An RV is a house that gets shaken down the highway at seventy miles an hour and then left alone for months at a time. Nearly everything that goes wrong with one traces back to that. Fixings work loose, water finds a way in, sun destroys anything soft, and small animals notice a large empty box full of insulation.
So this section is about prevention and repair rather than road trips. At the moment it covers two jobs. Replacing awning fabric once wind or sunlight has finished with it, which is very doable in a driveway up to a specific point. And keeping mice out of a camper in storage, which is the difference between an annoyance and a wiring bill.
Before you start any repair, do one thing. Find the brand and model of the part you’re working on and get its manual. It’s usually on a sticker on the roller tube, on an arm, or inside a cabinet door. Awning hardware differs between manufacturers, spring assemblies hold real energy, and a measurement that’s correct on our rig can be wrong on yours. Where a manual and a website disagree, the manual wins. That includes this one.
This section is small on purpose. We only write up jobs we’ve done ourselves.
Here’s how to connect an RV sewer hose: check that both tank valves are closed, take the cap off the outlet, push the hose’s bayonet fitting onto the outlet’s lugs and turn it until it stops hard. Seat the other…
Black first, then gray. That order exists for one reason: the gray water rinses the inside of your sewer hose on the way out, and nothing else you carry does that job as well. Almost everything else about how to…
Here’s how to level a camper, start to finish: raise the low side on leveling blocks while you’re still hitched, chock the wheels, unhitch, then run the tongue jack until the floor reads level front to back. Stabilizers go down…
Learning how to set up an RV at a campsite is mostly learning one fixed order: position the rig, level it, shut off the pedestal breaker and connect power, then water, then sewer, then open the slides and awning. Work…
I found out my awning was done at a rest stop outside Amarillo, when I walked around the rig and saw eight feet of vinyl waving at traffic like a checkered flag. If you’re in the same boat, here’s the…
Here’s the short version of how to keep mice out of your camper: seal every gap wider than a pencil, strip out anything a mouse could eat or nest in, and run a couple of traps as an early-warning system. That’s…