Jim_Oker

Yeah the vibration/noise transfer alone makes me doubt I'd ever be tempted to try it. There's also the issue that if you are following the safety instructions for your generator I think you'll likely find you shouldn't have its exhaust vent running that close to the solid sided walls of the current factory offered tongue storage box. I don't have experience with the Oliver but with our camper van (which is white but less well insulated - particularly the single pane windows which run all around the van) we've always been fine if we can find some shade and then run the roof vent fan during any driving breaks. But then we also rarely end up in 100+ temperatures - the one time I can recall doing so (driving from the Grand Canyon to the Bay Area in early June 2016) I just pushed on through rather than taking breaks between Needles and Barstow-ish. In fact my first break after that section was around dusk well north of Bakersfield as it was just a nasty hot day everywhere. I was sweating while having dinner in the van at a rest stop but I survived. My sales rep used the "the soft start etc. is great for taking AC'd breaks in the middle of hot driving days!" line but it was not at all a motivator for me.

Is there a brand (or a few brands) you'd suggest as good alternatives?

If I understand correctly, at least on the Honda e2200 there's only a 30 amp plug on the "companion" model, which you would want if you were looking to run two together to get 30 amps/3600 Watts of output. In which case said plug is a necessity.

This does not come close to answering your question, but it seems like it may be relevant to some readers who may not know this... When on the road in my van in places like southern UT, I've found that in addition to laundromats (which are few and far between down there!) that many RV campgrounds/parks as well as places that rent cabins will let you use their coin-op laundry machines (also handy for a standard size van camper is that they often will also sell showers, though I have worked out how to do portable dirtbag boondock showers so that's less of a draw than it was on my first UT trip...).

Great advice. A friend who has towed trailers since she was a late teen gave me a few lessons and the first thing we did once we had gone through the basic of hitching and hooking up and adjusting the brake controller and avoiding colliding with median strips on left turns on our way to the parking lot was "going straight back" a long ways across the empty parking lot we used. She stressed that this was a) harder than it might seem and b) an essential foundational skill that would help with turning back into sites etc. The way she put it was that being able to "find center" while backing would be used in all those other maneuvers. She also stressed that it takes at least a few months to really get the hang of backing up trailers.

Yeah old fashioned tire pressure checks can suffice in the near term until you have time and mental energy for sorting that out. Good luck with your tranistion. You probably know that moves are on the list of life's ten biggest stressors, and what you're doing sounds like a move on steroids. May you find moments of calm amidst the crush of things to be done.

I feel your pain. This discussion reminds me of a friend in Seattle who messed around with some Arduino gadgets for a while to create a motion activated recording of voices to try to deter folks who were taking leaks in the alley next to his garage on a regular basis. I think he had at least some success with this :-). And yeah good point about the x-chocks SeaDawg - forgot she is getting the single axle Elite.

"down east" eh? 🙂

At least a very cursory glance suggest "probably yes" as an answer as both are 3/8" thick. I'm making an assumption that 3/8" listed thickness of the Master Lock Python includes the outer coating as does the listed 3/8" of the Kryptonite cables, and I'm further assuming that the steel portion is likely also roughly 1/4" as the Kryptonite is and that both are rougly similarly tough steel. If that doesn't seem like enough, this cable lists a 1/2" thickness though as with the Master Lock Python the Amazon listing does not spec the actual braided cable's thickness. If you are already thinking of using some of this type of "stabilizing chocks" (it seems "chocks" is a bit of a misnomer here as I understand the word but...), my understanding is that this model can be locked in position. The cable-through-wheels is probably a bigger hassle to defeat if you use a really good lock, but there's always the question of how much weight and space budget you want to use up. But of course you could do both locking stabilizer chocks AND cable through wheels (maybe even using the same lock to secure both? As well as a hitch lock...). AND the motion-sensor activated recording of the German Shepherd barking menacingly along with some device pounding the floor and rocking the trailer a tad like dog paws stomping 🙂

There wasn't as of just after Christmas. They were supposed to open a ticket for me so I'd me notified when the fix is available. I haven't seen mail saying it was opened so thanks for the reminder to check with them on that.

Yeah if that's a significant concern by all means get an AS or put a security camera onto the front end of your Ollie or maybe some other motion activated alarm or such. Or avoid travel trailers entirely and sleep in your driving vehicle - there are lots of options for that. We leave our setup to walk the beach, ride the bikes, etc. a LOT. We've never had things we leave out in the open such as chairs and stove and grill and little 1 gallon propane tank messed with. And where we camp, the bigger nighttime concerns are the roving bands of racoons to be frank. You have to pick the things that matter most to you - this one is way down on my own list 🙂 . If I expected to spend lots of time in sketchy Walmart lots and the like I would probably stick with a van format and not use a trailer.

Thanks for the photo of your setup. How's that working so far? Have you hauled the bikes at all? Too early to say?

Voyager - sounds like you maybe shouldn't get an Oliver, and an AS may or may not be right for you. As a colleague puts it, "every tool is best for something and worst for something else. When I finally settled on the E2, I had looked at LOTS of floorplans of other trailers including AS, and this was one of the checkmarks in the E2 column for me (whereas others may assess floorplans differently for perfectly valid-for-them reasons). And i see SeaDawg has already made another point I came here to add - the windows. I love that wraparound window on the AS but for the life of me I can't figure out whey it's stuck on the tow hitch end which almost always ends up facing the least scenic side of any of the sites in which I've seen Airstreams camped (except maybe in cramped RV village type campgrounds such as the one right at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon where ANY view you get is just of other RVs... in which case I'd be drawing the blinds anyway and spending most of my waking hourse outside of the camper). I wish there was a bit more window area in the Ollie but not using the A S design which just seems weird!

I kind of abstractly understood this but now that I've towed hull #709 (Elite II) a little bit I'm quite happy with this too. I can see how it will be beneficial in many situations. I've not towed much but the prior trailers I *have* towed were out much wider at the wheels and it took a lot more attention to what was going on behind me while going forward. I'm OK with the bathroom being a very space efficient boat style design. All other things being equal I'd prefer the design aesthetic of the AS but all other things aren't equal. Dirt-road-worthiness (including not having cabinets fall off the wall going over potholes) and 4(ish) season ability were more important to me. It's all tradeoffs, eh?

I've only done the one test but not using the bonded plug was what I needed to do the get power moving through the surge protector. With the eu2200i with co minder I have not explored further yet. Based on all I've read here and elsewhere it was an unexpected result. My understanding is that the eb2200i is neutral bonded to the generator frame but that my model is not. It's a head scratcher but I haven't broken out the multimeter to see what's going on there...

I found there was not with some of the larger plug adapters out there. However, I did also find that once I got it set up with an adapter plug that allowed room (there's a photo of one such adapter above in another post), that I was getting an error on the Surge protector panel in the attic (the description of the error in the SP manual mentioned neutral-ground issue IIRC). So I tried it w/o the neutral ground plug and lo and behold I got E0 - i.e. no error and happy current flowing to outlets and charging the batteries etc. I.e. with just the one outlet into which the trailer was plugged). This appears to defy the conventional wisdom I've read in generator threads on this forum but there it is in any case... BTW I also bought the Hutch Mountain propane conversion kit and found it similarly easy to install, and it worked just fine on first try, though ran just a touch more smoothly after doing the easy-to-make airflow adjustment that's clearly described in the HM instructions (it's nice to know how easy this is as they suggest it may need re-adjusting at altitude).

Reminds me of the saying that you don't need to be able to outrun a bear. You just have to run faster than your friend.

One other swap worth making is the HDMI cable presumably no need to do any pulling/snaking just to do the test though you do need a spare and ideally known-good HDMI cable...

tNo experience with that TV, but here are a few basic AV troubleshooting steps that may help if you haven't already tried these things (long ago I built and installed somewhat complicated interactive A/V systems in museums and at trade shows and got used this troubleshooting dance with A/V components, trying to isolate where problems lay). If there's more than one HDMI input on the TV, you could try moving the input cord from one to the other to try to sort out whether the problem is in the TV or in the cord or the device that's providing the source signal. You would of course have to select that second HDMI input on the TV menu. If you have a computer monitor in your house that takes an HDMI input (and has a speaker, which is not uncommon in later model LCD monitors) you could also bring that into the trailer and swap the HDMI input cable from your trailer's TV to the computer monitor to see whether that HDMI cable/plug is providing a good signal to the TV...

Yes - though when our trailer crossed Snoqualmie Pass it was raining way up to multiple thousands of feet above pass level. I'm sure it was not pleasant driving (I've driven over the pass in my share of pineapple express events) but the road was bare and wet. If it had been a cold storm with all that moisture I think I would not have seen the trailer for another day or three. Daniel stressed that they stay put when it gets sketchy (hence the drop-off timing is estimated but not promised).

Thanks. Yeah, that is in the ballpark of what I'd estimated. And sure I got a "slightly used trailer" delivered to my driveway. Unlike JD I'm going to tow mine around the seasons as well. I've seen that discussion before and we each make our own tradeoffs in that regard eh? In any case having it here now is therefore also worth something to me versus waiting for maybe nicer weather later to go pick it up (at a time of year when I'd frankly rather be doing other things with or without the trailer). BTW I tracked the weather mine went through - bare and dry road until it was close to Snoqualmie Pass (about an hour from my house) at which point it got its first dose of some of our tropical winter weather. The grease fittings likely took a hit but it didn't get a bath of fresh icy road treatment (which I'll subject it to from time to time in any case frankly). I rinsed it a few days after arrival and it looks fine to me. I don't think there's a right or wrong here - just a set of tradeoffs JD and I make differently.

Daniel Jakus who runs Painted Cowboy Transport (http://www.paintedcowboytransport.com/) was recommended to me by the folks at Oliver. His price struck me as reasonable (do the math on driving a tow vehicle to and from there - even gas alone let alone using IRS mileage reimbursement for per mile driving cost...). He was great to work with. I've seen multiple other comments here to that effect and another forum member "theOrca" had one delivered by Daniel a year-ish ago also to WA like me and he was happy with the transport service (he had a few issues with his trailer not related to the transit though and encouraged me to go pick it up myself if at all possible; he has been getting those issues sorted though). Daniel and the folks at Oliver are used to dealing with each other. I was planning to pick up hull #709 in late December but that conflicted with being able to finally get in to have oral surgery for an infection that had been brewing for too long (had been going through the dentist-endodontist-oral_surgeon progression for a while - they seem hammered by folks finally getting in to get their teeth dealt with after holing up for much of the year...) and then letting myself recover. I would have loved to get that orientation they do and was looking forward to some parts of the trip back but I'll admit it was handy to have the trailer just show up at my driveway. I have yet to discover any problem that I would have had them fix on-site but I do have to do the Anderson WD hitch install myself - doesn't seem too bad but having them do it would have been more convenient. Maybe not 5,000+ miles worth of driving balancing convenience though... But it's definitely a bit of a gamble to not do a shakedown until the trailer is 2,500 miles from the factory. Oh, if you have it delivered in cold weather months tell them not to "dewinterize" the trailer before Painted Cowboy (or whoever you use for transport) picks it up as it's going to be unheated for the 4 day or so trip to OR.

I imagine trailer sidewalls on average take more abuse than car/truck sidewalls.

Yes they are in this size, looks like your inflation placard works for these as well (at least based on my limited understanding). Cooper Discoverer HT3 Commercial Vehicle Tire | Cooper Tire

FYI, the tires on a December delivery model are a Cooper DIscoverer HT3 LT225/75R16