Jim_Oker

I did look at LOT of trailer floor plans and toured several from a short list in person. One thing I quickly eliminated from consideration was any trailer with a slideout. I've just read of too many horror stories. Join the RV Boondocking Facebook group for instance and search on Slide-out and you can find some such stories including leaks and slides that are stuck out on move day and such. Traveling in our van has helped me realize how much a camper will be bounced around and also how frustrating any component failure can be, so I wanted to reduce the points of possible failure, which I think the Oliver fits fairly well.

Yeah it's not dark. I in fact covered the bed area ceiling and back (bed end) corner walls in our E2 with some darker colored fabric to make it feel a little more dark and cave-like back there and yet it still feels bright and open, just a little more homey back there now. I do miss being able to look out the upper windows while standing that I can look out in our camper van when doing food prep or other standing activity but then in exchange I like the storage we get instead from the upper cabinets that run the length of the trailer. So far it's been more of a thing I miss in concept more than in practice though if that makes sense. Yeah, you won't be able to gut it and re-do the interior like some of the cool youtube video bloggers and such like you can with a stick-built trailer but again there are pros of having for instance upper cabinets that will never be found on the floor after towing on a potholed forest road for instance. If you're itching to have your trailer be a blank slate for your architectural notions, you'd surely be better off with a used trailer from some other maker so you're not ripping out brand new stuff right away. If you've camped a bunch in campers already you may have some well studied notions of how you want to live in your next one but if you're new to RVing you may consider renting a few somewhat differently laid out trailers in your size range (from Outdoorsy or one of the other rental clearinghouses out there) to get a better handle on what you really do and don't want in the interior space. My camping style may be quite different from yours so what works well for me/us may not be great for you. We're still learning and evolving after 17 years with a Class B van (and about 15 of tent camping before that) and now not quite a year with the Oliver E2, but given our experiences in our van we had a pretty good sense that we wanted just a bit more room and something that we didn't need to make up for driving every morning when we are staying in one campground for a week or more on end but are often driving somewhere during the days. And we had a pretty good sense of how we'd use the space both in nice weather (when we're outside most of the time!!) and in not so nice weather (when we want to avoid the cabin fever two people can get in a standard size van with a raised top 🙂 ). Sure enough, the E2 is a pretty decent fit for us. I'm not quite as fond of the stark white 23rd century space shuttle interior look as some folks but the cloth mod I did along with hanging some of my photos has pretty much taken sufficient care of that for us, and I do like that we can wash down the entire interior (my cloth mod is velcro'd to the walls and can be removed in seconds and replaced in about a minute).

Here's a possible option

Right? This seems pretty darn obvious - the point it's puzzling that the chargers being used for Lithium installs don't already just have this as a setting.

Yeah, from backpacking and car camping with tents we long ago just got used to that phenomenon. I've learned to sort of assess their intentions and cope accordingly. If they're not angry then I mostly avoid risking making them angry - waving at them to shoo them a bit seems to not trigger their attack mode. But if they're not right in my food or face then I just leave them be and they leave me be. When we disturb a hive/nest though, it's a code red situation for sure!!

We have never had them truly "swarm" while cooking or eating outside. We may have a different definition for that term though - it's fresh in my mind as we had some swarm while trying to enjoy a viewpoint in the Washington Cascades last week, when my dog was pawing at the hole to their nest that was right in the middle of the trail to the viewpoint. They were starting to rush out of the nest en masse based presumably on some sort of "bee alert system" and were most assuredly starting to "swarm" in big numbers - I yelled "bees" and we all ran up the trail and then checked ourselves and the dog for any that had attached while we were near the nest. The dog got a few stings and my wife and friend each got one but somehow I was spared (thick long legged pants may have helped though my wife's sting was on her arm). We do, however, often have a few annoying but not angry bees stop by when we're cooking and eating - sweet stuff like fruit also seems to attract them. They've never shown any interest in going after *us* though and we just kind of try to wave them away which only partly works. We just live with it though the dog has a slightly harder time just being at peace with their existence. She seems to know enough not to go after them unless they're going after her though. I think she must have had some other hive encounters perhaps when she was a stray before we got her. Biting flies, otoh, she aggressively hunts and when she catches them, she eats them. But we've never had more than maybe 2-3 bees buzzing around while cooking/eating outside while camping - do you often have more than that, and are they aggressive/angry bees?

How do you do that? Just by pushing enough of the new grease in?

Couldn't they have designed a more intimidating grill??

Yeah we make heavy use of our little weber portable grill too. I often make compound butters and a salsa or two to take along on trips to put on grilled fish and meat for super easy and very tasty mains.

I hear you but after fifteen years with our standard size van (with raised top) we've gotten the utensils and ingredient shuffle down (a few Rubbermaid storage boxes work quite well for this) and frankly just prefer to spend more time outside in the lovely sites we tend to camp at. When we chose how to customize our van we didn't include a counter mounted stove and instead chose to just use a portable (which we can take indoors if really needed) and that worked super well. I think we'll be doing some more very cold and also very rainy camping in the Oliver so will surely be cooking indoors a bit more now that we have that option, but if the weather is good see ya outside!!

Some very new owners have mentioned out on the Oliver Owners Facebook group that someone in Service has suggested lower PSI to them - depending on who in Service the advice seems to have ranged from 55 to 65 for an LE2 based at least on the comments from folks on FB. They are presumably factoring in a decent safety margin for slow leak situations where an owner may not be running a TMPS on the trailer tires. They are probably finally clueing in to the fact that this will yield less calls about things like leaks from pulled apart plumbing fittings, electrical connections coming apart, and inverter mounts breaking off the wall.

And yes, my lithium batteries charge albeit slowly even when the solar is reporting 1 amp (DC)

There may be two ways to skin the cat - it appears that setting the "input breaker" amperage (110 AC) is a valid route for the generator scenario based on the article from Oliver that I linked in which they specifically mention generators as one use case for changing the setting.

Ditto on the thanks. I put mine on yesterday in temps bordering on 70. I preheated the gutter material and the fiberglass (which I'd cleaned first with SImple Green then with alcohol all with much elbow grease to get it fanatically clean!!) and it went on pretty easily, looks good, and is still well stuck there this morning. I should have gotten to this task back when we had hotter summer weather here but I think the tape's glue should still spread as required to bond well but just take a few days based on reading some 3M bulletins 🙂

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Yeah I found I was tripping the home AC circuit I plug the trailer into periodically sometimes when it's doing bulk charging, so I dropped the "AC input breaker" setting from 30A to 14A (It's a 15 amp circuit but also has some commonly used LED bulbed lights on it so one amp to spare seems to be giving me enough buffer). Oliver has an article that mentions that we may want to adjust this setting when not plugging into 30 amp circuits including the case of using some generators. I found this easiest to change via the Xantrex app on my phone btw. From reading John's comment, I'm surmising that the relevant setting may have a different name depending on whether you have one of the the Freedom XC Pro 2000/3000 inverter models or an older model.

Or maybe not but I'd pitch in for a kickstarter fund!! 😄

Gaia is also fantastic for hiking and backcountry skiing. When I've skied with guides (four trips in the last five years) the guides are using Gaia or the equivalent for the country we were in instead of dedicated GPS units (which they did also have but at the bottoms of their packs). I especially liked having it for hikes out across the blank sandstone slickrock shelves in Utah

If you want to try sticking with your phone for turn-by-turn type directions but don't want the limitation of needing to be connected to the internet to get a route, take a look at the TomTom Go app - they have been a strong competitor of Garmin's (and other routing tool makers) since forever and they've basically taken most of what they do in their dedicated devices and put it into an app for phones that allows you to download the entire map sets per country (as well as for inter-nation ferry connections). AFAIK it doesn't include any option to set a height clearance and have that taken into account with respect to the routes though, so Garmin's RV unit seems to have a leg up there (see comment above on that not always being perfect though! I think one of those truckers' paper based atlases may remain a key tool in the arsenal).

If you ever needed parts that is... Our 2005-ish Fantastic fan in our Ford E250 is still going strong. Manual open/close, three speeds, bi-directional, and super simple. No remote, no temperature or rain sensor - seemingly much harder to fry with condensation than these fancier fans and the raise/lower mechanism seems pretty darn solid. The lid has gotten a bit stuck closed at times an we've opened it with a little extra torque on the crank and so far haven't trashed it. Imagine that - a component designed and built to last LONG after the warranty expires, like our trailer frames and shells...

It's all in how you use it. If you have the "pedal assist" type instead of throttle, and you use it to help you maybe breathe a little less hard on big hills and to just simply go further while staying within your fitness range then you can still get PLENTY of exercise on these. I have a friend who uses one to do a two hour round trip daily commute and this ultramarathoner (he did a 50 mile foot race earlier this year) reports back that the e-bike allows him to cover a daily distance he wouldn't take on as often with a non motorized bike and that he's getting great base level endurance conditioning from his commute. I've done big mountain ski tours and hikes with him this summer (the skiing was back in early July and did involve 45 minutes at the start and end of hiking with skis strapped to packs but the skiing portion was phenomenal!) and can report that he's still in great shape despite having gone to the dark side bike-wise. Here he is at about 8,500' above sea level and 3k' above the car in mid July (we ascended about 600' further before taking a long break before the very fun descent).

I hope all my parts will wear out at the same time, though it seems increasingly likely that this won't be the case...

Watch the classified section on this forum and out in the Oliver Travel Trailer for Sale | Facebook group like a hawk and be ready to pounce (sorry, mixing my metaphors). They usually seem to be sold quite quickly. While I impatiently waited for my trailer to go into production I watched the classifieds here and saw one listed a few towns away from me. I replied within an hour of posting and set up a time to view it early the next morning. But within a few hours someone who lives six hours or so away had already put their cash down sight unseen and so scooped it out from under me. I am fine with that as I like my new trailer and I wouldn't have been willing to commit without an in person walkthrough, but this may give you some sense of the current market. There just aren't a ton of these trailers out there for sale or otherwise.

Yeah our van has a 2000W Xantrex inverter (2004 era) and a separate charging unit. That charger can get a little annoying when plugged in and it's doing bulk charging but this one in our Oliver is very much "next level." I'm not wildly concerned about it overheating! 😉

I've had the loud fan even with the inverter turned off but the trailer is plugged in - it will still charge the batteries in this state. I will try the solution Mcb mentions the next time I'm plugged in if the fan is doing this. So far I've only heard this in our driveway as all our camping has been w/o any plug-in. In late September 2 of our reserved camping nights will have full hookups so I will keep this settings option in mind.