Lou Schneider

4 watts is 0.33 amps at 12 volts. It will take 151 hours (6.3 days) to drain a single 100 amp-hour battery to the 50% charge level. Not too bad.

CA is crazy. I worked for 5 years at a college owned radio station with several remote mountaintop transmitter sites. My job was to keep all of the transmitters running so I was given a SUV owned by the college to take up the dirt roads leading to the mountaintops. All of the college vehicles had State Exempt license plates because the college was owned by a government entity. I was repeatedly pulled over while going through tourist areas. Each time it was to check the registration and verify I wasn't using a government owned vehicle for a personal camping trip.

Yep, my Plan B is a grandfathered AT&T Mobley. Actually the other way around, the Mobley is my primary hotspot and the Visible phone's hotspot is the backup. $20 a month for the Mobley and $25 a month (Party Pay) for the Visible phone gives me two unlimited data hotspots on seperate networks - more than enough for my needs, at least so far.

Visible is US only, and only on Verizon towers. Check the Verizon and Visible coverage maps carefully, there are several areas in the US (the largest are in OK and MT but there are also areas in several other states) where Verizon uses third party towers and Visible has no coverage there. Any areas that are pink instead of dark red on the Verizon Expanded Coverage Map are white no-coverage zones on the Visible map. All in all Visible works well, especially for the price. But be aware you're first in line to be deprioritized on a crowded tower and the no-service zones if these are issues for you.

Once I pulled into a rest area and was proceeding to the dump station when a car with a family inside cut in front of me. The driver got out, used his foot to open the drain cover and stuffed a used Pampers down the 3" hole. Plugged it up really good.

Somehow this song from the 1960s by the Ray Charles Singers seems appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqGz1mGVQQA

Yep, for the past 20 years I've been happy with several sets of Sam's golf cart batteries, which lasted an average of 5-7 years per set. But my present set is nearing replacement and I'm considering making the jump to lithium instead of settling for AGM. The Xscapers 40 ft. event trailer at the Annual Bash was impressive ... 12 Battle Born batteries, a 3 Kw sine wave inverter and MPPT charge controller all behind plexiglass and something like 3 Kw of solar on the roof. Made my mouth water.

$400 divided by 104 usable amp-hours (50% discharge) for a 129 lb AGM battery is $4 per usable amp-hour or if you adhere to a 40% discharge level, $6.45 per usable amp-hour. A Battle Born drop-in lithium battery gives 100 usable amp-hours for $950, or $9.50 per amp-hour. That's less than 50% more than using an AGM at a 30% discharge. At 31 lbs (1/3 lighter than a GC2 golf cart battery) your can lift the Battle Born battery in and out by yourself. If you consider the longer life of a lithium battery there's no contest. Battle Born has an 8 year full replacement / 10 year partial credit warranty vs. half that life for an AGM. Lithium doesn't fade out like a lead acid as it discharges. It's voltage and performance at a 20% charge level is virtually identical to when it's fully charged.

Getting legal advice is a good idea. IANAL but it seems to me it would be difficult to claim one state as your legal domicile while working and living fulltime in another.

I've seen those used by bobtail trucks (tractor only, no trailer) when the truck parking lot gets full. Again, let's leave the truckstops for the OTR truckers who need them.

Pretty much the same as plugging into 15 amp shore power - you can do it as long as you don't use more electricity than the source can supply. Just to clarify, the 30 amp socket is always energized but without a second generator you can't pull more than 18.3 amps surge or 15 amps continuous from it.

I haven't been there recently, but according to their website all roads on the Nevada side of Lake Mead NRA are closed to vehicles, access is only open to hikers, bicycles and wheelchairs. Check back closer to your departure, the current executive order closing Nevada expires at the end of April and the Governor may modify what's closed at that time. https://www.nps.gov/lake/planyourvisit/temporary-operational-adjustments.htm

People who stay for a while in one spot normally leave the grey valve open so the grey water can flow freely down the drain. Then they close it a day before they're going to dump the black tank to build up some grey water to rinse the hose clean after dumping the black tank. So leaving the grey valve open for 30 minutes won't hurt anything.

They said the same thing about the Sirius and XM satellite radio services. The FCC awarded two nationwide licenses so there would be competition and said the two would never be allowed to merge and become a satellite radio monopoly. When push came to shove and the two companies said they had to combine forces or go bankrupt, the FCC caved and allowed them to merge into SiriusXM. I expect the same thing will happen if/when the declining number of satellite TV subscribers force Dish and/or DirecTV into a similar situation.

A friend did something similar in Goldfield, NV ten years ago. It's a small town on US 95 about midway between Reno and Las Vegas and is the county seat for Esmeralda County (2010 population 846). After he was let go from Apple he took his severance and bought an RV. Then he bought a lot in town, went down to the courthouse and filed to build a house and a garage. He asked if there was a time limit to finish the house, nope. Did they require inspections during or after construction? Nope, if you're building it yourself it's your problem if it falls down. Built the two car garage, sunk a water well and put in the septic system. The garage includes a family room and a bathroom. It's still there and he uses it as his domicile address for taxes, voting and vehicle registration and visits it in his RV a couple of times a year. I'm sure there are other places like this around the country.

Starting today, Utah is"asking" travelers entering their state to fill out a Covid-19 declaration. An EAS text similar to an Amber alert will be sent to cellphones via geofencing along highways entering the state and at airports, telling travelers to go to a state website and fill out the questionaire. https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2020/04/09/utah-asking-travelers-to-fill-out-covid-19-declaration/#14ea5d774df9

TP shortages and grocery store lines aren't caused by hoarders but by closing restaurants and public toilets. If you're working and eat your lunch out, that's 1/3 of your daily food intake that didn't come from a supermarket. And not using public toilets and their TP has shifted that demand to home use. https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about-the-toilet-paper-shortage-c812e1358fe0

Did you also reset the height of your headlights to avoid blinding oncoming drivers?

Not really. I resented getting their avalanche of snail mail for related products long before Marcus took over the company.

"Loads of data" can be obtained from a Visible (Verizon) mobile phone hotspot. Their $19 Visible R2 phone is out of stock but you can get a ZTE Blade A7 phone for $49 or free if you trade in a working phone. Then pay $25-40 a month for unlimited everything - phone calls, text, data and hotspot. Nothing says you have to actually use it as a phone. Don't give out the number and just use the unlimited data and hotspot.

The only constitutionally mandated purpose for the Census is to count the number of people in the country to properly apportion seats in the House of Representatives. Everything else has been added by the bureaucracy to justify one government program or another.

You can take a compass and pass it in front of the wheel with the brakes applied to see if the wheel magnets are working. If they are, the needle will strongly deflect as it passes by. Another test I like to make every once in a while is to turn on my parking lights or headlights while looking at the trailer's forward clearance light in the side mirror. Even during the day I can see if it illuminates or not. If it doesn't, it says the electrical connection has come loose and there won't be any trailer brakes either.

If the brake controller is flashing, it's detecting a wiring fault between it and the trailer brakes. Either a short or a high resistance connection in the brake circuit that's preventing the power from getting to the trailer brakes. Electric brakes do depend on the brake drum rotating as the electromagnets grab hold onto the face of the drum and use the rotation to provide the force to apply the brakes. But the tech was whistling through his hat as the necessary rotation is only a fraction of a turn, not 30 MPH.

Los Algodones is a special case. The walk-in tourists are a huge cash cow for everyone involved and Mexico has an actual checkpoint south of town to screen people going further south, so I doubt Mexico will do anything to discourage the Algodones cross-border traffic.

Good Sam has always been a marketing tool since it was founded by publisher Art Rouse to promote Trailer Life Magazine and their new telephone book size campground directory. RV parks were approached by roving commission based sales teams and were only in the book if they agreed to offer the Good Sam discount and purchase at least a basic listing ($300 a year according to the owner of an RV park where I lived for a while) or spent up to several thousand dollars for an actual advertisment.