull loose quite often. I'm not bent on using the Powerpole, mostly exploring options for the moment. Right now I'll be going from an XT-60 connection on the solar panel to MC4 for 20 ft cabling to the Zamp to the Victron to the original battery wires from the Oliver that go to the external Zamp connector. I don't much care for the difficulty in disconnecting MC4 connections...this is for a portable solar panel. Right now I need to determine if the Victron can just connect directly to the 2 wires going from the Oliver to the Zamp connector. As you can see from the photos, those 2 input wires go to a block the splits to destinations unknown to me. I put this question to OTT service to see what they have to say. I'm probably barking up the wrong tree with this, making things too complicated, but want to consider opportunities to simplify things with the Victron installation. John
  11. That's what I thought as well. I'm not rushing into anything at the moment :)
  12. Hello, I have hull 996 (2022 Oliver Elite 2) and had OTT install an external Zamp connector to use a portable solar panel. Currently I use a Renogy 100w portable panel, through a reversing connector installed on the Zamp connector. All works ok but I'd like to replace the OTT supplied Zamp connector with an Anderson Powerpole connector. If I can work up the courage to cut a hole in the side of my Oliver . My question is this: can I simply remove the Zamp connector and use the wiring as installed by OTT and connect to the Anderson...red to positive and black to negative? My confusion comes from the fact that Zamp uses an unique polarity scheme and I don't know if OTT wired the trailer for that circuit differently. Can I just count on the trailers red to be positive and black to be negative? I plan to simply cut off the 2 wires going to the Zamp connector and connect red to red, black to black, to the Anderson. The 2 wires lead to a bundle that connect to other wires as shown in my attached photos. I'm hoping I can simply use those 2 wires from the Zamp to connect to the Anderson. Kind Regards, John
  13. I did not pursue the quest for a different brand... Sorry, I should have responded sooner. At the time I was interested in rerouting the hoses to relieve the tight bends when I encountered my problem. I ended up with everything as I received from Oliver.
  14. Very true...we started out with many trips to the CAT scales before leaving on this year's trip. As full timers we carry everything we own with us and we have a topper on our truck bed. We found we have to transfer 150 lbs (3 tool bags and 2 buckets of liquids) from the truck to the trailer every time we move on to our next destination and transfer it back when we reach our campsite. A slight PITN, but necessary. That puts us at 6800 lbs on the trailer for travel and reduces the truck weight to 6770 lbs (our GVWR is 6800 for the truck) with 10% tongue weight, full propane tanks, full tank of gas in the truck, and fridge/supplies stocked up. So pretty much if we want to add anything, we have to get rid of something. On a better note, I think we've lost 20 lbs each from all of our hiking :) so a trim down on things we can get rid of in a couple of weeks when we get back to SC and we may be able to add that battery/solar powered portable refrigerator or maybe a second awning for our Oliver. All part of this wonderful deal :) John
  15. Nice "Halloween" touch to the Oliver Logo
  16. Bill, How do you like the "this stuff"? Does it stick as you'd like it to? Any quieting from basement noises will be appreciated. John
  17. Dude! THE BEARD!!! I'm envious :) I don't remember seeing any of that at the rally... Glad ya'll are having wonderful adventures. We'll be back to SC at the end of the month. Somewhere between 21 and 22 thousand miles on the rig by then (big smile)! Happy Trails, John
  18. We hope to be there...if we can leave on time from SC :) John
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