JRhetts
Adventurer
Hi. Since a number of questions about the ER have been posed (and sometimes answered by non-owners), I thought I would simply offer our actual experience with the vehicle.
Carl N.: Nice to see you posted some great information already.
Overall, my wife and I would rate the design and use ability of the vehicle (layout, tank capacities, battery capacity, choice of appliances and fixtures) as simply "Excellent." (Sure, we'd like more of everything, but weight, size and cost go up too fast.)
OUR GOALS/CRITERIA
What it’s all about, for us, with regard to an expedition vehicle is: get away, stay remote, have a challenging yet comfortable time. When outside the vehicle, we seek out as much challenge and exertion as we can stand. When inside the vehicle, we want as much comfort and relaxation as possible. And although we like the challenge of driving challenging roads, we want the “getting there” to be as transparent (uneventful) as possible. We don’t want to physically handle or coax a 17,000 pound vehicle through anything. [Jacking a vehicle this size up in mud to put chains on it is no fun!] We’d rather have the physical challenges to our personal selves (climb peaks, explore caves, scramble on rocks, etc.) rather than in the vehicle. But we want to get to where we can have these challenges in the deep backcountry.
[I put this down because I am virtually certain that some on this Forum will have different goals or criteria, and that may explain a lot of why we see and evaluate things differently.]
USAGE
We owned an ER for nearly 4 years and 60,000 miles. Just sold it - it held it's value extremely well - and plan to take delivery of a new one. We lived in the vehicle over 400 nights, for as long as 125 consecutive nights (in a row.) We drove all over the NW and SW USA, sometimes pulling a horse trailer; we drove on open lava fields and bottomless mud pans on the rim of the Owyhee River; we drove the entire Parashant peninsula (No. rim of the Grand Canyon); Baja California for a month, going to out-of-the-way places like Agua Verde, El Conejo, and from San Juanico to Loretto via La Purisima and San Jose de Comondu; to Yellowknife in the NWT, as well as many abandoned logging roads in BC; and for 5 weeks we crawled all over Death Valley on both the remote "roads" as well as many unimproved alluvial fans.
APPEARANCE/AMENITIES
Living day after day in a space this small, it MUST be well designed and pleasant, or you'll want to tear it and/or one another up. The real wood makes a huge difference by providing a bright, attractive appearance; since we are both cooks, the (2) granite counter tops make cooking work very well inside the house. What I am trying to say is that the price of an ER includes a very attractive as well as functional interior, and for us – actually living in it for extended periods - this makes a very positive difference. It costs, but it has been worth it to us, though perhaps not to others.
TOILET
The toilet generates a lot of speculation, but speaking for two people who have lived in an ER for up to 4 months continuously (no motels, no friends' guest rooms, etc.) we would never choose a larger holding tank configuration above the cassette. We can dump anywhere - in a pit toilet is easiest (about 5-7 seconds, nothing to clean up, just walk away); you can do it in a 8"x12" deep hole in the ground; you can do it in any regular RV dump; and into any normal flush toilet anywhere. We have not found the smaller capacity (5 gal.) to be a problem, but instead we found that the flexibility outweighs capacity. (And we don't just open a valve and dump our blackwater - even backpackers dig a hole!!)
HEATING
The diesel furnace and hydronic heater worked just fine for us. They are very compact and they have high output. (Esbar has now come out with an automatic altitude compensating pump. Perhaps this is also true for Wabasto.) We have never fired up over 12,000 feet, so I cannot say how it would work above that. But at down to -10F the ER furnace easily kept us at 70deg or above. And since it is using diesel from the truck tanks, it will do this for even weeks at a time without consideration of running out of fuel. The hydronic heater not only generates hot water (within 30 minutes of a cold-weather start) if you have been sitting for more than a day, it also preheats the engine in cold weather.
STOVE
The diesel stove (orig. a Wallas, now Wabasto on newer units) is fine. We can cook anything on the burners, from high to very low temperature, and it is very easy to keep clean. (After we figured out that an auxiliary cooling fan was needed underneath to keep the electronics cool, the manufacturers have incorporated this into their own newer designs.) True, it does not heat up as fast as a propane or white gas stove, but there is no open flame and no CO (carbon monoxide) and water vapor to contend with. We have a definite preference for safety – no open flame and no carbon monoxide - and lack of condensation in cold weather to the faster startup of propane. [We always have a white gas one-burner with us, because we cook stir fry and other smelly dishes outside; for us, that would be our routine no matter what type of stove was inside!]
BATTERY POWER
Battery power at 510 ah has been quite sufficient for us. Full use of lights, fridge, music and furnace at night has never overtaxed the system. (We had two solar panels; now comes with 3, which is even better.) Please note: we have only used our A/C a few times; we don't like to sleep with it. If it is very hot - like 107 F in the eastern Oregon desert - we will cool the house down for an hour or two before we stop driving, and then later open windows and turn on the fan to stay cool with a breeze. (I would bet a Honda 1000 generator would maintain battery charge overnight if this were very important to you.)
DRINKING WATER
We had 100 gals of fresh water (newer ones, 85) and this is very important. With no propane to run out of and this much water, we have been self-sufficient for up to 2 weeks, in the most comfortable and pleasant little cabin I can imagine.
WHEELS AND TIRES
We started with the 17” MTRs, and were skeptical about the switch to 22.5s. In fact, they have performed much better than we anticipated in sand and mud (aired down as far as 35/45), and they dramatically improved the paved road handling with the steer tires front and drive tires rear. It is a very good compromise.
CAMPER MOUNTING SYSTEM
Something that I don’t see being brought up is: the camper mount system. In my opinion there is NO DOUBT that the 3-point mounting system reduces VERY SIGNIFICANTLY the stress and strain on the house when driving rough and frame twisting paths. After actually driving where we have been (see above), our cabinetry and general appearance are excellent, due to the protection the 3-point mount provided. I am sure this improved our resale value. As a real cowboy/horsepacking friend of ours who has a pick-up camper combination said when I proposed to him that he bring his rig and horses with us on a trip, "If I drove my camper along those last 75 miles of rutted road, I'd be popping panels and cabinets in my rig." We didn’t!
COMPARABLITY
I think most experienced drivers could take a pickmeup-camper combo 80-85% of the places we have gone, aced out of others by the steep attack and departure angles, the depth of the mud, or the length of the corrugated road. But after almost 4 years and 60,000 miles there is no sign of wear and tear in our house, and I know this is not the case with other rigs. Certainly there are places where a Hilux or LandRover or the new XV-JP can go that we can’t (low overhead and extreme off-camber), but we have more ground clearance than they and/or much more in the way of amenities.
There is no perfect vehicle for everyone. Every vehicle is a particular set of tradeoffs or compromises. I just wanted to offer the perspective of an actual user in this thread. YMMV.
Happy Trails, John
******************************************************
[added 4-21-08, in response to posted questions]
fuel consumption- I carefully checked the accuracy of the Ford built-in mileage calculator from time to time (my experience being that most of them are junk). To my surprise it was very good, and so I kept note of that pretty regularly. Highway cruising at 55-75 and 15,000 pounds gave us a pretty steady 12-12.5 mpg. 4x4 low range for a day put us down around 7.5. Sorry, I have no solid info on the new engines; I am expecting about the same.
any planned changes in new vehicle?- We're anticipating a few changes in addition to the new truck (more powerful and much quieter engine, coil spring front suspension, substantially tighter turning radius, nicer-but-not-essential in-cab amenities):
- Bill is anticipating new 20" custom wheels to accommodate Continental MPT81s after a 3" lift
- coolant system isolating valves, which we installed on the old one ourselves
- enhanced cold weather (below zero F) protections
- a bunch of small modifications to accommodate our personal preferences
- JimmiJammers on the front and rear doors (like Chev and Dodge, they can be entered in less than 15 sec with a screwdriver)
- external door locks (5) secured with trailer hitch pins
any Ford problems/why upgrade? - we had a few Ford engne problems very early in its life; these were fully resolved and we had no engine or transmission probs after that (roughly 45,000 miles).
I do not know why most early owners are trading up. But... speaking for us, we were motivated to get a new vehicle for several reasons. First and foremost, we were at a perfect point in the first vehicle's history to receive maximal resale value, and we did. Second, the improvements in the Ford truck REALLY appealed to us: much quieter in cab while driving (I have life-style and age-related hearing loss and really wanted a quieter ride); tighter turning radius (reducing 7- or 9-point turn arounds on narrow logging roads, and 3-point turns on mountain switchbacks); dual climate controls (wife and I have opposite-ends-of-the-continuum temperature sensitivity); stronger power curve (old unit had plenty of overall power, but new engine seems to offer this more smoothly at lower end of curve).Third, we have lots of confidence that the ER house can take the wear and tear (ours certainly did), and we have found the space extremely livable, but we are glad to take advantage of their accumulation of knowledge about building/assembly techniques over the last 4 years, making the house even more reliable and functional.
******************************************
[added 4/22/08 from my post on another thread]
ER TIRES AND WHEELS
I'm NOT technologically knowledgeable; MANY other members know a whole lot more about tires and specs than I. What I hope I can contribute is a user's experience.
ER uses a very strong 22.5" Alcoa rim - rated at 10,000# each. [Parenthetically, strong, tested rims are very important to me, as I have cracked 3 rims in my expedition camper career, 2 at one time, which stranded me in the Southern Oregon desert. More than inconvenient, this was dangerous and not something I want to repeat.] While the rim is a 10-bolt pattern, it is not the same as the Ford pattern. So they use a heavy, steel adapter plate between the Ford holes and the Alcoa holes.
ER has used a few different 22.5 tires, from Bridgestones to Michelin. We drove the Michelins, steer tires in front, drive (unidirectional) tires in the rear, for roughly 30,000 miles.
On highway (where, let's face it, an awful lot of our mileage occurs getting to and from the places we really want to be) the performance was excellent. Handling was crisp and precise, noise was minimal, and they can run and run at virtually any temperature and any speed. Both my wife and I felt relaxed and safe driving them on pavement. None of the "slop" or vagueness we knew with the original MTRs
Off-pavement, at highway pressures, the ride is fairly harsh; you don't have much in the way of sidewall and what's there is really stiff, as a highway tire should be. Nevertheless, we low-range crawled all over the alluvial fans of Death Valley at full highway pressure and never had any sidewall damage whatsoever (luck, or tire strength, I don't know.) However, aired down to 35/45, their performance improved very substantially. The ride smoothed out dramatically, and sand performance seemed to have a good margin of safety vis-a-vis plowing in and getting stuck. (We never did.) We drove our fully loaded ER pulling a horse trailer through literally miles of bottomless mud in Central Oregon, but that was with the MTRs. Our only real mud experience with the 22.5s were quite short stretches, and we had no problems - but truly it wasn't the same test. [You need to have a pretty good compressor to reinflate these big tires; I had very good luck with a PowerTank set up.]
In the process of ordering our new vehicle, I have been told that ER plans to offer a new option: 20" custom alum rims and the ability to use corresponding tires (e.g., 335/80 R20) like the Continental MPT 81s. This is not at this time a promise or a foregone conclusion, as the rims are still being developed and will be subject to DOT testing [important from my point of view and experience.] The bolt pattern will correspond to Ford's, so no adapter plate or extra set of 10 bolts will be required. The tire diameter will increase from roughly 36 to 41 inches - both gaining under-vehicle clearance and necessitating a 3" lift (the wheel wells on both the Ford and the ER house are able to accommodate the increase without further issue.)
With the new combo, an ER's off-pavement performance margins should be improved substantially, though the effect on higher-speed on-pavement handing is less certain (esp. noise and steering precision.)
*********************************************
[added 4/22/08 as a result of my own curiosity]
COST OF OWNERSHIP
I decided I wanted to know generally what it cost us to own our first ER. So I added our gross purchase price and all modifications and upgrades we did; divided this by the number of nights we slept in the vehicle. Turns out it cost us roughly $43 per night. Much better accommodations than comparably-priced motels, which we certainly could NOT have found where we spent most nights (tho I do admit to crashing at Walmart a few times.)
Carl N.: Nice to see you posted some great information already.
Overall, my wife and I would rate the design and use ability of the vehicle (layout, tank capacities, battery capacity, choice of appliances and fixtures) as simply "Excellent." (Sure, we'd like more of everything, but weight, size and cost go up too fast.)
OUR GOALS/CRITERIA
What it’s all about, for us, with regard to an expedition vehicle is: get away, stay remote, have a challenging yet comfortable time. When outside the vehicle, we seek out as much challenge and exertion as we can stand. When inside the vehicle, we want as much comfort and relaxation as possible. And although we like the challenge of driving challenging roads, we want the “getting there” to be as transparent (uneventful) as possible. We don’t want to physically handle or coax a 17,000 pound vehicle through anything. [Jacking a vehicle this size up in mud to put chains on it is no fun!] We’d rather have the physical challenges to our personal selves (climb peaks, explore caves, scramble on rocks, etc.) rather than in the vehicle. But we want to get to where we can have these challenges in the deep backcountry.
[I put this down because I am virtually certain that some on this Forum will have different goals or criteria, and that may explain a lot of why we see and evaluate things differently.]
USAGE
We owned an ER for nearly 4 years and 60,000 miles. Just sold it - it held it's value extremely well - and plan to take delivery of a new one. We lived in the vehicle over 400 nights, for as long as 125 consecutive nights (in a row.) We drove all over the NW and SW USA, sometimes pulling a horse trailer; we drove on open lava fields and bottomless mud pans on the rim of the Owyhee River; we drove the entire Parashant peninsula (No. rim of the Grand Canyon); Baja California for a month, going to out-of-the-way places like Agua Verde, El Conejo, and from San Juanico to Loretto via La Purisima and San Jose de Comondu; to Yellowknife in the NWT, as well as many abandoned logging roads in BC; and for 5 weeks we crawled all over Death Valley on both the remote "roads" as well as many unimproved alluvial fans.
APPEARANCE/AMENITIES
Living day after day in a space this small, it MUST be well designed and pleasant, or you'll want to tear it and/or one another up. The real wood makes a huge difference by providing a bright, attractive appearance; since we are both cooks, the (2) granite counter tops make cooking work very well inside the house. What I am trying to say is that the price of an ER includes a very attractive as well as functional interior, and for us – actually living in it for extended periods - this makes a very positive difference. It costs, but it has been worth it to us, though perhaps not to others.
TOILET
The toilet generates a lot of speculation, but speaking for two people who have lived in an ER for up to 4 months continuously (no motels, no friends' guest rooms, etc.) we would never choose a larger holding tank configuration above the cassette. We can dump anywhere - in a pit toilet is easiest (about 5-7 seconds, nothing to clean up, just walk away); you can do it in a 8"x12" deep hole in the ground; you can do it in any regular RV dump; and into any normal flush toilet anywhere. We have not found the smaller capacity (5 gal.) to be a problem, but instead we found that the flexibility outweighs capacity. (And we don't just open a valve and dump our blackwater - even backpackers dig a hole!!)
HEATING
The diesel furnace and hydronic heater worked just fine for us. They are very compact and they have high output. (Esbar has now come out with an automatic altitude compensating pump. Perhaps this is also true for Wabasto.) We have never fired up over 12,000 feet, so I cannot say how it would work above that. But at down to -10F the ER furnace easily kept us at 70deg or above. And since it is using diesel from the truck tanks, it will do this for even weeks at a time without consideration of running out of fuel. The hydronic heater not only generates hot water (within 30 minutes of a cold-weather start) if you have been sitting for more than a day, it also preheats the engine in cold weather.
STOVE
The diesel stove (orig. a Wallas, now Wabasto on newer units) is fine. We can cook anything on the burners, from high to very low temperature, and it is very easy to keep clean. (After we figured out that an auxiliary cooling fan was needed underneath to keep the electronics cool, the manufacturers have incorporated this into their own newer designs.) True, it does not heat up as fast as a propane or white gas stove, but there is no open flame and no CO (carbon monoxide) and water vapor to contend with. We have a definite preference for safety – no open flame and no carbon monoxide - and lack of condensation in cold weather to the faster startup of propane. [We always have a white gas one-burner with us, because we cook stir fry and other smelly dishes outside; for us, that would be our routine no matter what type of stove was inside!]
BATTERY POWER
Battery power at 510 ah has been quite sufficient for us. Full use of lights, fridge, music and furnace at night has never overtaxed the system. (We had two solar panels; now comes with 3, which is even better.) Please note: we have only used our A/C a few times; we don't like to sleep with it. If it is very hot - like 107 F in the eastern Oregon desert - we will cool the house down for an hour or two before we stop driving, and then later open windows and turn on the fan to stay cool with a breeze. (I would bet a Honda 1000 generator would maintain battery charge overnight if this were very important to you.)
DRINKING WATER
We had 100 gals of fresh water (newer ones, 85) and this is very important. With no propane to run out of and this much water, we have been self-sufficient for up to 2 weeks, in the most comfortable and pleasant little cabin I can imagine.
WHEELS AND TIRES
We started with the 17” MTRs, and were skeptical about the switch to 22.5s. In fact, they have performed much better than we anticipated in sand and mud (aired down as far as 35/45), and they dramatically improved the paved road handling with the steer tires front and drive tires rear. It is a very good compromise.
CAMPER MOUNTING SYSTEM
Something that I don’t see being brought up is: the camper mount system. In my opinion there is NO DOUBT that the 3-point mounting system reduces VERY SIGNIFICANTLY the stress and strain on the house when driving rough and frame twisting paths. After actually driving where we have been (see above), our cabinetry and general appearance are excellent, due to the protection the 3-point mount provided. I am sure this improved our resale value. As a real cowboy/horsepacking friend of ours who has a pick-up camper combination said when I proposed to him that he bring his rig and horses with us on a trip, "If I drove my camper along those last 75 miles of rutted road, I'd be popping panels and cabinets in my rig." We didn’t!
COMPARABLITY
I think most experienced drivers could take a pickmeup-camper combo 80-85% of the places we have gone, aced out of others by the steep attack and departure angles, the depth of the mud, or the length of the corrugated road. But after almost 4 years and 60,000 miles there is no sign of wear and tear in our house, and I know this is not the case with other rigs. Certainly there are places where a Hilux or LandRover or the new XV-JP can go that we can’t (low overhead and extreme off-camber), but we have more ground clearance than they and/or much more in the way of amenities.
There is no perfect vehicle for everyone. Every vehicle is a particular set of tradeoffs or compromises. I just wanted to offer the perspective of an actual user in this thread. YMMV.
Happy Trails, John
******************************************************
[added 4-21-08, in response to posted questions]
fuel consumption- I carefully checked the accuracy of the Ford built-in mileage calculator from time to time (my experience being that most of them are junk). To my surprise it was very good, and so I kept note of that pretty regularly. Highway cruising at 55-75 and 15,000 pounds gave us a pretty steady 12-12.5 mpg. 4x4 low range for a day put us down around 7.5. Sorry, I have no solid info on the new engines; I am expecting about the same.
any planned changes in new vehicle?- We're anticipating a few changes in addition to the new truck (more powerful and much quieter engine, coil spring front suspension, substantially tighter turning radius, nicer-but-not-essential in-cab amenities):
- Bill is anticipating new 20" custom wheels to accommodate Continental MPT81s after a 3" lift
- coolant system isolating valves, which we installed on the old one ourselves
- enhanced cold weather (below zero F) protections
- a bunch of small modifications to accommodate our personal preferences
- JimmiJammers on the front and rear doors (like Chev and Dodge, they can be entered in less than 15 sec with a screwdriver)
- external door locks (5) secured with trailer hitch pins
any Ford problems/why upgrade? - we had a few Ford engne problems very early in its life; these were fully resolved and we had no engine or transmission probs after that (roughly 45,000 miles).
I do not know why most early owners are trading up. But... speaking for us, we were motivated to get a new vehicle for several reasons. First and foremost, we were at a perfect point in the first vehicle's history to receive maximal resale value, and we did. Second, the improvements in the Ford truck REALLY appealed to us: much quieter in cab while driving (I have life-style and age-related hearing loss and really wanted a quieter ride); tighter turning radius (reducing 7- or 9-point turn arounds on narrow logging roads, and 3-point turns on mountain switchbacks); dual climate controls (wife and I have opposite-ends-of-the-continuum temperature sensitivity); stronger power curve (old unit had plenty of overall power, but new engine seems to offer this more smoothly at lower end of curve).Third, we have lots of confidence that the ER house can take the wear and tear (ours certainly did), and we have found the space extremely livable, but we are glad to take advantage of their accumulation of knowledge about building/assembly techniques over the last 4 years, making the house even more reliable and functional.
******************************************
[added 4/22/08 from my post on another thread]
ER TIRES AND WHEELS
I'm NOT technologically knowledgeable; MANY other members know a whole lot more about tires and specs than I. What I hope I can contribute is a user's experience.
ER uses a very strong 22.5" Alcoa rim - rated at 10,000# each. [Parenthetically, strong, tested rims are very important to me, as I have cracked 3 rims in my expedition camper career, 2 at one time, which stranded me in the Southern Oregon desert. More than inconvenient, this was dangerous and not something I want to repeat.] While the rim is a 10-bolt pattern, it is not the same as the Ford pattern. So they use a heavy, steel adapter plate between the Ford holes and the Alcoa holes.
ER has used a few different 22.5 tires, from Bridgestones to Michelin. We drove the Michelins, steer tires in front, drive (unidirectional) tires in the rear, for roughly 30,000 miles.
On highway (where, let's face it, an awful lot of our mileage occurs getting to and from the places we really want to be) the performance was excellent. Handling was crisp and precise, noise was minimal, and they can run and run at virtually any temperature and any speed. Both my wife and I felt relaxed and safe driving them on pavement. None of the "slop" or vagueness we knew with the original MTRs
Off-pavement, at highway pressures, the ride is fairly harsh; you don't have much in the way of sidewall and what's there is really stiff, as a highway tire should be. Nevertheless, we low-range crawled all over the alluvial fans of Death Valley at full highway pressure and never had any sidewall damage whatsoever (luck, or tire strength, I don't know.) However, aired down to 35/45, their performance improved very substantially. The ride smoothed out dramatically, and sand performance seemed to have a good margin of safety vis-a-vis plowing in and getting stuck. (We never did.) We drove our fully loaded ER pulling a horse trailer through literally miles of bottomless mud in Central Oregon, but that was with the MTRs. Our only real mud experience with the 22.5s were quite short stretches, and we had no problems - but truly it wasn't the same test. [You need to have a pretty good compressor to reinflate these big tires; I had very good luck with a PowerTank set up.]
In the process of ordering our new vehicle, I have been told that ER plans to offer a new option: 20" custom alum rims and the ability to use corresponding tires (e.g., 335/80 R20) like the Continental MPT 81s. This is not at this time a promise or a foregone conclusion, as the rims are still being developed and will be subject to DOT testing [important from my point of view and experience.] The bolt pattern will correspond to Ford's, so no adapter plate or extra set of 10 bolts will be required. The tire diameter will increase from roughly 36 to 41 inches - both gaining under-vehicle clearance and necessitating a 3" lift (the wheel wells on both the Ford and the ER house are able to accommodate the increase without further issue.)
With the new combo, an ER's off-pavement performance margins should be improved substantially, though the effect on higher-speed on-pavement handing is less certain (esp. noise and steering precision.)
*********************************************
[added 4/22/08 as a result of my own curiosity]
COST OF OWNERSHIP
I decided I wanted to know generally what it cost us to own our first ER. So I added our gross purchase price and all modifications and upgrades we did; divided this by the number of nights we slept in the vehicle. Turns out it cost us roughly $43 per night. Much better accommodations than comparably-priced motels, which we certainly could NOT have found where we spent most nights (tho I do admit to crashing at Walmart a few times.)
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