Jim_Oker

Here's a pic of a furnace reset switch from an owner (who posts in the Facebook group) who had to reset theirs to get it going again after having drained their batteries empty and then got them charged again. They said this about its location: "inside. We opened the panel on curbside back of the trailer. 4 screws to remove the panel. Then we looked for the reset switch. Really hard to see. Finally found it. Click it once and the thermostat is turned off. Click it again and everything started back up." The folks in Service had them reset via this switch:

Yes, when I looked up the equivalent chart for the Cooper Discoverers I got on my new Oliver (hull #709, delivered late December) the numbers were identical to these for the Michelin (which is a very similar tire as far as I can tell as anything but a tire expert).

And yeah, I've also put a squeegee in the bathroom. It's what we use at home after showers as well to do the bulk of the cleaning. Using liquid soap versus bars also helps a LOT with preventing soap scum buildup btw. A tip I learned from a tile guy.

I may eventually just remove the curtain if cleaning *it* when it inevitably gets a kinda dirty seems like a bigger deal than dealing with keeping the toilet area dry and clean of soap scum. But in a time/money tradeoff world I decided to let the factory provide me with the chance to try a pretty decent curtain design out. So far that little bit of vertical space it takes up along the wall has not seemed like a noticeable cost to me, just fwiw. There's no right or wrong here - just sharing my own assessment for me/us.

Interesting. I opted for the track and it came with a curtain. Hull #709, late December delivery, considered a 2021 model. It seems like a custom curtain cut to fit the curve etc. I am happy enough with it. It covers both the door and the toilet area and you can bunch it up and strap it to the wall between the door and the towel rod.

When I worked building interactive computer based museum exhibits, I quickly learned that when the phone call came, the first thing to check was "is it still plugged in?" 🙂 I boiled that and a few other helpful reminders of stupid things to check first when customers call into the observation "You can't fix it if it's not broken!"

Re: fridge on propane, at least in my van our Dometic fridge uses VERY little propane even in hot weather. When out camping we only rarely have run it on electric. After a few weeks in hot UT/AZ weather I've refilled out of an abundance of caution (there is no way to tell how full the welded on tank is on our van) only to find that I've used *maybe* a gallon (and some of that for bursts of furnace heat now and then).

Here's another of the very helpful PS articles

Yes, fwiw I recently rehabbed the long neglected white fiberglass top of a sixteen year old camper van with a buffer and two steps of buffing compound and then some paste wax, per pointers SeaDawg had given somewhere on the forum to Practical Sailor magazine, which has a fantastic set of articles on the topic including well done tests/reviews of various products for each step. I used it as an excuse to get another power tool 🙂 - I went with a pretty decent Shurhold dual action buffer rather than the awesomely powerful but perhaps hard for newbies to handle DeWalt - forsaking a little efficiency in favor of not burning my fiberglass. It will come in handy for the regular wax jobs required for the trailer too (presuming I stick with the paste wax which does seem to do a pretty great job). Here's one of the multiple PS articles I read to help guide me through this rewarding if time consuming task. There are businesses that do fiberglass work that will probably be up for doing this for you as well - often clustered around businesses catering to boaters but not always. The van top now looks great and more importantly is not a dirt magnet as it had become, and water beads up and runs off instead of just spreading out in a film on the formerly very chalky surface.

I hear a faint buzz from mine (hull #709 delivered this past December). Don't know about the other questions, but unless you've disconnected the batteries there are things that will still draw at least a small bit of current, though I think less than an amp, even if you have switched off the 12V circuit breaker (per Jason E from Service: "There is a 12v breaker inside under the street side bed but it does not stop all loads and there would remain a small load roughly less than 1 amp."). I don't know if this would explain why your system seems stalled at 75%. FWIW Up here in the cloudy northern-ish latitude of the Pacific Northwest in winter, I'm finding that with the trailer in the driveway getting what little bits of sun reach there, if left alone the battery charge wavers up and down but has not shifted much across multiple days so long as I'm not doing things like running the furnace. I have the factory lithium option and can monitor charge level from the LifeBlue app, and have seen that it goes up a little through even cloudy days but then drops by almost the same amount each night due to the various little draws such as smoke, CO, and propane alarms etc. This is without flipping said 12V breaker off.

One potential downside of the Clever Dripper is that their large cone will only make sixteen ounces at a time.

Yes I second the preheat

Give the Clever Dripper a try! You can play with the grind with something like that Hario mill until you get it just right. As for piping hot coffee, try dripping it into that double walled Oliver mug or similar and see if that's hot enough. It's important to keep the lid on the Clever Dripper while steeping, other than for the brief moment when you stir it mid-steep. Thanks for pointing out that roaster - I'll have to try them next time I'm down in that area. Can you find them outside of Bandon, or can you only buy them at their mother ship?

That's true of some of the sites but not all of them. We've had a very open site with territorial views in the main campground, and a lovely water view site at the Bowman Bay CG. Yes it is generally busy though not as bad on weekdays out of COVID times. It has some really amazing shorefront hiking both north and south of the bridge. I like Fort Casey well enough as a historical site but Deception Pass gives a great feeling of the semi-wild PNW inland salt water shoreline with the rocky headlands and little beach coves and a great mix of trees big and small. I've hiked at both and will be returning much more often to DP for more hiking.

Have you ever camped at Deception Pass State Park? The practice sorties from the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station can go well into the night and would help provide great cover for this sort of Seal practice I think!!

That's why the closet wall adjacent to the bathroom came to mind, but until I've figured out what we'll actually be storing in there I don't know whether that would work well either. But it's handy to the front door yet the devil glow would be well hidden when it matters for it to be. I also haven't bothered looking at whether that would be a realistic place to pull a wire to...

Yes, I think you are correct about that. I've been amazed at how much the little light reflections are to me given how effectively they bounce around in the darkness. I will live for a while with it in the attic with a user-added flap over the display and see how that goes. I have enough other things already on "the list" to be content with its current position with that little mod.

FYI, in hull #709, considered a 2021 model (delivered in late 2020) the SP remote is up in what I guess we call the attic - the cabinet above the TV and emergency exit window. It's on the streetside wall pretty close to the cabinet door. And yeah, having slept in there a few nights, I've done some temporary blocking of its flashing (or pulsing up and down if you will as it cycles through the readings) red furnace of hell glow but will be adding some sort of flap that normally covers it but is easily lifted. I haven't used it enough to be able to fully judge the location but it does seem like it would be a tad nicer somewhere like under the switch panel by the door or in the closet on the bath wall but I'm betting moving it or putting a second there will never make it onto my list...

Since this is resurfacing... If you like *good* coffee, and are willing to do just a little work to get it, I strongly recommend the Clever Coffee Dripper. As explained at that link, "The Clever Coffee Dripper combines the best features of French press and filter drip brewing. It combines control over steeping time with a sediment-free cup." It really does work quite well if you follow the prescribed process (and there are of course some Youtube videos with coffee geeks suggesting variants of the process). We actually have two of them so we can each be making our morning cups simultaneously. Boondocking bonus - you can heat your water on a stove rather than using an amp-hours greedy electrical appliance (but if you're adamant about drawing battery down for your coffee you can use the microwave for the water 🙂 ). Buy the best fresh roasted beans you can find (one fun little hobby I have while out and about in new-to-me areas is finding the little coffee roaster operations that have sprung up in many areas) and grind them in the morning as you prep your water etc. using something like this little Hario coffee mill. It takes a bit more time than putting that pre-wrapped puck of coffee into the Keurig but it makes SUCH a better cup!! BTW I should warn any coffee geeks/snobs out there that the Sweet Marias web site that I linked for these two items is a deep rabbit hole of home roasting and brewing information, equipment, and green beans. Turns out that coffee is among the three food items (along with wine and chocolate) that stimulate the widest range of our taste and smell receptors, and there's a stunning variety of bean types and processing methods that create a rainbow of coffee flavors to be discovered, and the folks at Sweet Marias are clearly on a mission to help folks explore that rainbow. Don't say I didn't warn you if you lose hours there and end up exceeding your decadal appliance budget on roasting and brewing gear for home and trailer...

If I'm not mistaken the basket is the first thing you'll collide with on either model (if you have that basket on the tongue) if you are jacknifing. I'm still teaching myself with my new E2 to know how far toward jacknifing I can go (i.e. how small/sharp an angle I can have between trailer and tow vehicle when backing up without having the two touch (i.e. in this case bumper to basket). At least in part it seems like a matter of knowing how the trailer looks in the mirror - i.e. how far to the outside of the mirror does the outer edge of the trailer go). And btw at least with my tow vehicle once I'm anywhere near that sharp an angle while backing, the angle keeps decreasing as I continue backwards (i.e. the tow vehicle keeps pushing the hitch further sideways as I continue back). It's a funky thing to learn - there's a sweet spot where I can maintain an consistent angle between the two but it's easy to get past that and it will just fold right up at that point if I don't watch out, which would be no bueno.

Yeah, as I mentioned I don't know much about audio formats. I may have misread your post but it seems like you're saying that the audio plays OK through the speaker on the TV but not through the separate speakers driven by the stereo head unit. That the sound cuts out at the same moments in the content sure makes it sound like some sort of decoding or format converting problem (whether due to a configurable setting or horked hardware is another question though), especially if it's playing fine on the TV speaker... Good luck.

Interesting. So you're getting some of the audio from the video, but it cuts in and out? I wonder if maybe the video has dolby surround info (or whatever the enhanced audio for video is these days) and the head unit isn't correctly interpreting it into stereo (i.e. is just cutting out the center channel info or some such). Just a harebrained theory w/o knowing much about the formats of audio currently being used with video... Whereas the TV is peachy with the audio format. If I'm on the right track, I also wonder if there's any relevant setting on the head unit that would fix that for you.

Yup, same here

I've always vacuumed (with soft brush) and then used a tack cloth. This is how I learned to prep when working for a few years in a commercial wood shop and it's been the consistent advice I've read for various products from spar varnish to epoxy to various oils etc. Just fwiw...

Honestly for me a bigger issue with that level of heat is that the absorption/evaporation style fridges don't keep up well at all in such heat - certainly nothing like a compressor based fridge. It's a good time to evaluate whether it's time to replace any mayonnaise or meat etc.!