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RE: Walmart overnight parking
I was recently told that Walmart has changed their policy concerning overnight parking nation wide and no longer allow overnight parking. I can't find anything doing a Google search. Can anyone confirm this?Why didn't you ask the person who told you this where they got the information?
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Rice
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03/31/23 11:59am |
Public Lands, Boondocking and Dry Camping
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RE: F/T RVer Health Insurance - Feedback
Anyone have experience with getting private nationwide health insurance from rverinsurance.com and the broker/agent Mike Neighbours? (private - not Obama Care / ACA)
Specifically health insurance issued by New Era Insurance and its Philadelphia American Insurance. Question is, when the day comes to file a claim do they pay out or jerk you around?
What do you mean "private" health insurance? ACA policies purchased on the Obamacare Exchange are private health insurance--the Exchange is merely a way to buy one and apply a subsidy if you qualify for one. My experience is that any plan you buy on the Exchange can be bought directly from the company, the only difference being that if you buy it directly from the company rather than on the Exchange you can't receive a lowered premium due to a subsidy.
So I'm curious about what "private" health insurance is. Is this a term your agent used?
What I suspect is that the policy you're looking at is not health insurance, but instead an indemnity plan. Indemnity plans might work for a given person, but there's a lot of history of people buying them without understanding exactly what it is they're buying.
If you're looking at a fixed benefit indemnity plan, you should read this:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/usc-brookings-schaeffer-on-health-policy/2020/08/04/fixed-indemnity-health-coverage-is-a-problematic-form-of-junk-insurance/
If you're looking at short-term limited duration health insurance, you should read this:
https://files.kff.org/attachment/Issue-Brief-Understanding-Short-Term-Limited-Duration-Health-Insurance
With regard to Philadelphia American Insurance, here's a lengthy discussion about it. It veers a little in the middle when an insurance salesman jumps in claiming to offer exactly what traveling fulltimers want (major medical insurance with a nationwide network), only it turns out not so much. But at the end of the thread, somebody shows up with what he found out when considering and researching a fixed indemnity plan with Phildalephia America.
https://www.rvnetwork.com/topic/138198-rver-insurance-exchange-health-insurance/
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Rice
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03/16/23 02:46pm |
Full-time RVing
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RE: Feedback on 12V water heater element as solar diversion load
To me, the cool part about the diversion load idea is that 100% of solar harvest capacity is used throughout the entire solar day.
Our setup is significantly different from yours, but you might be interested in what a fellow traveler did to use excess solar to make hot water. We have 1,050 watts of panels and six 6-volt golf cart batteries. Not huge by today's standards, but it was considered a lot of solar when we installed it in 2005. And since we still have a Norcold and not a residential refrigerator, it's still enough.
Our motorhome came with a gas/electric water heater that was installed on a non-inverter circuit. We moved it to the inverter circuit, so it would work on the batteries.
(And actually, we tested everything before moving the water heater breaker by necking down the shore power cord to a 15-amp plug, and plugging it into one of the 15-amp plugs on the coach. That meant the water heater "saw" shore power and would work, but the shore power was actually coming from the batteries. It looked very strange, having the shore power cord go to an outlet on the side of the coach (I can only imagine what our neighbors thought), but was easier than moving the breaker only to find out the whole plan was bogus.)
The basic idea was to rewire the AC power to the water heater through a solid state relay that comes ON when the battery voltage is at float level, and turns OFF when it drops below that, which happens almost instantaneously once the water heater begins to draw current. So the water heater is on for just a fraction of a second, and the battery voltage recovers just as quickly, and then it does the ON/OFF thing again.
This happens dozens, even hundreds, of times a second. The fraction of time ON versus OFF tracks the amount of incoming solar power available constantly, via a process called pulse width modulation ("PWM"). And since the water heater is a simple resistive load, it doesn't mind being rapidly pulsed like that.
Best of all, we put in a little LED light that flashes when the water heater is going on and off, and you'll probably appreciate how much fun it is to watch that light flash like mad. And it really does heat the water, to the point that we've boondocked for weeks at a time not running the generator and not using any propane for the water heater, taking daily showers.
We currently have a Midnite Classic controller, which has an AUX output and a high-speed FLOAT-tracking PWM mode that works great for this purpose, by connecting the controller's AUX output to the high-current solid state relay that switches the water heater's AC on or off.
We originally had an Outback MX-60 controller. We did get this scheme to work with that controller, but it was kind of tricky and took some monitoring that's not needed with the Midnight, which is basically "set and forget." However, with the Midnight's "set and forget," it does it only when the batteries are in float mode, and not when they're in absorb, when there's also excess solar that could be used.
So with the current controller, we're not using 100% of the possible solar, because it doesn't get diverted while the batteries are in absorb stage. Wringing out every electron with the old controller had its charms, but really, this is all just icing on the cake, so I've decided I'm okay with sacrificing some output.
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Rice
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02/18/23 09:14pm |
Tech Issues
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RE: Roadtrip by car vs RV, a couple of thoughts...
The last place we ate out at was a Jimmy Johns sandwich place....22 dollars for 2 sandwiches. Where was this?
Jimmy John sandwiches generally cost in the vicinity of $8 for something like ham and provolone, and $9 for a sandwich with added bacon, avocado, or extra meat. Where were you charged $11 each for two sandwiches?
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Rice
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02/12/23 03:02pm |
General RVing Issues
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RE: Brevard County Florida camping fee changes
The result was a raising of the basic camping fees by 200% now being $48. per day for a water and electric site. If you want full hookups, or a water view, you pay a premium fee on top of the daily fee!THEY DIDN'T RAISE THE BASIC CAMPING FEE BY 200%!
First of all, you say the new fee is $48. But there is no campground on their website that charges $48. There are three campgrounds, and the most expensive is Long Point, at $44 for a water/electric site. Not $48.
Here's an archived version of their website showing fees at Long Point in June of 2022:
Long Point rates in June 2022
A water/electric site was $28. Raising it to $44 is a 57% increase, not a 200% increase as you claim.
And the big increase is only for nonresidents. You, as a resident, will now pay $29.67 for a water/electric site at Long Point, up a whopping 6%.
Turns out Brevard County residents aren't participating in the rate increases, $27/day for them and $46/day for everyone else.No, according to the link that you provided, for Long Point it's $29.67/day for residents, and $44/day for nonresidents. At Manatee Hammock, it's $27.55/day for residents (which is close to your "$27") but $41/day for nonresidents (which isn't close to your "$46"). So I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers.
I'm wondering if the OP just "heard" that rates were going up 200% and raced here to complain, and didn't actually verify anything. Particularly because the new pricing structure greatly favors county residents--residents' camping fees at Long Point went up by 6% while fees for non-residents went up by 57% (again, nowhere near 200%). County residents pay the same year-round, while non-residents pay more in-season than out-of-season. County residents can book up to 13 months in advance, while non-residents can book up to 12 months in advance. (I don't like that reservations might have to be made a year in advance, but at least there's a period where residents have the ability to book and non-residents don't.)
If I am going to have to pay a premium to get a full hookup site, I might as well go to a private campground and have more amenities!For a full hookup site at Long Point, you'll add $2 to your resident rate of $29.67, for a total of $31.67. I've stayed at only half a dozen or so RV parks in Florida, and none in Brevard County, but on my latest swing through the state, I was consistently seeing rates of about $70 in December. So $31.67 looks like a real deal for a full hookup site.
Also, the length of stay has been dropped from 169 days to 90 days.Actually, it was 168 days, not 169. See rule #6 here:
Long Point campground rules in June 2022
But what objection would a county resident have to a limit of 90 days per reservation? If I were a resident wanting to camp locally, I'd welcome that because it wouldn't affect me at all but might make it less attractive for long-term people (although 90 days probably will still work for a lot of snowbirds).
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Rice
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02/04/23 01:07pm |
RV Parks, Campgrounds and Attractions
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RE: Compressor refrigerator opinons
I think the reason you are seeing a shift is because solar systems have come down so much in cost.That price drop may be illusory. In August of 2021 I bought a solar panel for my Airstream. (Airstream's design requires a specific panel size to fit on the roof.) At that time, I paid $290 for it. This week I priced THE SAME PANEL FROM THE SAME COMPANY at $490 each. Oof.
Is that the 90-watt panel? If so, then oof indeed. Even $290 seems kind of high.
But if it's a specialty product, there's not much you can do.
As a "past-times" data point: Seventeen years ago (in 2005), the 175-watt solar panels I bought were $675 each. I bought more a little less than a year later, and they had gone up to $825 each. Ouch. I decided to just enjoy the fact that I had an appreciating asset on my RV.
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Rice
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10/05/22 11:49am |
General RVing Issues
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RE: My Coach Net experience tonight.
If I can't count on Coachnet when I am in a jam, why even have roadside assistance? Why pay if I end up on my own anyway?
I think roadside assistance was more relevant back before everybody had the entire internet in their hands at all times. Back then it would have been a big PITA find a tow on your own, and being able to make one call and get it coordinated by someone else was a big benefit.
The roadside assistance companies were a middleman who made your life easier--you just had to make one call, which very well would have been at a pay phone some distance away. The alternative was to get to a pay phone and hope there's a phone book and start calling each tow company in the yellow pages.
But nowadays, it might be better to cut out the middleman, because you can locate and contact local tow companies while sitting in the driver's seat, and when you call them you can quiz them yourself about whether they know what they're doing, and if they can't do what you need, they might know someone who can.
Obviously Coach Net's (and all the other roadside assistance companies--they all do the same thing) business model isn't getting their customers the quickest tow possible; what they do is put out a bid to see if anyone will accept the job at that price, without even knowing whether the tow company can actually do it.
It's doubtful you'll get worse service doing it yourself than that. It'll cost you more, but maybe actually not if you're not paying Coach Net premiums and are mentally pocketing them toward future towing. Not to mention the mental anguish of paying someone to do something for you and having them fail.
I have roadside assistance on my insurance policy, for $21/year. I have $21 worth of expectations from it, and will suffer only the mildest mental anguish if I end up having to do everything myself anyway, including paying for the tow myself if they refuse to reimburse it.
Then again, I haven't had to do that, so my tune might change when paying an enormous towing bill. But putting a mental $249/year into my towing fund will go a long way toward defraying that.
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Rice
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09/30/22 05:52pm |
General RVing Issues
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