Thanks everyone for the nice comments...actually starting to see the finish line in the distance (finally). Boon, we haven't really had time to use the camper in the cold weather (I don't even have a propane tank hooked up right now) so furnace results are on hold. I will say that running a electric heater on low setting (drawing about 500 watts) keeps the camper about 60 degrees when the outside temp is hovering around freezing. 500 watts/hr is about 1700 BTU/hr and the furnace is rated at 18,000.
bigcitypopo wrote:
By chance have you thought of adding a battery rack to that pod. It seems you could had 6-8 6volts there toward the front of the pod thus placing the weight almost over the axle.. It might give Ya a good boon docking edge... Prewire it for solar. And your set... Then should you ever need to off-load... The unit is self sufficent with solar and a batt bank should you need to run an inverter or such.
Yes we thought initially about adding a 2nd bank of batteries in the garage pod (the living pod already has a small battery bank) but I am starting to have overall weight concerns even on the rear axle. I think when the garage is loaded on the truck behind the camper and we have our two motorcycles in it, the overall weight will be around 16,500 pounds. The GVWR of the truck is 19,500 so that only leaves 3000 pounds for gear. Considering we have more storage than a small house on this thing, 3000 pounds is not much.
I am looking at the Isuzu FTR,FVR,FRR series (or GMC T7500) which is the slightly heavier duty version of this cabover (26,000 GVWR). It seems they stopped importing them into the USA in about 2008 (probably because of the new diesel emission requirements) so they are harder to find. They would give us about 7,000 to 8,000 pounds for gear.
Or we may just try to keep the gear down to a minimum and get by with the NRR we have.
