Category: Mods & Enhancements

There are often ways to improve on your RV.

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Almost ready to leave.

Summer for us is about downsizing our house while hanging out nearby in our RV.  BUT…. hanging out often means fixing things, getting ready for the next trip.  I’ve already talked about replacing the rear AC.  Then we discovered a water leak under the sink which led to the water heater which led to scrambling to find a replacement.  Replacing it was straightforward, but the water connections were a pain.  The threads on the tank for the water lines were quite rough and it took several attempts to get them sealed.  Then for days afterward, we were getting air in the hot water line – too much to just be from what might have been left in the tank.  I did some research and found that sometimes the anode can off-gas.  Our previous heater didn’t have an anode – it had an all-aluminum case (which still corroded at a joint and leaked). 2 week old anode I purchased one of those electric anodes, installed it and the gas problem went away.  Here is a picture of what our anode looked like after just over a week.  It must have been a really cheap anode.

We chose to replace our weather station with one of the new-fangled one-piece units.  We bought the Tempest system https://amzn.to/4dpgawc which can read temperature, sunlight, UV, wind direction and speed, and rain.  It’s much easier to take down and store than my old unit.  The problem however was that there was no inside display. The Tempest system has a hub that passes readings onto the Internet where they can be accessed via our phones.  My solution was to purchase an Amazon Kindle Fire HD (with ad feature removed +$5) to run the Tempest app.  It’s not that simple though, the Fire can’t, as delivered, install Android apps.  But there is a way to install the Google store app, and then install Android apps, which I did.  I installed Tempest and our radar app and use the side-by-side feature to run them both.  I also ordered a wall mount for the fire.  Now we have a display that shows the current local radar and our weather station values.  I can choose to share my station via the Tempest web site, but my location should be updated or else it could show erroneous readings (Tucson temperature on what appears to be a central Illinois location).  I can change the location, but the process is a little more obtuse than necessary.  I’ve suggested to their support that they make it easier.

We’ve never liked the gas stovetop that came with this RV.  We bought a single countertop induction unit early in our RV travels and have used it ever since for any pan/pot cooking.  We purchased a dual built-in induction unit ( https://amzn.to/4dHdFFt ) and replaced the gas stove.  This required slightly enlarging the hole on one side and capping off the gas line.  Since we could finally free up some of the countertop, we also looked at ways to “fold” up the stove covers.  We’ve seen several examples of how people did this with hinges – but they didn’t work well for us.  Many of these drop-in stove covers have square corners which make a folding top able to move back.  Our unit (2019 32SA) had round corners, so a folded top was still two inches from being back and crowded a pan on the induction top.  We experimented with several solutions and ended up with what is shown below.  A stainless steel plate which makes the two-piece top into a one piece, plus a bracket right behind the stove top to keep the covers from pushing against the stove top and two small pieces of wood attached to the microwave and window frame for the cover to lean back toward. It works out pretty well.

Our ice from the ice maker started to smell like chlorine, so the annual ice maker filter replacement plus a cleaning of the condenser coils on the refrigerator was accomplished.

I made a new set of covers for the entrance steps.  We purchased some outdoor carpet a few years ago and have been making covers once or twice each year.  We cut pieces, install grommets and use tie-wraps to fasten them on.

We noticed the left rear leveling jack was raising on its own.  It was slow – and inch or two over a couple of months.  There were no hydraulic leaks, so I figured it had to be the solenoid.  There are two o-ring seals where it plugs into the control body – one of which if it leaked would cause this problem.  I ordered a solenoid seal kit for the HWH pump.  When I took the solenoid out, I discovered “an o-ring” was actually three rings, but everything I needed was in the kit.  I carefully replaced both sets of rings, and put it back together and a month past and the jack is still down.

We’ve been exploring what to do with the upholstery.  We all know RV manufacturers use the cheapest vinyl coverings on their furniture that money can buy.  We’d had slipcovers on our dinette for some time.  I made covers for the cushions on the couch two years ago.  Partly because they were too slippery for the dogs to comfortably jump up on but they were also shedding.

We looked at having all the seating recovered – $8000.  $3000 of that is the install.  In the end, we decided to push my sewing abilities and what reupholstery skills I had from my teenage years and start making custom covers for at least the dinette and the couch.

And so I have started the process.  The first cushion is shown here.  I eventually covered the dinette seats and backs as well as the couch back and all four cushions.  We also changed out some of the cushion foam but they still need tweaking.  Ultimately we want to replace that hide-a-bed couch with something better.  In the meantime,  here is the couch recovered.  The back and cushions are really the same color, some trick of lighting is going on.

 

And despite having done brakes on the truck in the last two years, we are doing it again.  There is a quite noticeable pulse in the brakes (front) and at the last oil change, they said the rear brakes are getting low.  So, a quick change out of discs, pads and fluid will happen soon.  Did happen.  And as usual, we made a minor mistake with the pads, but now all is fine. And fortunately, while we were working, my son found a nail in a tire, which we plugged.

I finally got around to replacing the battery monitor.  For the last 6 months, the battery monitor has been reporting 13.5 amps out – ALL THE TIME.  I installed a BMV712 which is physically like the 700 i replaced, but I had to run a new cable from it to my Victron Color Control.

Many other minor updates and replacements, area carpets, bedspread, sheets etc and so on until we leave.

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Back Home (sort of) in Illinois

We planned 5 days to get home – and pushed the trip into 4 to get back before the bad weather. We ended up taking the north route AZ to Albuquerque, NM to Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, and finally Illinois. We saw lots of grass fires and were bored out of our skulls crossing Kansas. At one point I said, “If there weren’t all those bugs on the windshield, we’d have nothing to look at!” The new horn button works great – we had one opportunity to use it.  A trailer leaving the campground before us had its entrance door pop open.

The RVIBrake wanted to do an update on the first day – but we didn’t have time to let it happen. The second morning I let it update. In the middle of day 4, the RVIBrake and hub lost pairing – for no good reason. We drove the rest of the way without it as the software pairing routine needed a QR code and my unit was so old it didn’t have one. I wrote RVIBrake and they emailed me a QR code which worked, but no explanation as to why we lost pairing.  

The cold and rain followed us home, and we had a flurry of appointments to take care of the first couple of weeks. We are just about to get back to the house for some more downsizing. But not so fast….. The rear AC quit. Oh, it moved air and the compressor was running, but it didn’t cool. I used to work on ACs, so it didn’t take long to diagnose it was out of freon.  I found the leak. I “can” fix that but I’m not allowed to buy freon without certification which requires having training and expensive recovery equipment they can verify. So, I looked around and found we could wait days after ordering one online. Or we could drive 90 minutes to Pontiac RV and pick one up – just a bit more expensive, but in hand the same day, which we did. The weather didn’t cooperate however and it took several more days before I could work on it.

So, how does one get an 80-pound RV AC 12 feet up onto a class-A roof? Well, either lots of McGyvering or have someone offer to use their front loader. It was still a bit of work because the loader didn’t quite reach, but way more reliable method especially when a couple of other campers volunteered to help.

Before I took the old one down, I documented all the wiring to make sure I could install the new one correctly. It turns out that just four screws hold the AC in place. I found what appears to be a common problem (found this in my previous RV too). All of the wiring for the AC comes out of the roof in the return air portion of the ducting. Often there is a couple of feet of extra wire that is just shoved in there with no attempt to get it out of the air path. I took the time to clean up the wiring before putting it all back together. And I made one mistake. These ACs are often installed with an inside unit instead of being ducted like ours. Thus some if not all the hold-down bolts are put in from the bottom. So this (and my old) AC had four long screws with the front ones running through threaded inserts(normally used for bolts from the bottom) before entering the roof structure. The problem was the screws engaged the insert threads and stopped turning when they hit the insert instead of pulling the AC unit down and compressing the seal. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this when installing, but having done a major job like this, I rehash the process in my mind later. I realized that problem with the screws and went back up the next day. I removed the screws, drilled out the inserts so the screws could turn freely, and reinstalled them. When tightening, they compressed the seal nicely so no leaks in the future.  One last thing, this picture is of the return side of the evaporator.  If you have a removable ceiling cover for the AC, you can see this from the inside.  If you have a ducted system like mine, the only way to see this is to remove the cover and open the “cold side” of the AC.  This is 5 years of dirt, despiting having filters inside on the return air that I cleared periodically. 

While we were here in Illinois the eclipse was coming so we made arrangements to visit friends down in Marion – right on the center line.  The eclipse was spectacular.  I took lots of shots with my camera but forgot to remove the solar filter during totality 8^{  But it was a great experience.  Traffic from central Illinois to Marion and back was the worst we’ve ever seen on I-57.  We spent about half the trip on parallel state roads.  

Also, I bought a Coach Proxy microprocessor.  What is that?  Coach Proxy came out of a group of Tiffin owners.  The microprocessor talks to the Coach’s Spyder system and presents a web page that can be accessed by our phone or computer.  Everything the Spyder system can see or control can be controlled remotely.  The version I bought was new, preconfigured for my 32SA as well as my WIFI (or was supposed to be).  I needed to tweak the config files to get the WIFI up and running.  I used this feature to turn the rear AC on/off while I was on the roof.  The source for the software is available and some people have ported it to other brand RVs but it sounds like a real programming project.  Finally, Coach Proxy users have used a service called NGROK which allows the Coach Proxy to be accessed from the Internet when away from the RV.  I couldn’t get the free version to work.  So I switched to Dataplicity – which some people said worked – nope, no soap at first either.  It was installed and configured and showed up on Dataplicity servers but no communication.  I talked to their support and they gave me one more install command after which things worked.  Their installer assumed a certain piece of software was already installed on the Coach Proxy system.  Now I can turn my ACs on/off, control lights, etc from anywhere on the internet.

Mike