Overland

BLM oil road, east of Carlsbad and Guadeloupe

Chaco Canyon - another tough road, but well worth it

Valley of the Gods

Little BLM campground southeast of Farmington, NM

Forest Service land, west of Rio Rico, AZ

Mount Lemmon, north of Saguaro in Tuscon, our first trip with the Ollie

These are all from our trip the past three weeks: BLM land just south of Sevilleta Wildlife Preserve in NM - Mojave Preserve, dirt road several miles inside the southwest entrance - This is the view from a short hiking trail off the CG at Organ Pipe, which Mike mentioned above. What a great little campground. I think this is FS 761 outside of Sedona. It shows up as Loy Butte Road on Apple maps, but I don't think it's labeled as that elsewhere. It's a popular road to camp on (I think the only one near Sedona), so finding a spot can seem frustrating, but keep driving and your patience will be rewarded. Not a great photo, but this is Zepata Falls BLM CG just outside of Great Sand Dunes. Really nice, but a very punishing three mile road to get there. And I don't have a photo, but I'd also highly recommend the campground at Natural Bridges in Bear's Ears. It's small and the spaces look tight, but the Elite II will fit. But then there's also ample backcountry camping available on pretty much any road outside of the park.

We've had a single incident where we got a knock on our door while out in the middle of nowhere. As it turned out, it was an innocent poor guy who'd gotten caught in the cold after sundown with just a t-shirt and shorts, freezing to death and still three miles on foot from home. We let him use our phone and with the assurance of having overheard his conversation, offered him a ride. He was grateful and I was happy to help. Weird, but harmless. Other than that, nothing to report. For general security, we just make sure to lock up and not leave easily stolen items out in the open. I have no plans to ever do anything else. As for campground friendliness, we've found that you're most likely to find friendly neighbors in national park, blm, or forest service campgrounds. As a rule, the more services in the campground, the more people tend to lock themselves into their bronze striped boxes. Just the glow of the TVs to let you know they're occupied. Boondockers are just friendlier. Even then, we've found that some campgrounds are somehow more inducive to social interaction than others. I haven't figured it out, but there are CGs where we won't talk to a soul and others where we'll make friends with three or four couples.

Steve, Oliver didn’t install my batteries, so the question is whether I wired them up that way or not. I don’t think I originally did, since I vaguely remember having the question in my mind when putting it all together. But when we had our trailer serviced in Santa Fe on our first trip to fix a few things, something I asked them to do was add some lock washers to the battery connections since I had one that had come loose, and I remember than when I looked at it after that he’d rearranged all my cables. And then I think that last year when I switched the cables into the box from 4/0 to pairs of 2/0 that I just duplicated what was there without thinking. But I think that’s largely irrelevant unfortunately. After charging all night and day I just turned off the power to see what the voltage did and sure enough it fell from 13.6 where it should be to 13.2 within 5 minutes. So even without checking the individual voltages, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got two bad batteries. No other reason for it to fall like that. Questions now are going to be why they failed, is failure common for Battleborns, and how easily/quickly will they get them replaced.

Thanks. Actually I didn’t quite get it right above. The two good batteries are the one that the + and - are attached to, and the one on which the battery monitor’s voltage sensor is attached. It makes sense that those two would be the ones with the right voltage, the one being monitored and the one getting the direct charge.

I think I have a mix of 5/16” and ⅜” studs on my stuff - should be fine. You could always do what I did and run pairs of 1/0 rather than 4/0, then you could use separate studs, assuming you have one free.

So, new update. I woke this morning to the battery monitor telling me that I was at 78%, but the voltage was 13.1, which for lithium’s is about 40%. Worse, when I turned the inverter on to make coffee, the voltage dropped to 12.5. Not great, but it dawned on me that all this behavior would make sense if I actually had only 200 Ah of batteries rather than 400. Could two of my batteries have died? I called Battleborn. Admirably, even though I got a recording and they’re closed for the weekend, someone called me right back. Their thought was that one or two of the batteries had gotten stuck in protection mode and needed to be ‘woken up’. Great, sort of - it’s a solution but it required unhooking all four batteries, testing them separately, and ‘waking them’ by hooking the bad ones to the truck via jumper cables and charging each one separately for thirty minutes. I carry a jump pack rather than cables but we found an auto zone on our route and got some heavy gauge ones. But when we got to our campsite, disconnected the battery cables and checked the voltages of the batteries individually, none of them were in protection mode (less than 1 volt). But two did read 12.9 volts (~20%) vs 13.3 on the other two (90%). Another call to Battleborn. The working theory now is that those two batteries had floated off sync with the other two somehow, likely due to my fault. The Battleborn rep asked me how I had the battery bank wired, specifically if I had both + and - leads to the trailer connected to the same battery or to the first and last. I had them both on the same one. He told me that when they’re wired that way, the battery monitor is only getting its info on charge state from a single battery rather than the entire bank, and that can allow the other three to drift out of sync. And since the voltages on lithiums are so constant, a small drift can have big consequences. In my case, he suspected that two of the batteries had gotten so far out of sync that they were no longer contributing. He recommended rewiring them and giving the bank an overnight charge, then see where we stood. So that’s where we are. Figuratively - literally we’re at the Joshua Tree KOA charging up. Fingers crossed. If the rewiring and recharging doesn’t work this time then I think the answer is that those two batteries have bad cells or something.

The Facebook group was definitely promoted a few times here when it was first started, but was met with pretty much the same responses as above. Personally, I think Facebook is the worst thing about the internet. It’s essentially anti-internet in both its conception and implementation. Further, their resistance to policing disinformation, collection and selling of personal data, and inherent involvement in related political issues makes them in my mind something to actively oppose. Likewise, I see no benefit to a similar competitor other than the possibility that it might drain some of facebook’s appeal and power.

Thanks for the replies. It seems to have gotten back on track after a full charge. I’m thinking now that this was related to a different problem that I’ve discovered with my inverter, which isn’t communicating properly with the Victron control panel. They’re connected, but turning on and off the inverter from the panel doesn’t always work and the panel isn’t reliably showing the state of the inverter. Twice now I’ve checked to see if the inverter is off, and the control panel said it was, but the outlets were still hot. The only way to reliably turn it off now is via the switch on the unit. So I suspect that this has been a problem since we started the trip and the inverter has been on most of the time, with maybe that power consumption not being registered by the control panel. Maybe. Something else that I’ve noticed is that my solar charge controller turns off when the batteries are full and doesn’t come back on. So if the batteries are full at noon, with the fridge, fans, etc. running for the rest of the day, we start the evening not with 100% but maybe 95% or less. Maybe that’s normal, but it seems like I would have noticed that behavior before. There were software updates to all my equipment that I installed before leaving, so it’s possible that all this behavior is buggy updates.

Not ruined. Even without amenities, the Ollie is still the best tent we’ve ever owned.

My Victron battery monitor lied to me. We’ve been out for a week or so in iffy conditions. Not much sun but enough to keep us going, or so we thought. Yesterday night when we got back from hiking our battery monitor said we were at 60%. Not ideal as we thought that we’d get a good bit more charge on our first full sun day in a while, but it was enough that we decided we had the power reserve to use the inverter and make some baked rice in the toaster oven. Tasted great, but after eating and just sitting around enjoying some music on the stereo suddenly everything in the trailer turned off. And I mean everything. Nothing at all worked, even the battery monitors - the whole trailer was black. I checked fuses and breakers but the only conclusion I could come to was that our battleborn batteries had tripped their protection circuit. And that was exactly what it was. After a while they tried to come back on, but that lasted maybe 30 seconds and they were off for the night. We woke up this morning to various things beeping as the solar struggled to return power to everything. The problem was that the batteries’ DOD was much more than the monitor was saying, and of course with lithiums you can’t tell very well what their DOD is just by looking at voltage alone, since they maintain a pretty constant voltage before they drop off a cliff at the end, meaning you’re largely dependent on the battery monitor’s algorithm giving you a percentage. So tripping the batteries’ protection circuit and going from just enjoying a nice evening to zero power was quite a surprise for us. So we’re at a KOA tonight before heading back out. A full charge should give us enough for the next leg of our trip. Plus we’ve got a fresh tank of water and clean laundry. I’ll contact both Victron and Battleborn to try to figure out why they got out of sync. I suspect it’s a Victron problem but we’ll see. We’ll be out of cell range for a week when we leave in the AM so I doubt I’ll be able to reply to comments for at least a while, but I thought I’d post about it just because it’s something new and interesting. Happy travels.

Well that would solve SeaDawg’s problem of the window not opening enough.

I forwarded the link to those suits to my wife. We ran into some Africanized bees at organ pipe a few years ago and could have used a few of those. 🐝 🐝 🐝 Probably a bit hot to wear for hiking though, especially in Arizona.

Our bath window failed about 2 years in. Not just fogging, but about a half inch of water trapped between the panes. No warranty either. It wasn’t terribly expensive but it did rub me the wrong way.

The benefit to us would be for emergency use and trip planning. We usually just plan a few days at a time, sometimes hour by hour, and it's nice to be able to bring up a map, look something up, etc. Plus we both still work, so the ability to take care of something without having to drive out of the way to find service would be welcome.

Depends on the speed, bandwidth, and reliability, I think. We pay as much if not more for unlimited cellular internet, so if Starlink turns out to be a viable alternative it may be a better choice for us. I wouldn’t count on a competitor showing up anytime soon. I think a few have been announced but they’ll be three or four years behind, and possibly more expensive since companies like Amazon don’t own their own rockets.

Their public beta has begun, with pricing announced at $99/month plus $500 up front to buy the antenna. Pricey, but not insane if the speeds are good and you spend a lot of time away from cell coverage. Any takers?

I'd suggest that if you're going through the trouble of repairing or replacing the shower box, that you add some cutoff valves on the water lines. This will allow you a quick solution to any future problems and might also be useful when traveling through cold weather, to cut off the supply and drain the unit as best you can. If you get the new model, I'd be interested if it performs any better than the old one. I wouldn't say that mine trickles, but it's not exactly forceful either.

"Offroad" is a relative term and most people think of it as just off pavement. Gravel roads and such. From the factory, an Oliver should be able to handle maintained, moderately smooth gravel roads. Even so, lots of washboard, potholes, etc. would run the possibility of small damage, like to a water line, electrical connection, components like the water heater, etc. To me, vibration is the biggest enemy of the trailer. If you've been to Chaco, think of the entry road there, and that's about what I think the limit of the trailer is - for 95% + of owners that's surely a perfectly acceptable level of durability. And with some small modifications, like securing water and electrical lines, you can go a long way to improving durability in those situations. I would hesitate to lift the trailer much, even though relative to true offroad trailers, one of the biggest limitations of the Ollie is a poor amount of suspension travel. Many early Elite I trailers have the axle flipped and so have about 3"-4" more clearance, but the Elite II gets a little ungainly when you try that. The factory actually mounted our suspension like that for us, but weren't comfortable with the possibility of decreased stability. Plus it looked dumb, and we switched it back. But there are some suspension options that will give you more like 1"-2", plus a little more cushioning. I'm trying out one of those on our upcoming trip (Lippert Centerpoint) and will report back. It was a dead simple install so I'm hopeful that it will show some benefit. There are clearance and perhaps durability tradeoffs with that type of solution, so you have to be OK with the compromises. The main advantage of a camper van would be maneuverability, and the main drawback would be that you can't leave it behind. We've been very happy with using our camper as a basecamp and venturing out for one or two nights in a tent. Last year, we did the white rim trail in Canyonlands that way and we felt that it was ideal. True "overlanding" really isn't a thing in the US, unless you go out of your way to travel like that. There are a few multi day overland routes here and there, but IMO, not enough to justify an Aussie or South African style setup. Most places in the US aren't seen best by going from point A to B to C each day. Instead, you go to point A for three or four nights, see what's around to see, then go to point B, etc. And if you travel like that, keeping your home on your back every hour of every day will get old. Better to set up your basecamp then go adventure.

No specific recommendations, but my first guess would be that the fan on the inverter might be out, though I don’t see why that error would show up while on shore power.