$5000!
Aint no friggin way.
I was gonna post earlier that he might really have a fund-raising winner. He could claim that he wanted to get the latest greatest eco-friendly hot water heater that heated water using nothing but CO2 recaptured from the environment and exhausted nothing but unicorn farts. ORRR...he'd be forced to buy a WWII-era coal-fired hot water heater, recovered from an East German scrapyard, that, due to some bizarre Nazi engineering, actually produces more pollution than all of the US power plants combined.
The super eco-friendly unit would only cost 5 or 6 grand, but he could hock some of his Mom's stuff to get the other one. One good thing about the coal-fired heater is that it had to be hand stoked, so his Mom would get her exercise working in the Boiler Room (he'd help but he has a bad back, worn down from his years of doing nothing).
So, there would be two options for the DU crowd. Donate and save the Earth. Or don't donate and cause the demise of the Earth and doom his mother to a life of shoveling coal. As an added bonus, he could throw in some sort of reference to supporting Hitler or Nazis.
I actually did speculate that he'd go for $5K for this, because the most expensive top-of-the-line hot water heaters are around $4K and $1K to install it would seem reasonable to someone who claimed he needed $200 to have the guts in his toilet changed. He beat me to the punchline, but he does have more experience begging than I do.