Texas: Preparing for RV maintenance and upgrades

On Monday, we drop the RV off for some planned maintenance and an upgrade. This is not an easy thing to do when you live in your RV full-time.

The process

This is our process for RV maintenance.

1. Call dealer or vendor to schedule the date for service. Agree upon service items.
2. Arrange for a pet-friendly hotel, starting the night before the service date.
3. In the days before the service date, secure loose items and clean up the RV. This includes making sure that the areas impacted by service don’t have things service employees might have to move.
4. In this particular case, we are moving the RV to the service vendor the night before.
5. Check into hotel with cat the night before.
6. On the morning of, we’ll be at service vendor when they open, drop off keys, and reiterate that we live in it full-time, and we can’t “just leave it while waiting for parts”.

Number 6 is the one that can really get messy. A lot of RV service vendors (dealers, Camping World, etcetera) don’t understand the full-time life, or that people who often live in their RV full-time do not have a “sticks and bricks” home to go to when the RV is being worked on. We were plenty clear when we made the appointment that we live in it, and we’d rather reschedule than wait for parts. This is important, as our RV upgrade is a new washer/dryer combination appliance. We ordered it through the vendor 3-4 weeks in advance, and we will stop by the vendor tomorrow in person to verify that the appliance has arrived.

We’ve planned for 2 days at the vendor and 3 nights at the hotel. Let’s hope that is the way it works out!  🙂

The maintenance

We have two maintenance items and one labor item.

• Slideout maintenance: Recommended annually to keep slide out rooms operating smooth. Lubricate tracks and gear slide mechanism; treat the rubber bulb seals and wipers; inspect slide out alignment, toppers, and seals. We already know there’s a tear in our slideout topper, but that’s a future fix/replacement.

  

   

• A/C maintenance: Recommended annually to improve performance and operating efficiency. Examine shroud for cracks and damage; check compressor voltage; check compressor amperage; remove and clean A/C filter; clean and unclog A/C roof drains; check air temperature drop across the evaporator coil. This is important as we go into the warm/hot weather that requires A/C usage. We suspect the A/C filter needs cleaning, badly.
  
• Labor item: One of the casualties of the winter weather in February was the connector for our sewer hose – it got too cold, Bob dropped it while handling it, and it broke. We need the vendor to install a new waste valve assembly and the connector for our sewer hose, which are not standard. We are providing the parts, we just want them to do the labor.

The upgrade

Our washer hasn’t worked since September 2019, when we were in Deming, New Mexico. Our dryer still works, but it’s part of a stackable unit. This makes it hard to service the washer, because the entire stackable unit has to come out. We put off fixing the washer, but we decided for this year’s anniversary present, we were going to switch out the stackable unit for a combination washer and dryer.

This is the one we chose: Splendide Vented Combination WDV2200XCD

This does mean a different mindset. The loads will be much smaller, so we’ve also been taking the opportunity to purge and donate items from our closet. Our biggest concern, beyond learning how many clothes we can wash at one time, is that any RV park we plan to stay at for an extended period of time needs to be on city water. A lot of RV parks that are on septic restrict “in RV washing” due to the septic system. And since we’ll likely be doing laundry regularly, we don’t want to be impacting a septic system like that.