How to Install Starlink Gen 3 in an RV? Use the Speedmount!

How do you install Starlink Gen 3 on an RV roof? This question plagued me until I found the Speedmount made by Trio Flatmout. It is a simple yet durable frame system that flush mounts the Starlink Gen 3 dish onto your RV roof. There’s no risk of the dish flying off while driving or getting snagged on low hanging branches while parking or being stolen from where it’s placed on the ground.

Being part-time RVers, we wanted our investment in Starlink to provide not only an RV internet solution when we’re on the road but a home internet solution when we’re living in our house. With a little creativity, we found a slick way to do that.

Links to the various cables, extenders, and other gear we used in our installation are listed at the bottom of this article.

Starlink Gen3 RV Installation with Speedmount by Tio Flatmout

Our Starlink Gen 3 Dish is installed permanently on our RV roof with a Speedmount from Trio Flatmount.

There is a learning curve with Starlink, and if you haven’t paid any attention to it over the years, like I hadn’t, it takes a while to sort it all out.

Many RVers are using the first or second generations of Starlink, and those systems are completely different than the new Gen 3 that was released in December 2023. So, YouTube videos, blog posts and forum discussions about those older systems are not only unhelpful but can be very confusing. This page explains a simple way to set up Starlink Gen 3 on an RV and use it for Home Internet too.

Since we installed Starlink on our RV a few months ago, we’ve had internet access everywhere in our travels.

Not only have we had internet everywhere we’ve camped, we’ve also used our Starlink RV setup while driving to navigate through the Rockies using Google Maps on our iPad with a wifi connection to our Starlink router mounted in the trailer. This was awesome because there was no cell signal anywhere on these roads.

In addition, for four straight weeks we camped in remote parts of the Colorado Rocky Mountains where there was no cell signal from any carrier. Our Verizon and AT&T hotspots were useless the whole time.

As icing on the cake, when we return home from our RV travels we will continue to use our RV Starlink installation as our Home internet solution when our trailer is parked next to our house!

Rather than installing a Starlink dish on the roof of our house, we’ll use the dish on the roof of the RV while the trailer is parked next to the house, and we’ll connect it to a Starlink router located inside the house with a permanently installed Starlink cable that comes out of the house to the RV parking area.

So, how do you install Starlink Gen3 in an RV?

Let’s start with what Starlink offers as far as equipment and service goes.

Currently the Starlink equipment comes in three sizes: a very big and expensive “Performance” dish and associated gear for professional and commercial users, a large dish and router combo aimed at residential users and a smaller dish/router aimed at people traveling around.

Most RVers and residential users opt for the mid-size or small-size system. The mid-sized residential-oriented dish can access more satellites than the smaller travel dish, so it may get better or faster service. However, the smaller dish is more compact for smaller vehicles like cars, trucks and vans.

There are also two types of service: Residential and Roaming. The Residential service assumes the Starlink equipment is installed at a fixed address. The Roaming service assumes the Starlink equipment will move from one location to another and can even be used while in transit at up to 100 mph.

We wanted to use Starlink both in our RV while traveling and also at our house when we are living at home. This way, we wouldn’t have to start and stop the service. We’d have Starlink every day all day no matter where we were as long as we were in close proximity to the Starlink equipment in the RV.

So, we purchased the mid-size residential dish and router (not the smaller RV gear) and signed up for the Roaming monthly service plan. We installed the Starlink dish on the RV roof to use it in the RV while traveling. When we are at home and the RV is parked next to the house, we swap Starlink cables and it becomes our home internet service.

Starlink Dish and Router General Layout

We can connect the Starlink dish on the RV roof either to a router inside the RV when we’re on the road
or to a router inside our house when we’re living at home.

For part-time travelers like ourselves, this makes a lot of sense. We pay the higher monthly roaming Starlink fee every month but get to use the Starlink equipment every day no matter whether we’re at home or on the road. We have no need for another internet service plan except as a backup.

We had been using our Verizon and AT&T hotspots for our home internet for the last five years because Verizon is extremely fast at our house. Surprisingly, it’s faster than any other internet service providers in our remote area. We still have the Verizona hotspot but have reduced the amount of data on our plan to the bare minimum because we’ll only need it if there’s a glitch with Starlink’s global service—which there was last week—or if the dish can’t connect to the Starlink satellites for some other reason (which hasn’t happened yet).

What’s In the Starlink Gen 3 Box?

We were surprised to find only five items in the Starlink box:

—Starlink Gen 3 dish (or “antenna”)
—50’ Starlink Gen 3 cable to go from the dish to the router
—Starlink Gen 3 router
—Router Power supply
—5’ A/C power cord to go from the router’s power supply to a 120 volt wall outlet

Starlink Gen3 components out of the box.jpg

There are just five items in the Starlink box: Dish, Starlink cable, Router, Power Supply and Power cable.
They are arranged here in the approximate way they get connected…!

We were also surprised that the only instructions were nearly wordless technical drawings and Starlink’s very poorly rated tech support via online ticket submissions. Yikes! Fortunately, instructions weren’t really needed.

Another surprise was that the online Starlink Store for additional equipment isn’t “open” to customers to look at or shop in until they activate their account. So, researching alternate parts (like longer or shorter cables) wasn’t possible until we activated our account.

Lastly, when we did set up our account, Starlink examined our credit card credentials more thoroughly than any other vendor we’ve ever dealt with. They didn’t like our phone number because it was a Skype number (Voice over IP) and not an actual cell phone number from a cellular carrier. So, our payment was declined. When we contacted our credit card company to sort out a solution, they were shocked that a vendor would go that deep before accepting a customer’s payment.

I guess it’s all part of the futuristic Starlink mystique.

Basic Starlink Gen 3 Setup

Before trying to set up the Starlink gear on our RV, we played with it for a few weeks on the floor and in the back yard at our house! This gave us a sense of how it all works and it was easy and fun to do. We highly recommend you do that too, at least for a few hours if not a few weeks!

As soon as you activate the equipment, the clock starts ticking for your service plan. You have 30 days to return everything and get your money back. So, we wanted to make sure Starlink was better than our old Verizon 5G MiFi hotspot at our house before we got into any kind of permanent installation.

The setup of the basic Starlink Gen 3 gear is a cinch, although a simple diagram like the one below would have been helpful!

Starlink Gen 3 Basic Layout out of the box

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The Starlink Gen 3 dish is very roughly 15 inches x 24 inches x 1.5 inches tall (a few inches taller when the “kickstand” is extended so the dish can sit on a slight angle).

The 50’ long weatherproof Starlink Gen 3 cable that connects the dish to the router has identical connectors at each end. These connectors are similar to RJ-45 ethernet connectors but don’t have the little plastic clip on them. You simply shove the connector into the receptacle very firmly until it clicks or pull it out using some finger strength.

I found I had to stand the dish on one end and put some real force on the connector to push it all the way into the dish’s receiver so it would “click” and make a full connection. Pulling it out feels really weird because you have to give it a very strong pull.

Starlink offers only two sizes of their Starlink cables, 50’ and 150’. 50’ was fine for our needs. if you need a different length, you can get different length Starlink Gen 3 cables from third party vendors on Amazon and elsewhere.

The Starlink Router connects to the router’s power supply. This power supply is then plugged into a standard wall outlet using the power cord that comes with the Starlink gear.

The 50’ Starlink Gen 3 cable carries power on it as well as the data signal. So, only one cable goes to a wall outlet, and that is the router’s power cable. You turn the Starlink dish on and off by plugging or unplugging the router’s power cable in the wall outlet. There’s no power switch for the dish.

After connecting everything and plugging it in, we carried the Starlink dish outside and set it on the ground. We downloaded the Starlink app to our iPad and used it to connect directly to the dish. Various screens came up as the dish was located and activated. After about 10 minutes or so the router found the satellites it needed in the sky, and we were able to log into Starlink from our laptops and get on the internet.

We ran some tests using the independent website https://speedtest.net. Starlink provides their own test site but we preferred to use the same one we’ve always used since there’s no potential bias towards one service or another.

At first the speeds seemed slow. However, we kept checking every so often for the next hour, and soon the speeds totally blew our minds!

Where the Verizon Mifi 5G hotspot had typically gotten speeds of about 25-35 Mbps for downloads and 15-25 Mbps for uploads, with Starlink we were seeing speeds as high as 360 Mbps download and 100 Mbps upload.

Of course, all of these speeds, both cell based and satellite based, are largely due to where our house is located and how many people are using the various services at the time of the test. Also, the remote server that the testing software selects for its speed test also makes a difference, as it might be a faster or slower server and it may be experiencing a lot of traffic or it may not. So, from one test to the next we sometimes saw very different speeds. However, we rarely saw download speeds slower than about 180 Mbps or upload speeds slower than 15 Mbps.

Over the years, as we’ve traveled with the Verizon 5G Mifi hotspot in very remote areas where we got 1 to 2 bars of service, we’ve generally seen download speeds of less than 10 Mbps and upload speeds around 3 or 4.

In addition, we learned that Latency Speeds are actually as important or even more important than the download and upload speeds. Latency speed has to do with response time and ultimately affects how long it takes to load a website. Our Verizon hotspot’s latency speeds were typically about 120ms to 150ms. However, the Starlink latency speeds were around 30ms to 40ms!

The real test, of course, was to go to some of our favorite websites and see how they loaded. When we did that, all we could say was, “WOW!”

Besides websites loading much faster, we also saw big improvements with our Apple Mail interface to Gmail and Hotmail. With the Verizon Mifi hotspot we had often been unable to view the photos people sent us. We’d have to double click each one individually to see it or download them all and look at them using the MacOS Preview app. What a pain. With Starlink, the photos were visible on Apple Mail before we could blink.

Although it took over 30 minutes for the Starlink dish to get up and running 100% the very first time, it took just a few minutes each morning after that.

So, we turned off the Verizon 5G Mifi Jetpack and put it in a drawer!!

We were still using Starlink with the dish lying on the ground in the back yard, however. So, now we had to figure out what equipment we needed to get the Starlink dish permanently mounted on the RV roof and also be able to switch between using it from inside the RV while traveling and using while it inside the house when we were at home.

Figuring this out took a while, and hopefully our notes below will save you a lot of time and research!

Starlink Gen 3 RV Mounting Options

Like solar power, Starlink installations are highly customized and are unique for each RV. With the older generations of Starlink most people set the dish on the ground.

Placing it on the ground or on a stand is a perfectly viable way to go. However, it’s a pain if you travel for long periods (or full-time) and have to set up the dish each time you set up camp.

An RVer has placed the Starlink Gen 3 dish on the ground in front of his truck

We saw this Starlnk Gen 3 setup at a campground. The dish is on its kickstand in front of a truck

An RVer put the Starlink Gen 3 dish on a stand in front of their trailer

Here an RVer has placed the dish on a stand away from the trailer and trees. We’ve found as long as the dish has a view of the sky directly above it, Starlink works just fine, even if there are tall trees close by.

Starlink makes a $10 mount for the dish called the Mobility Mount that is okay for use on slower moving vehicles. However, it is better suited to a boat than an RV, and the top recommended speed is something like 40-50 mph. We purchased a Mobility Mount but quickly realized it wasn’t what we wanted on our RV roof!

Starlink Gen 3 itself is rated for vehicles moving up to 100 mph, so why not use a mounting system that is also rated for 100 mph?

The Speedmount from Trio Flatmount

Trio Flatmount makes a fabulous mounting system rated for 100 mph called the Speedmount (you can see the details about it on their website here).

The Trio Flatmount Speedmount makes it possible for the Starlink dish to sit flush on the RV roof, screwed down in four corners. It is essentially a “frame” for the dish with a lip that encloses the edges of the Starlink dish and holds it snugly in place. The frame gets screwed onto the RV roof in the same way solar panels do, and those screws require liberal amounts of weatherproofing Dicor just like solar panels do.

Using this mounting system, not only can the RV travel at highway speeds without risk of the dish flying off but the dish is also protected from snagging on low hanging tree branches and being pried off the roof when you’re maneuvering into a tight campsite. Also, being permanently mounted on the roof, out of sight and out of mind, it’s extremely unlikely anyone will steal it. And if they did, they’d still need to get a router and remove your name from the service contract and put it in their name.

We read about other mounting systems, but when one fellow described arriving somewhere and discovering his Starlink dish was no longer with him, we saw the value in using Trio Flatmount’s rugged and solid Speedmount mounting system. It is an expensive mounting system, but it is well tested and highly rated. There are some Speedmount knockoffs on eBay, but the reviews were mixed and we didn’t trust them.

Starlink Gen 3 Kickstand – The Basis for Many RV Mounting Systems

One caveat for RVers considering other mounting options is to examine how the mounting system actually attaches the dish to the roof.

The bottom side of the Starlink Gen 3 dish has a “kickstand” that can be opened up so the dish sits at an angle to the sky rather than flat.

Starlink Gen 3 Dish back side (underneath)

On the bottom of the dish there’s a “kickstand” that folds out. In this pic it is folded in.

Starlink Gen3 Dish underneath showing kickstand open

Here the kickstand is opened up so the dish can be flipped over and set up on a slight incline.

During our “testing” phase before we installed the dish on the RV roof, we set up the router and its power supply on the floor next to a sliding glass door and ran the 50’ Starlink Cable through that door to the back yard. Every morning we carried the dish and its connected Starlink cable out into the back yard and plugged in the router, and every evening we brought the gear back inside and unplugged the router.

As a side note, we found the speeds were identical whether the dish was set up on the kickstand or lay flat on the ground So, after a few days of setting it up on its kickstand, we simply laid the dish directly the ground and didn’t bother with the kickstand.

Some mounting systems rely on the clip that attaches the kickstand to the back of the Starlink dish to connect the dish to the mount. Starlink’s Mobility Mount works this way. The kickstand clip is strong, but a mount of this kind is not nearly as secure as a frame that encloses the four sides of the dish and is screwed onto the roof in four corners. It was this kickstand clip that gave way for the poor fellow who arrived at his destination to find he no longer had his Starlink Gen 3 dish on his RV roof!

How to Install Starlink Gen 3 on an RV roof using the Trio Flatmount Speedmount

To install the Starlink dish in the Trio Flatmount Speedmount, the first step is to remove the kickstand from the Starlink dish all together. A firm tug pulls the kickstand out.

Starlink Gen3 Dish how to remove kickstand

The kickstand is removed from the back of the dish by giving it a strong tug.

Starlink Gen3 kickstand removed

With the kickstand removed, you can clearly see the hole where the Starlink cable plugs into the dish.

The Speedmount is a white plastic frame made up of four corner pieces that get screwed together. The lip of these frame pieces fits around the edges of the Starlink dish, and the four pieces are then drawn together as the four corners of the frame are screwed in using the supplied screws and Allen wrench.

The outer edges of the dish are completely enclosed by the lip on the surrounding frame and the frame is screwed directly onto the RV roof.

Easy!

Trio Flatmount Speedmount Starlink Gen3 Mounting Bracket

The Speedmount is made up of four corner pieces that get screwed together to make a frame around the Starlink dish. A different set of four screws (not supplied) goes through the four outer corner holes to screw the frame onto the RV roof.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount Corner Bracket

The lip that secures the edges of the Starlink dish is fairly deep. In this image you can also see two of the weep holes along the top of the lip that allow rain water to drain off of the dish.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount hardware and allen wrench

Four machine screws and an Allen wrench are supplied for screwing the frame together.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount Installation

The Allen wrench is used to tighten the screws and create the frame.
Again, the weep holes for draining off rain water are clearly visible along the top of the lip.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount Starlink Gen3 Mounting system installation

The upper (outer) screw holes are the ones used to mount the Speedmount onto the RV roof.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount Starlink Gen3 Mounting Bracket

Here the four golden screws we’ll use to mount the Speedmount on the roof are set into their respective holes.

Swapping Starlink Cables Between RV and House Routers

It was easy to see how the four pieces of the Speedmount would go together and enclose the dish and then get screwed onto the roof. However, as noted above, our plan wasn’t to use Starlink only in our trailer. We also wanted to use it as our home internet solution when the trailer was parked next to the house.

In order to do this, we planned to switch between using a Starlink Gen 3 router installed inside the RV and using a Starlink Gen 3 router installed inside the house. We would simply change which Starlink cable was connected to the dish depending on whether the RV was parked next to the house or was out on the road somewhere taking us on an RV travel adventure.

One very short cable would go between the dish and the router inside the rig (a 6’ third party Starlink Gen 3 cable was the shortest I could find) and another long cable (the 50’ cable that came with the kit from Starlink) would go between the dish on the RV roof and the router inside the house.

We weren’t sure if we’d carry the router and power supply back and forth between the RV and the house when we switched between living in the RV and living in the house, or if we’d have two separate routers/power supplies installed permanently in each location.

Whether we employed one router/power supply or two, I wanted the switch to be easy to do and I needed the cable connections on the RV roof to be 100% weatherproof.

However, the problem with my cable-swapping idea was that the Starlink cable connection is on the bottom underneath the Starlink dish. Once the dish was permanently mounted on the trailer’s roof, we wouldn’t be able to access the bottom of the dish any more. So, we wouldn’t be able to plug and unplug the Starlink cable from the dish and switch between the RV router and the house router as I wished.

Taking a tip from this video, we purchased a pair of waterproof cable extenders. The idea was that the cable extender would lie outside the dish on the trailer roof, and whenever we took the RV traveling or came home and parked it, we could unscrew the cable extender and change which Starlink cable was plugged into it. This way, the dish could remain in place on the roof and the cable swap would take place outside the dish and not underneath it.

Starlink Gen3 Waterproof Cable Extender

This waterproof cable extender would allow us to swap cable connections to the Starlink dish.

These waterproof cable extenders are very rugged. Unfortunately, they were about 15 inches too short to go from the receptacle on the back of the Starlink dish through the cutout on the bottom of Trio Flatmount Speedmount to an accessible spot outside the Speedmount frame where we could do our cable swaps.

So, I connected two of them together to make a longer extension. The first connector sits underneath the dish and the second sits outside the end of the dish where I can reach it to switch cables. Not totally ideal, and there was some extra expense for the extra extender, but it works just fine.

Perhaps a longer version of this high quality waterproof cable extender will eventually be available. I did find a cheap one on eBay but it didn’t look rugged enough to me. Fortunately, this setup has worked just fine for us with no degradation in speed.

Starlnk Gen3 with Trio Flatmount Speedmount bracket and two cable extenders

I used two cable extenders connected together to get to the exterior of the Speedmount frame. This photo shows that two together is long enough but I don’t have the full waterproof pair of connectors screwed together. Installation pics further down show the two extenders properly connected under the dish.

It turned out that I actually needed a third cable extender because one full extender (two halves) was used underneath the dish and half of a second extender was used to reach the outside of the dish. Then I needed two more halves, one for each of the two Starlink cables.

The 50’ House Router Cable coming from the interior of the house would have half of a cable extender on the RV roof end of it. Likewise, the 6’ RV Router Cable coming through the RV roof from the router down below would have half of a cable extender on the roof end as well. This way, either cable extender half could be screwed onto the cable that came out from under the dish on the RV roof.

Starlink Gen 3 Dish and Router Layout for RV and Home Internet

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Starlnk Gen 3 with Trio Flatmount Speedmount bracket and two waterproof cable extenders

Here you can see a pair of cable extenders screwed together. There’s another pair underneath the dish. To swap cables, unscrew the visible pair of extenders and screw in the extender from the other cable (not shown).

Mounting the Trio Flatmount Speedmount and Starlink Dish on the RV Roof!

Now that we had an idea of our basic layout and the cable swapping technique, we needed to figure out where to place the Starlink router in the RV and how to run the Starlink cable from the RV roof down to the RV interior.

We wanted to mount the Starlink router securely on a wall inside the RV, and the most solid vertical surface in the rig turned out to be the end of the upper kitchen cabinets. This panel was solid wood that could support screws and hold the weight of the router and power supply as we drove around on rutted dirt roads in search of campsites. The other walls were ultra thin wallboard.

Another advantage of this spot is there’s a 120 volt wall outlet on the ceiling right there.

How

The most solid vertical surface in the rig was the end of the kitchen cabinets which is solid wood.
A 120 volt wall outlet is on the ceiling just a foot away
The cup hooks at the bottom are for holding bunches of bananas or bags of avocados!

As for running a cable from the RV roof to the interior, we considered using an existing hole in the roof but there weren’t any good ones. A propane refrigerator vent opening would be ideal. But our trailer came with a 12 volt electric fridge, so no such opening existed. No other options seemed viable, although we did consider the Wineguard antenna opening for a while. In the end, we decided to drill a hole in the roof and snake a short Starlink cable down through it.

Up on the trailer roof, we estimated the location of the router on the end of the kitchen cabinets from the locations of the trailer windows and then positioned the Starlink dish in its Trio Flatmount Speedmount on the roof.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount RV installation for Starlink Gen3

The Speedmount will be installed right about here.

After marking the locations of the Speedmount screw holes on the roof, Mark placed a large dollop of Dicor on each screw hole on the Speedmount and then placed another large dollop of Dicor on the trailer roof where the screws would screw in.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount RV installation for Starlink Gen3 Placing Dicor with caulk gun

Mark put a dollop of Dicor in each screw hole on the bottom of the Speedmount. Note that the cable extender junction that will sit underneath the dish has both halves screwed together in this pic.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount RV installation for Starlink Gen3 Placing Dicor with caulk gun

Mark also put a large dollop of Dicor on the roof in the four screw locations.
The cable extender that sits beneath the dish is more clearly visible here.

Then he screwed in all four screws.

Trio Flatmount Speedmount RV installation for Starlink Gen3 Screwing it onto the RV roof

The last step was to screw in each of the four screws to attach the Speedmount to the RV roof.
Note the weep holes along the edges for draining rain water off the dish.

The mounting screws did not come with the Speedmount. Mark used some long self-tapping screws from his collection.

Mounting Screws to install Starlink Gen3 dish on RV roof using Trio Flatmount Speedmount

He used these long self-tapping screws (they did not come with the Speedmount).

After the four screws were screwed in, Mark put one final enormous dollop of Dicor on top of each screw head.

Installing the Starlink Gen 3 Cable from the Roof to the Interior

Inside the trailer, we estimated the location of the dish on the roof and Mark drilled a pilot hole for the Starlink cable run and then used a hole saw to make a grommet-sized hole in the ceiling. We purchased a white grommet to dress up the hole in the ceiling.

How to install Starlink Gen3 on an RV running the Starlink cable from the roof to the router

Mark drills a pilot hole in the ceiling.

How to install Starlink Gen3 on an RV running the Starlink cable from the roof to the router you need a holesaw to cut a hole in the RV roof

Then he expands the size of the hole with a hole saw.

Up on the roof, he drilled another hole for the Starlink cable to go through. The connector on the end of the Starlink cable doesn’t come off, so the hole had to be big enough for the RJ-45 style connector which is a bit bigger than the cable itself. Then he snaked the 6’ Starlink cable from the roof down into the interior of the trailer. A 3’ Starlink cable would have been preferable but I couldn’t find anything shorter than 6’.

How to install Starlink Gen3 on an RV roof use a hole saw to cut a hole in the RV roof

Mark drilled a hole in the roof large enough for the Starlink RJ-45 style connector end to fit through.

Starlink Gen3 RV installation the hole in the RV roof has been made

Next step is to snake the cable down through the roof into the interior of the RV.

This new hole had to be weather sealed and we used Dicor for that. In order to keep the Dicor from oozing through the hole and not sealing properly, Mark took a thick piece of plastic from an old lunch meat container, cut out a small square piece and then used a hole punch to punch a hole in it. This was the exact diameter of the Starlink cable!

Install Starlink Gen3 in an RV - Prepare waterproofing for cable run from RV roof to interior

Mark used a hole punch to put a hole in a thick piece of plastic that would support the oozing Dicor.

Then he cut a slit in the side so the cable could go through it.

Waterproofing protection support for Dicor on Starlink cable run from the RV roof to the router in the interior

He slit the side of the plastic piece to slide the cable through.

With the Starlink cable snaked down through the roof into the interior of the trailer, Mark cleaned the area of the roof around the hole and placed the plastic piece into a bed of Dicor on the roof. Then he squeezed a bunch more Dicor on top of it and around the cable. This made a good waterproof seal around the Starlink cable and the hole. We’ve been in quite a few huge downpours and some short hailstorms and so far so good.

Starlink Gen3 installation in an RV prepare the roof for Dicor waterproofing

Mark cleaned the roof material around the hole with rubbing alcohol so the Dicor would adhere to it.

Starlink Gen 3 cable goes through RV roof with plastic protector and Dicor waterproofing

Then he put a bunch of Dicor around the hole and pressed the plastic piece into it.

Starlink Gen3 cable goes through RV roof with plastic protector and thick layer if Dicor

Additional Dicor on top will prevent any leaks around the hole and cable.

Next, we connected half of one of the cable extenders to the end of the 6’ Starlink cable and screwed it onto the cable extender coming out from under the Starlink dish. This is the junction where we will swap between the 6’ RV Router Cable and the 50’ House Router Cable.

Starlink Gen3 waterproof cable extender for RV roof

Both the 6′ Starlink cable (for the RV) and the 50′ Starlink cable (for the house) have half of a cable extender on the end so they can be screwed into the cable extender coming out from under the Starlink dish.

Starlink Gen 3 Dish installed on RV roof with Trio Flatmount Speedmount with removable Starlink cable

The dish remains in place at all times. In this pic the dish is connected to the cable that goes to the Router inside the RV. When we use the router in the house instead of the one in the RV, the cable end coming up through the RV roof is disconnected and encased in a waterproof protective cover. Then the 50′ cable that comes through the exterior wall of the house (from the router inside) will be brought up the exterior wall of the RV to connect to the dish on the RV roof. When we’re using the RV router, the unused 50′ House Router cable remains coiled by the exterior wall of the house with a waterproof protective cover on the cable end.

Back down inside the RV, Mark used a Starlink cable sized grommet to dress up the messy hole in the ceiling.

Starlink Gen3 Router installation in an RV - use white grommet for hole in ceiling

This grommet tidies up the hole in the ceiling.

RV Starlink Gen3 installation - Use a grommet for the hole in the ceiling

The grommet gives the installation a finished look.

Installing the Starlink router inside the RV

Taking another tip from this video, we purchased a Starlink Gen 3 router wall mount kit and Mark screwed it to the end of the kitchen cabinets. This wall mount kit supports both the router and its power supply.

RV installation of Starlink Gen3 - Install a wall mount for the router inside the RV

The wall mount bracket supports both the router and its power supply. The power cable plugs into a 120 volt outlet on the ceiling and the extra cable is coiled onto a rubberized cup hook.

There was quite a bit of extra Starlink cable and there was also quite a bit of extra cable between the router and its power supply. So, we put a large rubberized cup hook next to the router and coiled all the cable on it.

The router’s power supply plugs into a wall outlet on the ceiling. This outlet was originally intended for a TV but we don’t watch TV, so it’s unused and in a perfect location.

Starlink Gen 3 Router and Power supply mounted inside an RV

The Starlink router and power supply are firmly mounted to the end of our RV kitchen cabinets and have stayed in place despite driving over some insanely rocky, rutted and potholed dirt roads.

We can turn Starlink on and off by plugging and unplugging the router from the ceiling outlet. However, since we dry camp nearly 100% of the time, we keep the Starlink router plugged into the ceiling outlet all the time and power the Starlink system on and off by turning the RV’s inverter on and off.

Generally, we turn on the inverter in the morning and keep it on all day unless we go out somewhere or won’t be needing a/c power for a while. We turn the inverter off at night and Starlink (both dish and router) gets turned off with it.

Setting Up the House Starlink Cable for Our Return Home

Our house used to have a satellite dish for TV and internet service, and the coax cable for it was still on the outside of the house and still ran into the interior of the house through a hole in the exterior wall.

We pulled the now-unused coax cable out from the interior of the house through that hole in the exterior wall and snaked the 50’ Starlink cable through the hole in its place. We used black rubber grommets to seal the hole in the exterior wall and dress up the interior wall hole. We used a liberal amount of silicone on the outside to ensure it was weatherproof.

We only need about 8’ of the Starlink cable inside the house to reach the router in there. The router sits on a shelf and its power supply is positioned next to it — no wall mounting needed. Outside the house, the other 42’ of the Starlink cable extends a short distance to the base of the trailer then goes up the exterior RV wall and over to the Starlink dish on the RV roof with a few feet to spare. So, when that cable is not in use (while we’re out traveling in the RV) it gets coiled and hung on the house’s hose bib outside to wait until our return.

Because the end of the 50’ Starlink cable is exposed to the elements while it’s hanging on the hose bib and we’re out traveling, we put a silicone weatherproof protective cover on it just like the one that goes on the cable that’s on the RV roof when it’s not in use. We don’t totally trust these little waterproof silicone hoods, so we also wrapped the entire end of the cable tightly in thick plastic and taped it.

50' Standard Starlink Gen3 cable on exterior of house ready for connection to Gen3 dish on parked RV

The Starlink cable that connects to the router inside the house is coiled up and hung on a hose bib when not in use. The cable end has a waterproof protective cap and is also wrapped in plastic and taped.

When we get home and park the RV next to the house, we’ll bring the 50′ House Router cable up to the RV roof and screw the end into the cable extender that sticks out from underneath the Starlink dish. The dish will be mounted nice and high in the air (on the RV roof rather than the house roof) and the router will be on a shelf in a bedroom facing the rest of the interior of the house (we’ve tested this and the speeds are great).

We’re very happy with this simple solution that gives us Starlink both at home and on the road.

How Does Starlink Gen 3 Perform in an RV?

Starlink Gen 3 is awesome! Just turn on the inverter and we’ve got fast internet wherever we take our trailer.

How Long Does it Take Starlink Gen 3 to Boot Up?

At most, it takes 5 minutes or so for it to get up and running in the morning. We’re always busy with breakfast and other morning activities anyway, so we don’t even notice the time it takes to boot.

Even when we change locations, we haven’t found that the time lag is more than a few minutes for Starlink to find its satellites and start providing service. Perhaps the longest time has been about 6 or 7 minutes.

How Does Starlink Gen 3 Work When Driving?

We’ve been astonished to be able to use Starlink as we tow the trailer. We turn on the inverter in the trailer and keep it on as we’re driving. Sitting in the truck, my laptop and iPad can connect to the Starlink router in the trailer very easily and I have full internet access at fast speeds anywhere Mark drives.

How Does Starlink Gen 3 Work with Trees and Other Obstructions?

We’ve had no trouble with trees and other obstructions. As long as the dish can see the sky straight above it, it can find the satellites it needs. This is very different than the older Gen 1 and Gen 2 versions of Starlink that required positioning the dish either manually or using the dish’s internal motor.

RV camping in the forest but Starlink still works great!

We had internet download speeds of over 350 Mbps and upload speeds of over 35 Mbps in this spot.
See next pic below!

Speedtest.net results when camped among tall pine trees

Speedtest.net test results on a Thursday morning in the heavily treed campsite pictured above.

Starlink provides an Obstruction Detection system in their app, but we don’t use the app since we don’t have a cell phone and we don’t bother using the iPad very much except for navigation purposes. So, we’ve never tried the Obstruction Detection software.

We’ve been astonished to camp surrounded by tall pine trees and not have any negative impact on our internet service. We’ve been camping among trees a lot more this year than ever before, not on purpose but just because of where we’ve traveled, and Starlink has been great. We did have about 3 minutes of trouble in one heavily treed setting where we were living in full shade all day, but we used Starlink there for a total of maybe 10 hours, so that little blip was not a big deal.

Since we live on solar power, we prefer not to camp in the deep woods anyway. In general, the impact of shade from nearby trees has been far more noticeable on our solar panels this year than on the Starlink dish. (The solar panels have performed really well too, thank goodness!).

How Does Starlink Handle Rain and Storms?

We saw a video of an early version of the Speedmount where the RVer complained that rain pooled on the Starlink dish and it lost its signal until he dried it off. He recommended installing it at an angle.

The Trio Flatmount designers have fixed this issue on the Speedmount and now have weep holes along all four edges of the frame so rain can drain off the dish. We have sat through (way too many) huge rainstorms this summer, several lasting quite a few hours, and we’ve snuggled up inside the rig and used the internet throughout. We have not lost the signal during a storm, and although we haven’t climbed up on the roof to check it, we assume all the rain water has drained out of the weep holes as designed or it wouldn’t have worked during the storms!

Our Speedmount is installed at about a 2 or 3 degree angle because our RV roof isn’t 100% flat. But it is an extremely shallow angle so the weep holes are doing the draining as designed more so than the angle of the Speedmount installation.

Would We Recommend Starlink for an RV?

Yes, 100%. And we’d recommend using the Trio Flatmount Speedmount to install it securely and permanently on your RV roof too.

If you are a part-time RVer like we are now, we’d also recommend swapping between using it for internet access at home as well as on the road the way we are doing.

Of course, if you have a superior or cheaper home internet solution, then this won’t make sense. But if you are like us and your home internet options are limited and expensive, then you can’t beat Starlink even at the higher prices you’ll be paying for the Roaming service during the months when you are living at home.

We envy our neighbors who use Starlink with their much cheaper cost for the Residential equipment (same equipment we have) and cheaper Residential monthly service fee. But we think the flexibility of being able to take Starlink with us wherever our RV wants to go, even if it’s just on a long weekend RV trip close to home, is well worth the extra cost.

When and How to Buy Starlink?

In an effort to expand their customer base, Starlink offers every customer a special promo link they can share with friends to get them to sign up. This link gives the friend a free month of service and also gives the existing customer a free month of service too. A win-win!

Unfortunately, although we had friends who’d encouraged us about Starlink for two years, when we finally pulled the trigger we had no idea they had a special link that could have helped both us and them. So, we didn’t win and neither did they. Darn!

However, if you want to get a free month of service and don’t have a friend with a special link, this is ours and we’d love for you to use it. It takes you to the Residential landing page, but just click the “Roam” button to see the current Roaming equipment and service options.

Get a Free Month of Starlink Service!

If you use this link, please let us know, and thank you very much for the free month of service…we hope you enjoy yours! Once you’ve signed up, you can spread the joy through your own link and/or send friends back to this page for our Starlink RV installation tips!

If you aren’t in a rush to get Starlink, keep an eye on their promotions. When we signed up, the Roaming equipment cost dropped from $499 to $349 and the Roaming monthly cost was $165/month. A week later the new promo was FREE equipment for Residential users who committed to 12 months of Residential service at $120/month. Since we were about to head out on our RV travels for the summer, we sure didn’t want to commit to 12 months of staying at home, but that was a sweet deal for folks who didn’t want to take their Starlink dish on the road!!!

These promo deals change all the time…

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Is Forest River a Good RV? Well Built? Here’s Our Experience

When we told a friend we’d just bought a 2024 Forest River travel trailer (an Arctic Wolf 17CB), he excitedly forwarded us an email he’d received from Warren Buffet’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, that told the story of their acquisition of Forest River.

Forest River sounded like a very special company. Obviously we’d made a great choice with this trailer!

But when we told another friend about our purchase, he exclaimed in horror, “I can’t believe you bought a Forest River! Don’t you know those things are junk? The fresh water tanks fall out of them as you’re driving down the road!”

So, which is it? Are Forest River RVs any good? Are they well made? Are they worth the money?

Here’s our experience with our brand new rig.

Is Forest River a good RV band? Are Forest River trailers well made?

Are Forest River RVs Well Built? Here are our thoughts!

2024 Forest River Alpha Wolf 17CB travel trailer

Our trailer purchase was unique because we bought a brand new never used trailer from a private owner. He’d traded in his $200k motorhome for the cheapest trailer on an RV dealership lot so he could get his cash out of his motorhome. Then he immediately put his new little trailer up for sale.

When we bought this trailer, we paid a fraction of what a brand new unit would have cost because we didn’t get it from a dealership and the seller really wanted to unload it.

However, because he hadn’t ever intended to use the trailer himself, he skipped doing a thorough and detailed Buyer Walkthrough and simply towed it home.

When he showed it to us, it was apparent he’d never done more than poke his head inside. It had sat on the dealer lot for a few months and prospective customers had looked at it, but other than that typical dealer lot exposure before he bought it, it was the same as it had been the day it left the factory.

So, we got to see in depth what a brand new trailer fresh off the Forest River production line is like when it lands at an RV dealership.

Here’s what we experienced in the first five months of use:

1) Fresh Water Tank Can’t Be Filled

Responsible: Forest River Assembly Line Workers

The first day we had the trailer, Mark put a hose into the gravity fill fresh water intake so he could fill the fresh water tank and test the plumbing systems. Instantly, the water spurted back out at him and soaked him completely.

Fresh water intake on a Forest River RV 2

When Mark put a water hose in this fresh water intake, water gushed all over him!

It turned out the fresh water intake hose didn’t go downhill to the tank the way a gravity fill hose should. Instead, it looped upwards for a foot or so and then back down before going to the fresh water tank. The water from the hose in Mark’s hand couldn’t go uphill, so it spurted back out all over him.

Fresh water intake hose bad installation on a Forest River RV

The white fresh water intake hose goes up for about a foot from the basement and loops over all the other hoses in the bottom of the vanity before going back down below the flooring to the tank.

Obviously, a properly installed fresh water intake hose goes downhill or horizontally all the way from the intake to the tank and doesn’t go uphill at all.

Was this improper installation due to bad training or incompetence? Why didn’t Quality Control catch this incredibly obvious problem?

The intake hose is located below a rat’s nest of water hoses and other things under the bathroom vanity, and it’s very hard to reach, so it was not an easy repair.

It took Mark nearly a day of work to troubleshoot the problem and then fix it. He cut about a foot off the intake hose line and rerouted it to lie below all the other hoses and lines, making sure it had a downward or horizontal slope the whole way to the tank.

Forest River RV removing excess hose ion the fresh water intake line

Mark cut off about a foot of the fresh water intake hose so it would lie flat along the trailer floor.

Forest River RV fresh water intake line rerouted so it can work properly

He re-routed the fresh water intake hose underneath the rat’s nest of other hoses instead of on top of it.

2) None of the electrical outlets worked

Responsible: Forest River Assembly Line Workers

The second day we had the trailer, Mark hooked the trailer up to shore power and plugged his electric razor into a wall outlet to see if the outlet worked. Nope!

It turned out NOT ONE of the wall outlets worked!

This was because they were all wired to the GFI outlet in the bathroom, and that outlet had been wired backwards. The Hot went to the Load rather than the Line.

Forest River RV GFI outlet was wired backwards at the factory

This GFI outlet in the bathroom was wired backwards, so none of the electrical outlets in the trailer worked!

Wow! Had the installer been trained to wire GFI outlets backwards? Or did s/he forget how it’s done? Or was it sabotage by an disgruntled employee? How many RVs did that employee wire backwards? Has that employee learned how to do it correctly yet?

Clearly, Quality Control never bothered to plug something into an electrical outlet in this trailer!

That problem took another few hours for Mark to troubleshoot and fix.

3) Slide-out Adjusted Incorrectly

Responsible: Forest River Assembly Line Workers

Next, we opened the single slide-out for the first time, and just as it finished opening we heard a loud crunch/thud as it jerked into place. Oh dear!

The single slide-out on the trailer uses an Accu-Slide Cable Actuated system that consists of pulleys and chains mounted to the wall above the slide-out behind the fascia board.

Slide-out needs adjusting on a Forest River travel trailer

The Accu-Slide mechanism is behind the fascia board at the top of the slide-out.

The two pulleys move horizontally along the wall parallel to the road in the direction of travel while the slide-out itself moves in and out perpendicular to that. It is considered very ingenious, or even genius.

Accu-Slide adjustment on a Forest River travel trailer

Chains with pulleys move horizontally to move the slide in and out.

However, it must be adjusted very precisely. On the outside of the slide-out the cables should have about 1/2 inch to an inch of play in them. Instead, one cable was sagging by two inches and the other was banjo-string-taught.

Clearly, Forest River didn’t adjust the slide-out mechanisms on this trailer before it was shipped to the deal. The Accu-Slide mechanism was fastened to the wall and that was it.

After some research and studying a slew of videos, Mark figured out how to adjust this Accu-Slide cable mechanism.

He did 3 complete adjustments and spent the better part of two days studying, adjusting, testing and sorting it all out until he could repeatedly bring the slide in and out and retain the correct tension on each exterior cable. It is now adjusted properly and it goes in and out with just a small clunk when it reaches the full Out position.

AccuSlide adjustment on a Forest River RV

Adjusting this Accu-Slide mechanism was not easy and took three full repeats of the process to be 100%.

4) Camco Shower Wand Leaked

Responsible: Camco

Mark then turned on the water in the shower to test it. The shower wand leaked like crazy all over everything. He tried to fix it to no avail. So we bought a replacement.

Oxygenics shower wand leaking

When Mark first turned on the shower the shower wand leaked all over the place and couldn’t be repaired so he bought a replacement.

5) Outdoor Shower Leaked

Responsible: Lippert Components

Next up was the outdoor shower which also turned out to have a leak which Mark fixed.

Leaky Outdoor Shower Wand on a brand new Forest River travel trailer RV

When it was first turned on, the outdoor shower leaked all over the place too.
Forunately, it was repairable.

6) The tankless “instant” hot water is useless unless you have a Sewer Hookup

Reponsible: Forest River Designers

With the basic electrical and plumbing systems finally functional, we took our first weeklong shakedown cruise to a campground at Lake Pleasant, Arizona, that had electrical and water hookups as well as nice bathrooms (just in case!). Our site didn’t have a sewer hookup.

One of the two funky things about this new trailer is it doesn’t have a hot water tank (the other is that it has a 12 volt electric refrigerator). Instead, it has a tankless on-demand “instant” hot water heater.

Rather than heating up a tankful of water before taking a shower or washing dishes, this system heats the water as it flows through the pipe into the sink or shower when you turn on the hot water faucet.

All of our previous RVs had hot water tanks (Fleetwood popup tent trailer, Fleetwood travel trailer, Hitchhiker fifth wheel, Arctic Fox truck camper, Genesis Supreme toy hauler) and they worked just fine.

Tankless hot water heater on a Forest River travel trailer RV

The Forest River Alpha Wolf travel trailers come with a tankless “instant” hot water heater

Unfortunately, we immediately discovered that the tankless “instant” hot water heater is more accurately described as a tankless “eventually” hot water heater. It is anything but instant! A lot of fresh water has to pass through the tankless hot water heater before it gets hot.

The shower, which is right next to the heater, wastes 2 gallons of fresh water as you wait for the hot water to arrive. The kitchen sink which is about 12 feet away from the heater wastes 5 gallons of water.

That’s 9 gallons a day of wasted water for two people taking showers and doing one load of dishes! Never mind washing your face or hands in hot water at other times during the day!

Worse, if you want consistently hot water to flow, you can’t turn the faucet off at all while showering or washing dishes. If you do, you’ll have to waste the same amount of water all over again when you turn the faucet back on.

Ultimately, the tankless hot water heater sends massive amounts of clean fresh water down the sewer drain, either into the RV park’s plumbing system if you have a sewer hookup or into the RV’s gray tank if you don’t.

So, without a sewer hookup, you fill up the gray tank in no time! And that’s what we experienced.

What’s even more unsettling is that when you’re dry camping, every PINT of fresh water you carry is precious and you don’t waste any. So putting all that good fresh water down the gray tank drain is a colossal waste.

In our over 3 thousands nights of boondocking we developed a simple system for heating and using hot water with our hot water tank. We’d heat the water in the tank for 15 minutes once a day which was sufficient for showers and dishes. In all our rigs the water in the hot water tank stayed hot or warm most of the day.

Before showering, we’d put a small sauce pan in the shower and capture the first quart of water that had been sitting in the pipe between the shower and the hot water tank and was still cold. Later on, we’d heat this water on the stove and put it in the sink for dishes. We’d turn the tap to hot (which flowed cold at first) and fill the sink the rest of the way. As we rinsed the dishes, the water in the tap would be warm and then become hot. Super Easy!

Unfortunately, because of the tankless “eventually” hot water heater, we stopped using hot water all together after the first day of that first shakedown cruise. Ugh!!

But what to do longer term with this new trailer? We certainly weren’t going to travel only to campgrounds that had showers!!

Workaround: ShowerMiser Hot Water Heater Product Saves the Day

Replacing this tankless hot water heater with a tank-based system would have been very difficult due to space constraints.

Fortunately, we found a workaround product that Mark installed when we got home, and we both absolutely love it. It’s a ShowerMiser and we’ll be describing the installation and how it works in a future blog post. It’s a simple concept but tricky installation. Fortunately, some RV brands are now installing them at the factory.

The only problem is that it works for just one faucet. So, we have it on the shower but nowhere else. This means we can take hot showers but we don’t have running hot water anywhere else in the rig.

ShowerMiser installation on a Forest River travel trailer RV

Installing a ShowerMiser has made it possible to take a shower in our trailer!
But we can’t use hot water at either the bathroom or kitchen sink or at the outdoor shower.

We’d love to install a second ShowerMiser for the kitchen sink and a third one at the bathroom vanity and a fourth one at the outdoor shower so we could have hot water at each of those faucets. But the installations in those locations are prohibitively difficult.

So, we’ll just travel and live with hot water in the shower but nowhere else. We’re okay with it, but what a huge step backwards from every rig we’ve ever owned, including our 2005 popup tent trailer!

In our opinion, any RV with a tankless hot water system MUST HAVE a factory installed ShowerMiser at each faucet that has a hot water tap if it is to perform equivalently to an RV with a hot water heater.

Even for RVers who stay strictly at RV parks with full hookups, just imagine if every RV in the park had a tankless hot water heater. The amount of the park’s fresh water supply that would be going straight into their sewer would be significant.

For now, we have nice hot showers and we heat water in a sauce pan on the stove for dishes. We rinse our dishes in cold water (yucky in the wintertime) and we have no hot water at the bathroom vanity or the outdoor shower.

That’s pretty primitive living for a brand new 2024 RV!

7) Gray Water Dump Hose Handle Fell Off

Responsible: Forest River Assembly Line Workers

At the end of this trip Mark went to dump the gray water tank at the RV dump station and discovered the handle for the gray tank was gone! We’d towed the trailer over a hundred miles, so it must have fallen off while driving. We bought a new one and Mark used Loctite to screw it on securely. While he was at it, he put Loctite on the black tank handle too.

Looking for silver linings in all this frustration, the original two wastewater tank handles were both black but the new gray tank handle is gray. So now the black tank handle is black and the gray tank handle is gray — easy to distinguish!

Black and Gray water handles on a Forest River travel trailer

The Gray tank handle fell off. We replaced it with a Gray colored handled to color code the two tanks.

8) Nowhere to store a dripping wet RV Sewer Hose

Responsible: Forest River Designers

The rear bumper is presumably designed to hold an RV sewer hose. However, it is too small to hold a modern RV sewer hose with a flange on the end for attaching it to the waste tank valve.

Also, the endcaps on this too-small bumper have a tendency to fall out of the ends. So, Mark used a self-tapping sheet metal screw to hold the endcaps in place.

RV dump hose bumper on a Forest River travel trailer RV

This bumper is too small to hold a sewer hose and the endcaps fall off while driving.
So Mark screwed each one in place.

9) Massive Water Leaks in the Basement

Responsible: Lippert Components, Inc.

Now that we could use hot water in the trailer, we went on our Second Shakedown Cruise for 5 days at Canyon Lake Marina RV Park near Phoenix. This campground had electric and water hookups but no sewer hookups, so we could test the ShowerMiser.

Before we even tried the ShowerMiser at the campground, Mark filled the fresh water tank because we planned to run off the tank and refill it from the water hookup if necessary.

Suddenly, a puddle of water began to grow on the ground right by the tankless hot water heater. Mark took the cover off, and the basement compartment where the heater was installed was full of water.

After sopping up the mess, he discovered that as long as we had the water pump turned on or were connected to city water, the water heater would flood the floor under the vanity with water. If we turned off the water pump or disconnected from city water the leak stopped.

So… we camped for 3 nights and 2 days without using any water in the rig at all except what we’d brought in drinking water containers. We’d turn the water pump on very briefly to flush the toilet and that was it for water use. We used paper plates and brushed our teeth with bottled water. It was awkward and dirty living for a fancy new RV.

We ended up canceling our final 2 nights at the RV park. Why spend good money on a park when you can’t even rinse out your coffee cup without causing a flood in the bathroom? The campground had a strict no refund policy but we persuaded them to bend the rules a smidge due to our mechanical failure.

The tankless hot water heater is a Lippert product, and once we got home, Mark tried working with Lippert’s Tech Support on the phone. However, after several phone calls and submitting multiple photos of the problem area, he was getting nowhere.

So, we called a local mobile RV tech who got it fixed in a few hours. The problem was two cracked O-rings deep inside the heater. They were impossible to reach without removing the hot water heater from the rig all together.

$220 later along with two perfectly sized O-rings that Mark had in his collection, we could now turn on the water pump or connect to city water and not have water leaks fill the basement with water. Yay!

The RV tech commented that when he’d worked at an RV dealership, they would have replaced the whole hot water heater rather than troubleshoot the problem and find the broken o-rings inside. They would have done this whether the trailer was under warranty or not, and it would have been a very expensive repair.

10) Insufficient Solar Power

Responsible: Forest River Designers

Now that we’d fixed the huge water leak in the hot water heater, we returned to Canyon Lake for our third Shakedown cruise to use the last 2 days of the reservation we’d canceled and then move on to camp at one of our favorite places, Roosevelt Lake, which is all dry camping with no hookups.

This trip went well.

At Roosevelt Lake we used the Honda Generator because the 200 watts of factory installed solar power on the roof wasn’t enough to boondock for more than 24 hours at a time due to the 10 cubic-foot 12 volt refrigerator.

200 Watt factory installed solar power system on a Forest River travel trailer RV

The 200 watts of factory installed solar power are enough to keep the refrigerator working while underway but not enough to live on AND use the fridge for more than a day.

We knew that ahead of time and were pleasantly surprised that using the generator for two hours or so a day gave us plenty of power and supplemented the small solar power system very well.

When we returned home we installed a large solar power system which gave us all the power we need to boondock indefinitely and will describe that installation in a future blog post.

11) Three Water Leaks in the Bathroom

Responsible: Forest River Designers

Now that we were fully set up for dry camping, we took our 4th Shakedown Cruise and spent 8 days at one of our favorite spots, a dry camping campground called Bonito Campground outside Flagstaff Arizona. This is where had a wonderful surprise visit by a pair of camels and a guy wearing a Civil War officer’s uniform!!

We wanted to test the solar power system to see if it was sufficient for our off-grid RV lifestyle with that big electric fridge. It worked beautifully even though the panels were shaded for about 3 hours a day. It was late May, a few weeks from the summer solstice, so the days were long and the sun was high in the sky — ideal for solar power.

However, after washing our hands and doing a few dishes on the first day when we got to the campground, we noticed the water pump was “grunting” periodically when no water was running.

We listened to this for a while and determined it wasn’t just the elevation change (3,000’ to 7,500’). It was a water leak somewhere.

It actually turned out to be 3 water leaks!! Each one was at a junction between two water hoses under the bathroom vanity and below the shower.

Forest River uses pex cinch clamp rings to connect water lines together and some of the water lines are joined in places that are impossible to reach after the appliances have been installed.

When RVs are built, all the wiring, plumbing and conduit runs are put in place first before the appliances are installed, so it is common for important things to be in places you can’t reach without extraordinary effort.

If the designers planned ahead for repairs and used higher quality fittings, leaks would be less common and would be easier to fix. Our beloved sailboat had two stainless steel hose clamps on every water pipe junction. You don’t want water leaks when you’re in the middle of the ocean!

The first two leaks were fairly accessible and Mark fixed them within an hour. The third leak was underneath the shower stall in the far back corner. Worse, it was behind the shower drain tube, virtually out of sight and out of reach.

Somehow Mark managed to get his arm under the drain tube and replace the fitting with a hose clamp. But when he tightened it, it began to twist and became impossible to tighten completely.

Shower leak under the shower pan on a Forest River travel trailer RV

The leak under the shower pan was below the far back corner. Mark had to squeeze his hand underneath the drain pipe and then blindly feel for the broken connector, replace it and tighten it. No small feat!

So, because he couldn’t tighten it all the way while were out camping, we had a slow leak throughout that shakedown cruise. For a full week we turned on the water pump only when we needed water and turned it off immediately to avoid getting a pool of water under the shower pan. After turning off the water pump, we’d “burp” one of the faucets to make sure there was no pressure on the leaky fitting. This was an inconvenience, but we lived with it.

When we got home Mark put another hour or two into fixing that water leak. He came up with a creative way to make an extension rod that could reach the fitting and fortunately was able to tighten it. So far it seems to be holding. Yay!

12) Entry Stairs Don’t Work on Unlevel Ground

Responsible: Lippert Designers

This trailer came with fold-down entry steps that are now found on most trailers. While these are much more solid underfoot than the older style flip-out stairs of yesteryear, they require some forethought when parking.

There are three stairs on our step system and they stick out enough from the trailer that you have to ensure there’s space by the trailer for them to touch down. When we were camping at Bonito Campground we were in a very narrow site and there was about a one foot drop right in the spot where the stair supports needed to be. We had to stack several blocks under the feet in order to set up the stairs. Ironically, we moved campsites after a few days and had the exact same problem in the second campsite!

They also rattle a lot while traveling. We’ve tried wedging things in to make them stop wiggling but haven’t found the right solution yet.

Lippert Solid Step RV Entry Stairs on Uneven Ground - Yikes!

The stairs could not reach the ground and required several blocks stacked up the feet.

Smaller problems and inconveniences

Responsible: Forest River Designers and Assembly Line Installers

Those were the major problems the trailer has had in its first four trips. However, there were lots of other little things that cropped up too.

– Not enough Dicor was used on the roof skylight installation and there were some big rain water leaks waiting to happen. Mark went over everything on the roof and added a big dollop of Dicor wherever needed

— Forest River has begun leaving certain items off their new trailers. This trailer did not come with a dump hose, a TV or a ladder to the roof even though it has a walk-on roof.

There is a sticker on an interior wall indicating that’s where to hang a TV. There is also a backing plate on the back exterior of the trailer for installing a roof access ladder which Lippert makes.

We bought a dump hose. We don’t watch TV. We’re making do with a household extension ladder at home and taking a telescoping ladder with us on the road. I sure miss the ladder on the back that is permanently attached and is so easy to climb at a moment’s notice.

— The water pump is installed in such a way underneath the rat’s nest of hoses below the vanity that it makes a massive racket whenever it runs. We haven’t yet decided how to dampen the noise.

— All four trailer tires and the spare were low on air. This is to be expected on a unit that sat on the dealer lot for a long time but during a Buyer Walkthrough it is worth insisting the tires be pumped up to spec.

— All the wheel lugs were loose. Again, if the trailer were new from a dealer they should be tightened before you tow it off the lot.

So… Does Forest River Build Quality RVs?

With all the catastrophic failures, it would be easy to call our trailer a lemon, but in reality I think it’s a pretty typical trailer.

I suspect that every Indiana-made RV brand arrives at the dealerships with similar types of problems, and we’ve had plenty of experts who are “in the know” tell us that is the case.

One quipped, “If it’s 80% functional, then it’s ready to ship to the dealer.” So, that’s the goal: 80% operational.

While we were going through all of this, a friend of ours who has a new Airstream told us his trailer was in the shop at that very moment for warranty repairs. Even though his rig probably cost two or three times what ours did, he’d experienced much the same misery.

Crazier still, he had a friend with a new Tiffin motorhome who’d also gone through the wringer with ridiculous numbers of stupid problems even though that motorhome probably cost three times what his Airstream did.

So, the kind of quality we all might hope for when buying a new RV is completely missing across many brands, no matter what the price point.

All the responsibility for getting the unavoidable repairs taken care of falls on the Buyer/Owner, and the best time to get them done is while you’re still a Buyer and not yet an Owner!

When doing a Buyer Walkthrough on a new rig at a dealership, it’s a good idea to insist you see water successfully going into the fresh water tank, make sure the black and gray water handles are attached securely, verify all the electrical outlets work, heat a mug of water in the microwave, put a thermometer in the fridge, test all the faucets and shower wands plus the hot water system, air conditioner, furnace, stove burners, etc., not to mention verifying everything on the roof and the windows are sufficiently sealed from the elements.

The dealership may want to hustle you out the door, but until you sign the papers and transform from a Buyer into an Owner, all the power is in your hands. After that you have to take your turn in line for service and live without your rig while it’s in the shop or tackle the repairs yourself.

Why Are RVs Built So Poorly?

I think it boils down to two things.

1) Speed vs Quality

We’ve toured many RV factories (Fleetwood, Northwood Arctic Fox, KZ Durango, Keystone Raptor, Jayco Highland Ridge, Thor Heartland, NuWa Hitchhiker) and we were told time and again that the trailers are built in 2.5 to 3 days. That’s pretty quick for throwing together a rolling house, and each factory was very proud of their speed.

So, the goal is speed, and assembly line workers (and perhaps the Quality Control inspectors and repair people) are measured by how fast they complete their jobs, not by how well their jobs are done.

We’ve also toured two super high end custom manufacturers (Space Craft and Luxe) as well as a tiny tear drop trailer manufacturer (Escapod) and a tiny travel trailer factory (Casita), and those factory environments were completely different.

Their whole focus was on quality, not speed of manufacture. Things like wiring and plumbing lines were proudly shown off for their tidiness and organization, and at Casita we watched a trailer standing under a torrent of water being tested for water leaks. However, trailers at those first two top-of-the-line brands take weeks to build and they exceed most RVers’ budgets.

And even being super high end, we spoke with customers at both of those plants who’d returned to the factory for warranty repairs. They each had a long list too. Apparently, no RV is immune to that!

2) RV Manufacturers are not RVers

I think the other primary reason RVs are built so poorly is that the manufacturing executives are not RVers themselves.

When I wrote for Trailer Life Magazine, I published three different articles surveying all the toy haulers, full-time quality and weekender quality fifth wheel trailers that were on the market at the time. As part of my research for those articles, we met with executives at several well known RV manufacturers while we were in Indiana.

As a lark, I asked each executive we met, “So what kind of RV do you have?’

I expected they might own the brand they sell so they would know their own product line on an intimate level. Or perhaps they’d own a competitor’s brand for market research purposes. Or perhaps, like NuWa (Hitchhiker) used to do, the company had a few of their own products available for employees to use. They could take these rigs out on weekends for fun and also educate themselves and come home with valuable feedback.

However, only one executive out of half a dozen we met in person and another dozen I spoke to on the phone currently owned an RV…or had ever owned an RV for that matter!

The most common answers I got from these RV executives were:

“My wife doesn’t like RVing.”
“We prefer flying to distant vacation destinations because we don’t have time to drive there.”
“We go overseas (or to the tropics) for all our vacations.”

This explains a lot about the failures in the RV manufacturing industry.

One wonderful exception to all this was an RV designer I corresponded with who worked on the Forest River Cherokee brand (which is the brand our Alpha Wolf is part of).

He was not a top flight executive in the corporate ranks but was the designer of a small toy hauler that I thought was a particularly clever layout. I asked him what kind of RV he owned, and he said he owned that trailer! So, he not only designed it but he went camping with it too.

No wonder it was such a great design!

RV Manufacturers are “Assemblers” more than “Manufacturers”

In the end, RVs are complicated little rolling homes and RV manufacturers are more “assemblers” than true “manufacturers.”

RV manufacturers install a bunch of products made by other companies into a rolling box. The walls, ceilings, ductwork, wiring and plumbing are their purview, but all the appliances and systems we rely on in the RV life are made by third parties.

Interestingly, in most cases, the “other companies” are actually just “one company,” that is, Lippert Components, Inc. Just about everything in an RV, from trailer frames to windows and doors to kitchen and bathroom appliances to climate control systems to entry stairs and toy hauler ramp doors, is made by Lippert.

There are other component manufacturers out there, but Lippert’s products are always cheaper and generally not as good. So, more often than not, RV designers choose Lippert’s products over the competition to save on costs.

Also, if a new company creates a clever new product, Lippert frequently buys the company out and suddenly every RV has one. Then they find shortcuts and material/component alternatives to make the product cheaper to produce.

Lippert can be very aggressive with pushing their products as well. One executive told us they deeply discount their products when sold in bundles, so if the manufacturer wants a specific item, it’s often most cost effective to take the whole bundle even if there are products in the bundle they’d rather not use.

I asked an executive of an RV component company that has all the skills and manufacturing capability to build superior trailer frames why they didn’t get into that business. He said it would be impossible to compete against Lippert which virtually owns the trailer frame market (with a few notable exceptions).

We saw first-hand the strong arm tactics Lippert uses in the industry when we attended a horse trailer dealership owner’s gathering in Oklahoma. A Lippert rep was demonstrating a new landing leg system for horse trailers to a group of dealership owners. One fellow in a cowboy hat said with a casual drawl, “That will never fly with my customers. They wouldn’t like that one bit!” The young and eager rep’s response was, with a laugh, “Just shove it down their throats!”

Fortunately for the deep pocketed buyer, higher end RVs are typically built with fewer Lippert components and the highest end fully custom RVs openly eschew Lippert products all together.

So, to a large extent, all brands of mass market RVs are essentially the same because they are just assemblies of identical components. The difference could be the care with which the components are installed, but if every company measures its assembly line workers by how fast they do the job-because time is money-then they’ll all have the same problems with quality.

Years ago, we traded in our “lower end” year-old Fleetwood travel trailer for a “higher end” Hitchhiker fifth wheel that cost over twice as much.

We were astonished to look around the interior of our new rig and realize that almost all the appliances were the exact same models as the ones we’d had in our cheaper trailer.

So, Are Forest River RVs Well Built?

Given all this, I think the answer is a resounding, “No.”

However, from what we’ve seen at the RV factories, RV dealerships and in talking to other RVers, Forest River trailers aren’t significantly worse…or better…than the competition. No matter how much money you spend on an RV, failures of some kind are pretty much guaranteed.

The bottom line is that if you like traveling by RV, then dealing with failures is just part of the picture. And if you can’t afford a fully custom RV, then generally shoddy construction is to be expected, with few exceptions.

However, people like ourselves who love RVing will continue buying and owning these poorly built mass market rigs because, well, RVing is a great way to travel and explore! And for us, in the end, the fun outweighs the hassle (and Mark can fix almost everything)!

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Goldline RV Cover – Winter protection for our new trailer!

After our summer travels, it is time to put our Genesis Supreme 28CRT fifth wheel toy hauler to bed for the winter with a Goldline RV Cover, something we never had to do as full-timers. For those who are going to be doing the same thing, we wanted to let you see what how this winter protection will work with our new trailer.

Goldline RV Cover for a Fifth Wheel Trailer

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Before we left in June, one of the things that concerned us most about buying our virtually brand new Genesis Supreme toy hauler was how we’d protect it from the elements during the eight months of the year it was sitting dormant waiting to be the Mothership for our travel adventures the next summer.

Our 2007 Hitchhiker fifth wheel that we lived in full-time was out in the elements 24/7/365 for the twelve years we owned it because we were living in it year round except for the months it was in storage between 2009 and 2013 as we sailed Mexico’s Pacific Coast on our boat.

Sadly, even though we washed and waxed the Hitchhiker fifth wheel regularly, by the last few years we owned it, the exterior seriously showed its age and looked terrible. Likewise, the exterior of the formerly garage kept Arctic Fox truck camper we owned for a year was just beginning to show a few signs of aging after it sat outside for the 12 months we had it.

We don’t have a good covered storage option for our new trailer, so we decided we’d try protecting our new trailer each winter with a fabric RV cover.

There are quite a few brands of RV covers on the market, and all get mixed reviews. They tend to tear over time and generally fall apart. For several weeks before we left, we read reviews of various RV covers until our eyes got tired.

Then we came across a discussion in the Escapees RV forum about the Goldline RV cover, a brand we hadn’t heard of before.

This cover is made from a 7-ply material rather than the standard 6-ply material used by other manufacturers, and the reviews and discussion about its construction were very favorable.

We dug a little deeper and discovered that one of the things that makes the Goldline RV cover unique is the Marine Grade fabric used in its construction. Similar to Sunbrella, which has a weave density of 800D, this fabric, Marinex, has a weave density of 600D which translates to a 33% weight savings, a big plus when trying to pull a 50′ x 25′ piece of it up onto an RV roof!

Also, the the color of the fabric is obtained by dyeing the thread rather than dyeing the finished fabric which makes the color hold much better over time.

One of the things we liked is that the Goldline RV covers are sized in two foot increments. Other covers we considered have as much as four foot increments between sizes, making it difficult to get a good fit.

Our toy hauler is 32′ 10″ long, so we chose a 33′ Goldline RV cover. We’ve done a trial run of putting the RV cover onto the trailer so we could see how it worked and what we are in for when we’re finally ready to cover it for the winter.

It’s not hard to put this RV cover on. We laid it out on the ground next to the toy hauler, putting the “Front of cover” label at the front of the rig, and then Mark pulled it up onto the roof and lowered the sides.

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 1

We laid the cover on the ground alongside our trailer.

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 2

We located the “Front of Cover” label. You can also look for the piping that is on each side of the fifth wheel overhang.

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 3

Up the ladder he goes! This is where the full weight of Sunbrella fabric would be a challenge.

There are panels on the two sides of the Goldline RV cover that can be rolled up by the roof or lowered down and zipped closed. This allows access to the RV door, windows and hatches as needed.

Goldline makes toy hauler RV covers for travel trailer toy haulers that have an opening in the back for the ramp door as well. This would be terrific! However, they don’t have a model for a fifth wheel toy hauler like ours available yet, so we went with the regular fifth wheel RV cover. We just won’t be able to open the ramp door when the cover is on the trailer.

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 4

Mark pulled the cover towards the back of the trailer and let the sides fall as he went.

The last step in the installation is to cinch up the straps that go beneath the trailer and hold the sides down and also to tighten the straps on the rear end as well as the fabric that covers the fifth wheel overhang.

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 5

Looking good up there!

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 6

It seems like a good overall fit.

I’ll be writing a more detailed review of this RV cover once we’ve had it on our trailer for the winter months, gone in and out of various hatch compartments and the front door with the cover in place, and seen the cover through the worst of the mid-winter storms.

We rarely get snow in our area but we do get plenty of heavy rain in short doses, some wind, and tons of UV-filled sunshine. Those UV rays cause the worst damage to an RV’s exterior, so we’re excited to have found an RV cover made of UV resistent fabric that can protect our rolling home and hopefully keep it looking good!

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 7

We tied a few of the straps but not all of them…this was a trial run.

Eevelle Goldline RV Cover fifth wheel installation 8

While it’s “in storage” we’ll be able to go in and out of it easily…nice!

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RV Awning Installation and Repair – Replacing the Awning Fabric

Our RV awning is 11 years old now, and the canvas fabric recently tore at the top and bottom. RV awnings are a pain in every respect (except for the wonderful shade they offer), and we knew we were in for a challenging DIY repair if we tried to do it ourselves.

Fixing an RV awning is a job for at least two people, preferably three or four for certain parts of the job, and it’s easiest if someone in the group has done it before because it can be a little tricky.

Ripped RV awning torn before replacement-min

Oh no! Time for new RV awning fabric!

We were traveling through Rapid City, South Dakota, and recent hail storms had made a mess of many RVs and RV dealerships all around the area. Only one of the local RV dealerships and repair shops could get us in within the week, so we were thrilled when we backed into a bay at Jack’s Campers.

Fortunately, they had the fabric for a 17′ Dometic Sunchaser awning in stock, an old manual model that is not installed on new RVs any more. Luckily, there must be enough oldies-but-goodies on the road these days that Jack’s Campers stocks them.

We back our fifth wheel trailer into a bay at Jack's Campers in Rapid City South Dakota-min

We got into position at Jack’s Campers in Rapid City, South Dakota.

We called our RV Extended Warranty folks, Wholesale Warranties, to find out if this awning failure would qualify for reimbursement under our warranty plan.

We have had so much good luck with our extended warranty on major repairs like our refrigerator, trailer axle, suspension, toilet and window leaks and plumbing, that we were hopeful this repair would be covered too. However, only the mechanical aspects of the awning were covered, not the fabric.

In the end, the whole RV awning repair job ended up costing $444 out of pocket, most of that being for the new fabric, and it took the guys at Jack’s Campers just 45 minutes to do it.

The first step was to remove the awning arms and roller from the sidewall of our fifth wheel. They unrolled the fabric about a foot and unscrewed the mounting brackets that attached the awning arms to the side of the trailer.

Remove the bolts attaching RV awning to the side of the fifth wheel trailer-min

First, remove the awning arms from the sidewalls of the trailer.

There was putty in the awning fabric track where the mounting bracket had been, so this had to be removed with a flathead screwdriver.

Use flathead screwdriver to remove putty from RV awning track on fifth wheel trailer-min

There was some putty in the awning track, so it was removed with a flathead screwdriver.

Next, two guys slid the awning fabric off of the awning track on the RV wall and marched the whole thing into the workshop and rested it on some saw horses.

Two people slide the RV awning off the track on a fifth wheel trailer RV-min

Two mechanics walked the awning out of the track on the trailer.

Rest the RV awning on saw horses to remove the fabric-min

Once in the shop the awning was laid across some saw horses.

Manually operated RV awnings have a spring inside the roller mechanism (a “torsion assembly“) for rolling up the fabric. At one end of the roller there is a locking mechanism to keep the spring inside the roller tight so the fabric doesn’t unroll. This locking mechanism became important when the new fabric was installed to get the spring tensioned correctly inside the roller.

Locking end of RV awning-min

The right arm of the awning has a locking mechanism which keeps the fabric from rolling off the roller.

At the opposite end of the roller there was no locking mechanism. The bolt holding the awning arm to the roller at the non-locking end was removed and the arm was pulled off. The arm at the locking end of the roller remained attached throughout the job.

Remove bolt holding RV awning arm to the roller-min

Remove the awning arm from the non-locking end of the roller.

RV awning endcap and spring-min

Awning arm removed.

Then the rivets on the endcap were drilled out and the torsion assembly was pulled out.

Drill out rivets from endcap on RV awning-min

Drill out the rivets on the endcap.

Remove spring and endcap from RV awning to replace fabric-min

The endcap and spring (torsion assembly) are removed from the roller.

RV awning spring and endcap-min

The torsion assembly is out of the roller.
Spraying it with silicone spray will help the awning roll more easily.

Then the awning fabric was slid off of the roller.

Two mechanics hold the RV awning to slide the torn fabric off the track-min

Two mechanics slid the old awning fabric out of the track.

The new fabric was unfolded and laid out in the workshop, and then it was slid into the track on the roller until the fabric stretched the whole length of the roller.

Open up and spread out the new RV awning fabric-min

The new awning fabric was unfolded and laid out.

Opened up RV awning endcap-min

The new awning fabric will be slid into the track on the roller.

Install new RV awning fabric by sliding it along the track-min

The new awning fabric was started in the track on the roller.

Spraying the track with a heavy duty silicone spray helped the fabric slide along the track smoothly.

Spray heavy duty silicone on the RV awning track before sliding the fabric onto it-min

Spraying the track with silicone helps the fabric slide more smoothly.

Slide new RV awning fabric onto the roller along the track-min

Two mechanics slid the new awning fabric along the roller track.

Then the torsion assembly was placed inside the roller and new endcap rivets were installed.

Reinstall RV awning endcap and spring-min

The endcap and spring were reinserted inside the roller.

Install new rivets on RV awning cap-min

Put new rivets on the endcap.

New rivet installed on RV awning endcap-min

New rivet in place.

The fabric was positioned so it went all the way to the locking end of the awning. At the opposite end a set screw was screwed in to prevent the fabric from sliding off the track.

New RV awning fabric at endcap on locking end of roller-min

Make sure the awning fabric has been slid all the way to the locking end of the roller.

Screw in set screw to keep RV awning fabric from falling off the track-min

Put a set screw at the non-locking end of the fabric so it doesn’t slide off the track.

The new fabric was laid out so it could be rolled onto the roller. Then a vice grip was used to turn the spring between 15 and 18 times to get the right spring tension.

New RV awning fabric installed-min

New awning fabric is in place.

Use vice grips to wind up the new RV awning fabric-min

Use vice grips to rotate the spring 15 to 18 times to ge the right spring tension.

Then the awning arm was reattached to the roller with a bolt.

Bolt on the RV awning arms to the roller-min

Bolt on the awning arm.

New RV awning fabric with set screw and awning arm attached-min

Awning arm (non-locking end) is reattached.

Back at the trailer, the awning track was sprayed with heavy duty silicone.

Use heavy duty silicone spray to lubricate the RV awning track-min

Out at the trailer spray the awning track with silicone.

Then the new awning fabric was loosely wrapped around the roller and the whole thing was marched outside to the trailer.

Wrap the new RV awning fabric around the roller-min

Four guys assisted in wrapping the new awning fabric around the roller a few times.

Carry the RV awning out to the fifth wheel trailer-min

The awning is taken out to the trailer.

Our little project supervisor, Buddy, had been watching all the goings on through open big shop door from a safe distance out by the trailer. When the awning and its new fabric were brought out to the trailer, he backed up as far as he could into the parking lot to give the guys room to work!

Supervising puppy keeps his distance from the RV awning project-min

Stand back!

Using ladders and reaching overhead, four guys maneuvered the awning fabric into the track on the trailer and slid it all the way to the front end of the track. This is where having lots of hands can help.

Slide the RV awning fabric along the track on the wall of the fifth wheel trailer RV-min

The awning fabric is slid along the track on the side of the trailer.

After installing the awning on the trailer, the mechanics noticed that the two feet that held the bottoms of the two awning arms had each developed hairline cracks. So, they replaced each foot.

Replace the cracked RV awning foot-min

The feet of both awning arms had developed small cracks, so they were replaced.

The last step was to test the awning by rolling it all the way out and then all the way in again.

New RV awning installed on our fifth wheel trailer RV-min

Test the awning to make sure it rolls all the way out and all the way in again.

Completed installation of the new RV awning fabric on a fifth wheel trailer-min

Done!

Ta Da!! A job well done. The whole project took 45 minutes from start to finish.

Now that we’ve seen how a manual RV awning gets installed, Mark is confident he could do it without going to an RV repair shop as long as he had some extra hands for sliding the awning fabric on/off the trailer awning track and on/off the roller track.

Side note: If you have a manual awning, it is really important that you use some kind of velcro straps or bungee cords wrapped around the awning arms as extra security to keep the awning from accidentally opening while you are traveling.

Our photo above doesn’t show them, but we have used these awning straps ever since we bought the trailer.

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Trailer Suspension Nuts & Bolts – RV Blues on Rough Roads!

Lots of full-time RVers with big rigs are very sensible and stick to traveling on paved roads. But we like to get off the beaten path, and sometimes that puts us on crazy, rough and rugged dirt roads.

On our recent trip to Bisti Badlands in northwestern New Mexico, a 45 minute drive down three miles of extremely washboarded, nasty dirt road wreaked havoc with our trailer’s suspension.

Equalizer bolt walks out of fifth wheel suspension

Hmmm…. That center bolt on the equalizer doesn’t look right!

As we were hitching up to leave, Mark did his usual walk around our trailer to make sure nothing was about to fall off and that everything was secure. To his shock, he noticed that the long bolt that goes through the equalizer on our trailer’s leaf spring suspension system had walked almost all the way out!

Fifth wheel suspension Equalizer bolt unscrews itself on rough road

Yikes!

Holy Smokes! Our 14,000 lb. 36′ fifth wheel trailer was about to lose the bolt holding this vital piece of gear together!

We were miles from nowhere, and I immediately began scenario building in my head to plan various ways we might get out of this mess.

While I theorized, Mark calmly set about getting out his tools and tackling the problem right there in the dirt. His first task was to raise the trailer up so he could get the bolt properly aligned horizontally and tap it back into place with a hammer.

So, out came the 12 ton bottle jack.

Raise fifth wheel trailer with bottle jack for suspension repair

First things first:
Raise the wheels totally off the ground with our 12 ton bottle jack.

He needed to raise the trailer up quite high to relieve all the pressure on that bolt, so he took a piece of wood we sometimes use under the fifth wheel landing legs and put it under the bottle jack to raise it higher. Then he took a second block of wood and put it on top of the bottle jack to span the c-channel tube that runs the width of the trailer.

Pumping away on the bottle jack, he finally got the wheels entirely off the ground and began tapping the bolt through the two sides of the hanger with a small hammer.

Hammer fifth wheel equalizer bolt pack in place in suspension repair

With the pressure off, Mark taps the bolt back into place.

It took a little finagling to get the bolt to line up and go through the second hole on the back side of the hanger.

Fifth wheel equalizer bolt holds suspension together

At first, the bolt didn’t want to go through the second hole on the axle hanger.

But he was able to get it aligned and he got it to go through.

Equalizer bolt in position for fifth wheel suspension hanger assembly

All the way through. Yay!

The bigger problem, though, was figuring out what had happened to the nut that had been holding this bolt in place. It was nowhere to be found and undoubtedly was somewhere out on that nasty 3 mile dirt road.

So, now what?

Mark is a really amazing mechanic, and he keeps a magic container of potential spare parts in his Man Cave in the basement of our trailer. This magical container is a lot like the carpet bag that Mary Poppins carried.

Remember how Mary Poppins pulled all kinds of surprising things out of that bag, to the sheer delight and amazement of Jane and Michael Banks? Among other things, she pulled out a hat rack, a potted plant and a full-size standing lamp while Michael searched under the table to try to figure how she did it.

Well, that’s just the way Mark’s magic box of spare parts tricks works. When he needs a special little gizmo to make things right again, he fishes around in the box and finds just the thing while I scratch my head wondering how such a little container could always produce exactly what he needs.

A few months back we’d replaced the tires on our fifth wheel trailer and decided to replace the original lug nuts with locking lug nuts. A few of the original lug nuts also had cosmetic cracks on them which didn’t look attractive, so the new locking lug nuts were much nicer all around. Mark had decided to put a few of the old lug nuts in his magic box of tricks.

5th wheel trailer wheel lug nuts

A few months back we had replaced all the lug nuts on our trailer wheels.

So, as he fished around for an appropriately sized nut, lo and behold, it turned out those lug nuts were the exact diameter he needed!

Fifth wheel trailer lug nut_

This old lug nut is exactly the right diameter for our wayward bolt!

The thread pitch on the lug nut was not quite right, but the threads on the bolt had been damaged anyway as it walked itself out of the hanger.

While I held the bolt in place with a wrench on one side, Mark ratcheted the lug nut on the other side. He was able to jam the nut on the bolt and re-groove the bolt’s threads enough to make a super tight connection.

In no time we were back up and running and towing our fifth wheel trailer back down that crazy 3 mile road to the paved highway to go see other new and exciting destinations.

As I mentioned in my post about Bisti Badlands, it’s okay for a passenger car or van, but I would leave a bigger RV in Farmington and drive the tow vehicle or toad to Bisti instead!

Ratcheting 5th wheel equalizer suspension bolt in place

With some force, we secure the lug nut on the bolt. What a terrific temporary fix!

Who would’ve ever thunk that a rough road could loosen the nut on a big fifth wheel trailer’s suspension and walk the bolt that holds the equalizer in position almost all the way out?!

And who would’ve ever thunk that a lug nut from the trailer’s wheels would give us such a great temporary fix to get us back on the road?!

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Royal Flush! – A Surprise RV Toilet Replacement…Under Warranty :-)

Our fifth wheel trailer is 10 years old now, and we’ve been living in it full-time for most of those years. Our RV toilet has been with us every step of the way, although over the last few years it has struggled to hold water in the bowl.

Last week, out of the blue, Mark put his foot on the pedal to flush the toilet, heard a loud snap, and then the toilet flapper valve refused to budge. It was completely broken and unable to open and flush properly. Ugh!!

Luckily, the toilet bowl couldn’t hold water any more either, so it was kinda able to flush, just in a dribbling sort of way!

RV Toilet Replacement under an Extended RV Warranty

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So, our delightful plans to go play in the dunes at Great Sand Dunes National Monument in Colorado were dashed, and we drove off over the horizon in pursuit of a replacement RV toilet.

Broken RV toilet can't hold water in the toilet bowl

The toilet flushing mechanism broke, and pressing the pedal no longer opened
the flush valve in the toilet bowl. Fluids dribbled out quickly anyway… Not good!

After some calling around, we found a shop that had our exact Thetford toilet in stock, and when we arrived, there it was on the display rack!

New RV toilet at the RV repair shop

What luck! There is an identical toilet on the display rack.

We have an RV Extended Warranty with Wholesale Warranties that has been a huge help in dealing with the many surprise financial blows we’ve faced as our trailer has aged and various components have quit working.

We first got our warranty in October of 2014, and by Christmas of the following year it had paid for itself several times over as we faced one major repair after another, all in a row.

Unlike vehicle insurance, which protects vehicle owners against accidents, an extended RV warranty protects against failures of the systems in the RV that aren’t caused by a mishap.

Installing new RV toilet in tiny RV toilet room in fifth wheel trailer

There wasn’t a whole lot of space to work in our little toilet room!

We learned from our last RV toilet repair job that replacing broken parts in an RV toilet is often more expensive than simply swapping out the toilet all together.

So we weren’t surprised when the service manager said he wanted to replace our toilet rather than troubleshooting the problem and disassembling and reassembling the toilet to replace the broken part. He called our RV warranty company and explained that the toilet couldn’t flush and that the flushing mechanism was broken.

The warranty company agreed to cover the toilet replacement in full.

To get started, the RV technician removed the shield around the base of the toilet and then unscrewed the two large bolts that hold the RV toilet to the floor.

Remove RV toilet base shield in fifth wheel trailer

The first step to removing the toilet is to remove the shield from around the base.

Two bolts hold an RV toilet to the floor of a fifth wheel trailer

Two bolts — one on either side of the base — hold the RV toilet to the floor.

Then he detached the fresh water line from the toilet and pulled the toilet off of the hole in the floor that goes to the black tank underneath.

Old RV toilet removed from hole to black sewage wastewater tank

The toilet is removed from its position over the sewer drain hole that goes to the black wastewater holding tank.

Next, he detached the hose clamps holding the rinse spray wand’s flexible hose onto the toilet

Removing broken RV toilet before installing new RV toilet

The hose clamp for the fresh water rinse sprayer is removed.

After pulling out the toilet, all that was left in the little toilet room was the hole in the floor that goes to the black wastewater holding tank, the blue fresh water line that fills the bowl and flushes the toilet, and the fresh water spray wand with its flexible hose (this was an option on our old toilet and didn’t come with the new toilet, so we kept the old spray wand).

Empty RV toilet room in 5th wheel trailer

After the toilet is removed, all that remains is the black water sewer hole, the blue fresh water flush pipe and the flexible fresh water sprayer hose.

Then it was out with the old — and in with the new!

Removing broken RV toilet from fifth wheel trailer

Out with the old toilet…

Installing new RV toilet in a fifth wheel trailer

…In with the new toilet!

To install the new RV toilet, the process was repeated in reverse. First the toilet was positioned over the black tank hole, then the fresh water line and the fresh water spray wand were reattached, and finally the RV toilet was bolted to the floor.

Since the spray wand is an option, the toilet ships with the barbed hose fitting it slides onto sealed shut. So, before sliding the hose onto the barbed hose fitting, the end of the fitting had to be clipped off.

Back of new Thetford RV toilet with optional spray wand

In order to attach the rinse sprayer, the hose connection must be clipped to open it up.

Optional sprayer nozzle on RV toilet installation

Sprayer and fresh water flush lines attached.

And then the installation was finished and our sparkling new RV toilet was all ready for its first Royal Flush!

The whole procedure took an hour from start to finish. When we settled up with the service manager, the final bill was the following:

FINAL BILL FOR REPLACING OUR RV TOILET:

Parts – New RV toilet (porcelain bowl) $297.59
Labor – One hour $105.00
Tax $11.61
Total Cost $414.20

RV EXTENDED WARRANTY PAYMENT BREAKDOWN:

Warranty Coverage (amount we saved) $314.20
Out of Pocket Cost (our deductible) $100.00
Total Payment $414.20
New RV toilet installation in fifth wheel trailer

A nice sparkling brand new toilet. Yay!

This brings our total repairs and savings with our Trailer Extended Warranty to the following:

Here's a summary of what our four year RV warranty through Wholesale Warranties cost, what our repairs WOULD HAVE cost, and what our warranty reimbursements have been to date:

Cost of Warranty $1,904
Total Cost of Repairs we've had done $7,834
Total Out of Pocket Costs for those repairs $1,145
Repair Reimbursements:
Trailer Axle Replacement $1,036
RV Refrigerator Replacement $1,647
Plumbing Issues & Window Leak $1,142
Suspension Replacement $2,550
RV Toilet Replacement $314
Total Repair Reimbursements $6,689

Our trailer warranty has paid for itself 3.5 times over!
Confused about the nitty gritty fine print buried in RV Extended Warranties? Here's an excellent detailed explanation!!

If you are curious what an extended RV warranty would cost for your rig, Wholesale Warranties is offering a $50 discount to our readers. Call our contact, Missi Emmett at (800) 939-2806 or email her at missi@wholesalewarranties.com and mention that you heard about them from our website, Roads Less Traveled. Or go to this link:

Wholesale Warranties Quote Form

The $50 discount comes off of the quoted price at the time of purchase — just be sure to ask!

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The Full Case History of our RV Extended Warranty:

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RV Plumbing Tips – Cleaning RV Faucets, Sink Drains & Shower Wands

The effects of hard water on RV sinks, faucets and drains can be an ongoing problem for RVers. This page describes a few tips for how we remove these pesky mineral deposit buildups from our bathroom and kitchen sinks in our fifth wheel trailer and keep the water flowing smoothly in our shower wand and RV toilet rinse sprayer.

RV plumbing tips for cleaning RV faucets and drains and removing mineral deposits

RV plumbing tips for removing mineral deposits and cleaning RV faucets and drains.

We like the water to flow freely in our RV vanity sink faucet, kitchen sink faucet and in the shower and RV toilet sprayer wands, however, periodically these faucets begin to spray water in weird directions because their inner workings have gotten clogged up by mineral deposits from the hard water.

In our bathroom vanity, our first step is to remove and clean the screen filter in the faucet. Sometimes the faucet tip can be unscrewed by hand, but if we’ve let it go too long, we have to use a pair of pliers to break the faucet tip free due to corrosion that makes it impossible to unscrew.

Remove RV faucet screen with pliers

Remove the RV faucet screen (with pliers if it’s stuck!)

Then we unscrew the entire screen assembly from the faucet.

Disassemble RV faucet

The faucet tip unscrews from the faucet.

Dirty RV faucet screen

Ugh… the screen is pretty dirty. No wonder the water comes out funny!

This time the screen was very corroded. We remove the corrosion and mineral buildup by putting all the pieces in a bath of white vinegar for 20-30 minutes or so.

Prior to putting the pieces in the white vinegar bath, it is a good idea to make note of the order that these parts go into the faucet assembly!

Soak RV faucet parts in white vinegar

After noting how the pieces go together, soak them in white vinegar.

After the bath, the bits of corrosion can be seen in the white vinegar!

RV faucet parts get cleaned with white vinegar

Here are all the pieces. You can see the dirt that came off in the vinegar bath!

Using an old toothbrush, we scrub each piece until it is clean.

Use toothbrush to clean RV faucet screen

Use a toothbrush to get the screen totally clean.

RV faucet cleaning with toothbrush and white vinegar

Scrub all the parts with the toothbrush.

Then we reassemble the pieces in the correct order and orientation.

Reassemble RV faucet after cleaning 2

.

Reassemble RV faucet after cleaning 1

Reassemble the pieces.

Put RV faucet together after cleaning it 2

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Put RV faucet together after cleaning it

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To make it easier to remove the faucet tip the next time we do this job, it helps to grease the threads with a marine PTEF lubricant prior to screwing the assembly back onto the faucet.

Lubricate RV faucet with PTEF lubricant grease

Lubricating the threads makes it easier to unscrew next time!

Lubricate RV faucet after cleaning

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Reassemble RV faucet

Screw it back into the faucet.

RV faucet cleaned and lubricated

Ta da! Now the flow will be smooth and full.

Our trailer has white plastic sinks in the bathroom and kitchen, and these sinks often develop a skanky brown ring around the sink drain. For years, we relied on Comet to clean these sinks. We sprinkled it on the entire sink, let it sit for a bit, and then scrubbed.

We recently discovered that Baking Soda is just as effective!! The fantastic thing about Baking Soda is that it is non-toxic. This is wonderful not only for our gray water holding tanks but also for the RV dump stations as well as the septic fields and municipal waste water treatment systems that are downstream from them.

It’s also really cheap!

Tips for cleaning an RV sink drain

White plastic RV sinks are prone to getting ugly stains.

Dirty RV sink drain

Yuck!

We simply sprinkle it on the sink and then scrub the sink with a damp Scotch-Brite scrubbing pad.

RV sink drain cleaning with baking soda

Sprinkle the baking soda in the sink and scrub the stains with a damp scrubby pad.

What a great result — a wonderfully squeaky clean sink!

RV sink drain is sparkling clean

Sparkling!

The drain plug also gets gummy, and we use an old toothbrush to scrub it clean with either baking soda and/or Murphy’s Oil Soap (a handy all around biodegradable cleanser).

In an RV that is used for dry camping a lot, like ours, the bathroom vanity sink drain can get really gross really quickly because in an effort to conserve fresh water not much clean water gets flushed down the drain.

This can result in foul odors in the sink drain, and it’s pretty unsightly too.

So, we do two things.

First, we scrub the inside of the bathroom sink drain with an old toothbrush. To get a longer reach down the drain, we taped our toothbrush to an old tent stake we had lying around. Anything long and narrow will work.

Toothbrush and extension rod to clean RV sink drain

Tape an old toothbrush to a long stick to reach deep down the RV sink drain.

Cleaning an RV sink drain

Scrub inside the sink drain.

We also scrub the sink drain plug.

Second, to keep the RV bathroom sink drain fresh smelling, we use Happy Camper Holding Tank Treatment which we’ve found is a particularly good deodorizer. We put scoop of powder in an old water bottle, fill it up with water and shake it well (the bottle gets warm as the enzymes get activated!), and then pour it down the drain.

Most of it goes into the gray water tank, but a small amount stays in the bathroom sink drain p-trap and does its magic there, killing off the offensive odors.

Use toothbrush to scrub RV sink drain plut

Scrub the sink drain plug with a toothbrush.

To keep our RV shower in tip-top shape, we clean the drain there as well. The biggest problem in our RV shower drain isn’t foul odors, because the shower drain gets flushed with lots of water everyday. Instead, the challenge with the RV shower drain is accumulated hair.

In a house, it’s easy enough to use a powerful cleanser like Drano to clean out any clogs caused by hair, but we don’t want strong chemicals like that sitting in our gray wastewater holding tank. Afterall, we want the enzymes and bacteria in the Happy Camper and Unique RV Digest-It holding tank treatment products we use to thrive and go to work breaking things down!

So, we use a long spring hook (and flashlight) to pull the hair out. It just takes a few minutes and then the drain is clear.

Some RV shower stalls may have drain components that can be removed for cleaning. Ours doesn’t.

Cleaning hair from an RV shower drain

Use a spring hook to pull hair out of the RV shower drain.

Periodically, the RV shower wand gets crudded up with mineral deposits just like our RV sink faucets do. Again, we rely on white vinegar to clean up the deposits clogging the spray holes in the shower nozzle.

First, we pour the white vinegar through the shower wand to let it soak from the inside.

Tips for cleaning an RV shower wand

The RV shower wand can be cleaned with white vinegar.

Then we soak the shower wand’s face in a bath of white vinegar.

Tips for cleaning an RV shower wand

Put the RV shower wand face down in a white vinegar bath to clean all the little holes.

If we’ve let a little too much time pass, we’ll also use a toothpick to clean out each hole in the shower head. We use bamboo toothpicks because they hold up well in water. Ordinary wooden toothpicks tend to disintegrate when they get wet. A scribe also works well.

The before-and-after difference in the flow of water through the shower wand is startling. When half of the little holes are blocked from mineral deposits and the other half have an impeded flow, the water can feel like needles on your skin. After cleaning the wand, it is more like a waterfall.

Clean each hole in an RV shower wand with a toothpick or scribe

Use a toothpick or scribe to clean each hole in the shower wand.

Lots of RVers love the Oxygenics RV shower head. We don’t use it because it doesn’t work well with the low water pressure we use to conserve water since we dry camp every night, but for RVers who get water hookups a lot, these shower heads are extremely popular. Of course, in hard water areas, these shower heads will need periodic cleaning as well.

The RV toilet bowl rinsing wand is also subject to corrosion from mineral deposits, and after a while when we go to rinse the toilet bowl we find the water flow from the sprayer is restricted and funky.

RV toilet sprayer wand cleaning

The RV toilet sprayer wand gets clogged with minerals too.

Again, it’s easy to unscrew the end of the toilet spay wand, put it in a white vinegar for 20-30 minutes, scrub it a bit with a toothbrush, and then put it back on the wand.

RV toilet rinse wand cleaning

Unscrew the tip of the toilet rinsing wand and soak it in white vinegar to clean the holes.

As an aside, if you have energy leftover after cleaning all your RV sinks, faucets, drains and spray nozzles, a spray bottle filled with a water and white vinegar mixture is super for washing the windows. As I wrote this, some flies got in our trailer and Mark started spraying them when they landed on the window next to him using a spray bottle filled with water and white vinegar. Besides slowing them down and killing them, he was really impressed with how clean the window was when he finished!

So, these are a few of the things we do to keep our sinks and drains flowing smoothly in our life on the road in our RV.

We hope they help you too!

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Is RV Solar Affordable? 3 Solar Power Solutions for RVs and Boats

Is RV solar power affordable? Or is installing a solar power system on a motorhome or trailer — or even on a sailboat — just too darn expensive to be cost effective? We never thought this question would be hard to answer until recently.

This article outlines three different RV solar power solutions and lists all the parts (and costs) of everything you need to buy:

1. A Small, Expandable Rooftop RV Solar Power Solution – For weekends and vacations
2. A Portable RV Solar Power Solution – To get you up and running effortlessly
3. A Big Rooftop RV Solar Power Solution – For full-time RVing

Solar panels on a fifth wheel trailer

Can a solar power installation on an RV or sailboat pay for itself?

Ever since we installed our first (very small) solar power system on our first full-time RV nearly ten years ago, we’ve been excitedly telling people it is a very affordable do-it-yourself project for anyone with some mechanical and electrical knowledge. And for those who can’t turn a wrench, it shouldn’t be that much more.

Our first 130 watt solar power system cost us about twice as much as the same system would today, but even at that high price, we felt it was dollar-for-dollar an equal value to buying a Yamaha or Honda 1000 generator. Best of all, once a little system like that was installed, it was a whole lot less noisy, expensive to operate and complicated to use than a generator would be.

At today’s super cheap solar prices, that little solar power system is even more valuable compared to one of those nice Japanese portable gas generators than it was 10 years ago!

Installing solar panels on a motorhome RV

Installing solar power can be a DIY project if you’re handy.

Recently, however, we’ve heard some crazy prices being quoted for installing solar power systems on RVs. We met one couple with a gorgeous brand new DRV Suites fifth wheel who were quoted $13,000 for a solar power installation. Not long after that, we read an article in a popular RV magazine describing a $12,000 solar power installation on a fifth wheel.

Yikes!! These are outrageous prices!!

We sure hope no one is finding they have to spend that kind of crazy money to get a solar power system installed on their trailer or motorhome or sailboat.

We’ve got oodles of articles on this website that go into the nitty gritty details of things to consider when designing and installing a solar power system on an RV or a boat (located HERE). However, all that theory aside, it’s not all that complicated.

Here are three solar power “packages” — with approximate prices — that will do the trick whether you’re a part-timer or full-time RVer.

Although it is possible to buy “pre-packaged RV solar power kits” online, we suggest hand selecting the components you want so that just in case any individual item has a problem it can be returned easily.

We’ve heard of cases where people bought a pre-packaged solar power kit online and then had problems returning a broken part because they had to return the entire kit — solar panels, charge controller, cables and all — just because the one item wasn’t working right.

 

SMALL ROOFTOP RV SOLAR POWER SYSTEM – 150 WATT SYSTEM

Affordable solar panel with a popup tent trailer

For part-time RVers, installing solar on the roof isn’t a requirement.

The following is essentially what we put on our roof and what we camped with off the grid every night for a year when we started.

The brands are not exactly the same, but these components are highly rated and will do the trick for anyone that wants a roof-mounted solar power system on their motorhome or trailer.

This kit includes both a solar battery charging component and an 110 volt AC power component provided by an inverter. If you don’t understand the distinction, please see our post: RV Solar Power Made Simple.

The simplest inverter installation is to connect the inverter to the batteries using heavy duty cables and then to run an ordinary (but long) power strip (or two) from the inverter to somewhere convenient inside the rig.

Rather than using the wall outlets in the rig, just plug the AC appliances into the power strip as needed, taking care not to operate too many things at once and overload the inverter.

Prices always change, so check the links to see the current prices.

The nice thing about this kit is that it is easily expandable. If a second or third solar panel is eventually desired (to double or triple the size of the system to 300 or 450 watts, for another $200 or $400), those panels can be purchased at a later date. At that point the solar charge controller can also be replaced with a bigger and more sophisticated charge controller (for $600).

 

PORTABLE FOLDING SOLAR POWER KIT SUITCASE – 120 WATT SYSTEM

Portable folding solar panel suitcase for RV and motorhome use

A portable solar power kit that folds up and can be carried like a suitcase is an awesome solution for weekenders, vacationers and seasonal RVers.

A really nifty alternative for anyone that isn’t super skilled with tools or that’s a bit spooked by electrical things, is a portable solar power kit that folds into a suitcase. These come with two matching solar panels, battery cables with alligator clips, and a panel-mounted solar charge controller. The solar panels are hinged together and can be folded towards each other. A handle on the side of one of them makes the whole thing easy to carry and store like a suitcase.

These portable folding suitcase solar panel kits come in all sizes. A good size is anywhere from 120 to 200 watts:

The advantage of a portable suitcase solar kit like this is that it is self-contained. If you think you might upgrade to a different RV soon, then there’s no loss in investment when one RV is sold and another is purchased. Also, if you decide to install a roof-mounted system at a later date, the suitcase solar panel kit can be sold to another RVer.

As for the inverter, heavy duty cables and power strip, they are included here just to round out the package so you have AC power in the rig as well as the ability to charge the batteries just like the “small solar power kit” described above.

 

Affordable solar power on a motorhome

Installing solar panels on tilting brackets is popular, but only necessary in mid-winter. We’ve never done it.

With a big RV solar power installation, it is likely that the RV’s house battery bank will need to be upgraded or replaced too, so this package includes a “replacement” AGM battery bank.

The Magnum inverter is an inverter/charger that has a built in transfer switch, making it very straight forward to wire the inverter into the house AC wiring system so you can use the standard wall outlets in the rig rather than plugging things into a power strip.

We’ve been living exclusively on solar power since we started this crazy traveling lifestyle in 2007, and this system is larger than any system we’ve ever had on a boat or trailer. So it ought to work just fine for anyone who wants to RV full-time and do a lot of boondocking.

 

INSTALLATION COSTS

If you are not a DIY RVer, you’ll need to budget for the installation labor too. As a very rough estimate, I would allow for $500-$1,000 for a small system installation and $1,500-$2,500 for a big system installation. The variations in labor costs will depend on how difficult it is to work in your rig, how hard it is to mount the various components and run the wires from roof to basement, and whether or not you choose to have the batteries upgraded or replaced.

 

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

RV park and campground prices are all over the map, but assuming that the average cost is $25 per night for a site with hookups if you don’t take advantage of monthly discounts or $15 per night if you do, these systems can pay for themselves in anywhere from 18 camping days to 14 months, depending on what size system you buy, whether or not you do the installation yourself, and how you typically camp. Of course, this assumes the rig is equipped with a refrigerator that can run on propane and that if air conditioning is needed an alternative power source like a generator is used.

As with everything in the RVing world, starting small and cheap is the best way to go.

 

BIG and COMPLEX SOLAR POWER INSTALLATIONS

Solar panel arch with solar panels on sailboat transom

Installing solar power on a sailboat has its own set of challenges.

We have installed three different RV solar power systems and one solar power system on a sailboat.

We published an article in the February 2017 issue of Cruising World Magazine (one of the top magazines in the sailing industry) describing the solar power system we installed on our sailboat Groovy back in 2010. This system gave us all the power we needed to “anchor out” in bays and coves away from electrical hookups in marinas for 750 nights during our cruise of Mexico.

Cruising World has posted the article online here:

Sunny Disposition – Adding Solar Power – Cruising World Magazine, February, 2017

Installing solar power on a sailboat is very similar to installing it in an RV, but there is an added complexity because there isn’t a big flat roof to lay the panels on. Instead, we had to construct a stainless steel arch to support the panels. Fortunately, our boat, a 2008 Hunter 44DS, had a factory installed stainless steel arch over the cockpit already. So, we hired a brilliant Mexican metal fabricator named Alejandro Ulloa, to create our solar panel arch in Ensenada, Mexico.

Solar power installation on sailboat Hunter 44

We turned to Alejandro Ulloa of Ensenada, Mexico, for our solar panel arch
He can be contracted the=rough Baja Naval.

Solar panel arch installation on Hunter 44 sailboat

Alejandro is an artist. He wrapped the arch in plastic to prevent scratches until it was permanently mounted on our boat!

Solar panel arch on sailboat Hunter 44

The arch went back to Alejandro’s workshop for tweaking after this measuring session.

Solar panel arch on sailboat Hunter 44 installed by Alejandro Ulloa

Dimensions now perfect, Alejandro mounts the arch permanently.

Getting the 185 watt 24 volt solar panels up onto the arch was a challenge. Getting solar panels up onto an RV roof is tricky too!

Affordable marine Solar panel installation on sailboat Hunter 44

Getting the solar panels onto the roof of an RV or up onto this arch takes two people (at least!)

Installing solar panels on an arch on sailboat (Hunter 44) with Alejandro Ulloa Baja Naval Ensenada Mexico

The second of the three panels gets installed.

The solar panel arch was going to double as a “dinghy davit” system with telescoping rods that extended out over the transom. These davits supported a pulley system to hoist the dinghy up out of the water. So once the solar panels were mounted on the arch, we had to be sure it could handle the weight of the dinghy.

Our dinghy weighed a lot less than the combined weight of Mark and Alejandro!

Strong solar panel arch and dinghy davit extension

Alejandro and Mark test the arch to be sure it can support the dinghy (which weighed half what they do).

The solar panels were wired in parallel because they would be subjected to shade constantly shifting on and off the panels at certain times of the day as the boat swung at anchor.

Wiring solar panels on a sailboat (Hunter 44) marine solar power installation

Mark wires up the panels in parallel.

Affordable solar panel installation on a sailboat

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Solar panel arch with dinghy davit extension supporting affordable solar power on sailboat

A beautiful, clean installation with wire loom covering the exposed cabling and the rest snaked down inside the tubes of the Hunter arch. The davit extensions for hoisting the dinghy are clearly visible under the panels.

Solar panels installed on arch on Hunter 44 sailboat

Nice!

Down below the cockpit inside a huge locker in the transom, Mark mounted a combiner box that brought three cables in from the three panels and then sent out one cable to the solar charge controller.

Emily and Mark Fagan aboard sailboat Groovy

The transom locker in our Hunter 44DS sailboat was very large!

Combiner box for solar panel parallel wiring on a sailboat

A combiner box brings the wires from the three panels together before a single run goes to the solar charge controller (this is optional and not at all necessary).

The solar charge controller was installed in the cabin inside a hanging locker in the master stateroom.

Xantrex solar charge controller installed in sailboat locker

We have an Outback FlexMax charge controller on our trailer but chose a Xantrex controller for our boat because there were no moving parts. We compare the two HERE.

The solar charge controller was located about 8 feet from the near end of the battery bank which spanned a ~14 foot distance under the floorboards in the bilge.

Two 4D AGM batteries in bilge of sailboat

We had four 160 amp-hour 4D AGM batteries for the house bank and a Group 27 AGM start battery installed under the floorboards in the bilge.
One 4D house battery and the Group 27 start battery are seen here

This 555 watt solar power system, which charged a 640 amp-hour house bank of 4D AGM batteries, supplied all of our electrical needs, including powering our under-counter electric refrigerator.

Usually our engine alternator provided backup battery charging whenever we ran the engine. However, at one point our alternator died, and we were without it for 10 straight weeks while we waited for a replacement alternator.

Why such a long wait for a simple replacement part? Getting boat parts in Mexico requires either paying exorbitant shipping fees and import taxes or waiting for a friend to bring the part with them in their backpack when they fly from the US to Mexico.

During that long wait our solar power system supplied all our electricity without a backup while we were anchored in a beautiful bay. Diesel engines don’t require an alternator to run, so we moved the boat around and went sailing etc., and lived our normal lives during our wait.

Solar panel arch and dinghy davit extension with solar panels installed on sailboat

View from the water — cool!

The dinghy davit extensions on the solar panel arch made it easy to raise and lower the dinghy from the water and also to raise and lower the 6 horsepower outboard engine.

Solar panel arch and dinghy davit extension on sailboat

A pulley system on the davit extensions made hoisting the outboard and dinghy a cinch for either of us to do singlehandedly.

Solar panel arch and solar panels on sailboat transom

For 7 months we left our boat at the dock in Chiapas, unplugged from shorepower, and let the solar panels keep the batteries topped off. Everyday during that time they put 19 amp-hours into the batteries which was essentially the power required to operate the solar charge controller!

At anchor, sometimes the solar panels were in full sun all day long if the current and wind and the pattern of the sun crossing the sky allowed the boat to move around without the sun coming forward of the beam of the boat.

However, whenever the sun was forward of the beam, the shadow of the mast and the radome fell on the panels. We could watch the current production from the panels go from full on, to two-thirds, to one-third and back again as the shadow crossed one panel and then two at once, and then one and then none, etc, as the boat swung back and forth at anchor.

Mast and radome cast shade on solar panels on sailboat

RV solar installations have to avoid shade from air conditions and open vent hatches.
On boats the shade from the mast and radome is often unavoidable.

Mast and radome cast shade on pair of sailboat solar panels

When the shadow fell across two 185 watt panels at once, it knocked both of them out of the system so only one of the three solar panels was actually producing power.

The coolest and most unexpected benefit of having our solar panels mounted on an arch over the cockpit was the shade that they provided. The sun in Mexico is very intense, especially out on the water, and it was wonderful to have two huge forward facing jump seats at the back of the cockpit that fully shade as we sailed!

Under the shade of solar panels and a solar panel arch on a sailboat

Made in the shade — What a life that was!!

We have more solar power related articles at these links:

SOLAR POWER OVERVIEW and TUTORIAL

BATTERIES and BATTERY CHARGING SYSTEMS

LIVING ON 12 VOLTS

Our technical articles in Cruising World magazine can be found here:

Do We Miss Our Boat “Groovy” and Sailing?

We describe our thrilling — and heart wrenching — first and last days on our wonderful sailboat in the following posts. It is very true that the happiest days of a boater’s life are the day the boat is bought and the day it’s sold!

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What’s A Girl To Do at the RV Dump Station?

Dumping the RV holding tanks is a nasty little job, but it’s part of the fun of traveling around in an RV, and we’ve all gotta do it. It’s really not all that bad when it’s a shared job, but of course that’s easy for us gals to say, because it’s usually our male partners-in-love-and-life who get to do the bulk of the dirty work.

RV dump station tips for women RVers-2

Despite lots of progress over the years for the types of work women can do, emptying an RV’s waste water holding tanks is a job many women are just as happy to leave to their better half.

Sometimes, when we go to an RV dump station, I am amazed to see a woman remain in the passenger’s seat of her truck or motorhome for the whole duration of the job. I’m not sure how these women have negotiated that arrangement with their significant other, but I figure they must be incredibly good cooks to be able to chat with a friend on the phone or check the latest on Facebook while their hubby is grinding it out with the sewer hose, the splashing water, and all that muck and mire.

RV dump station tips for RVing women

Mark looks like he’s having so much fun. Can I get away with doing nothing?

I wish my skills were so awesome in the kitchen that I could be exempt from doing anything at the RV dump station. But alas, in our marriage, I need to be a participant in this dirtiest of deeds to win brownie points for other aspects of our life together. Nonetheless, it took me a few years to find things to do while we were at the RV dump station that were truly useful and helpful.

We have a full set of “blue” RV dump station procedural tips below — but they don’t say much about the “pink” side of the job:

Dirty Little Secrets from the RV dump station

Too often at the beginning of our RVing lives I found my best efforts to help with setting up the RV sewer hose or screwing in the water hose ended up with me underfoot and in the way of the general flow of things. Mark had his methods, and I couldn’t read his mind as to what came next.

Few people are in truly sunny and radiant moods when they don their rubber gloves at the RV dump, and too often I found that my most valiant attempts to be helpful resulted in tensions rising between us.

RV dump station tips for women RVers

I think he’s trying to tell me something.

Then one day I discovered a way that I can be of significant help and get some important jobs done at the same time.

GIVE THE BLACK TANK A BOOST FLUSH

For starters, I fill two 5-gallon water buckets with water and carry them into the rig to dump them down the toilet after the black tank has been emptied. Even if an RV has a black water flush system like ours does, it is still surprising just how many little bits of gunk and human waste solids get flushed out when two 5-gallon buckets of water are poured down the toilet.

I fill the buckets while Mark gets the sewer hose out and attaches the clear elbow so he can see when the holding tanks are fully drained. Then I can scoot out of the way and carry the buckets around to our RV’s door before he begins attaching the black water flush hose between the rig and the water spigot. This way we don’t end up stepping on each when we first start working at the RV dump station.

RV dump station tips flushing black tank with buckets of water in toilet

We have two buckets and I fill each one with water to give the toilet and sewer pipes an extra flush.

The buckets are heavy to carry around to our trailer’s front door, but I don’t mind a little bit of a shoulder and arm workout, and I take them one at a time. Maneuvering a heavy bucket of water up stairs is excellent exercise for both balance and strength.

I grab the inside of the doorway with my left hand for extra balance, tighten my abs so I don’t throw my back out with the uneven weight distribution of carrying a heavy bucket, and I leverage myself up and set the pails down inside in the kitchen.

RV dump station tip flush black tank with buckets of water in toilet

The buckets are heavy, but I take my time and grab the door frame to keep my balance as I go up the stairs.

For those who can’t carry the buckets, your partner will likely be happy to carry them for you since this really helps ensure the black tank and toilet get a complete flush. Also, filling the buckets only half way or three quarters of the way can help not only lighten the load but keep the water from splashing all over the place and all over you.

CLEAN THE BATHROOM

The other task I tackle is cleaning the toilet room from top to bottom and cleaning the bathroom vanity and kitchen sink. I figure that if my sweet hubby is dealing with the darker side of RVing outside at the RV dump station, I can deal with the same stuff on the inside..

This insures the bathroom gets cleaned on a regular basis and also means that when we arrive at our next campsite not only are the holding tanks empty but our bathroom is sparkling clean and smells fresh.

So, once I get the water buckets inside the rig, I begin assembling the things I will need to clean the toilet and the bathroom. When I hear Mark’s knock on the wall, I know he has finished emptying the black tank and it is time to dump the buckets of water down the toilet.

RV dump station tips flush black tank

I pour one bucket at a time and Mark watches the flow in the sewer hose to make sure the water eventually runs clear.

Since the buckets are just inside the RV door, it takes me a minute to grab one and empty it. Then it takes a few minutes more to go grab the other one and empty it too. Having a few minutes between flushes is helpful because then Mark can monitor whether the water from the second bucket is running clear or is still flushing solids out. If there are still chunks coming out, then, depending on whether anyone is waiting to use the RV dump after us, I’ll fill another bucket or two with water and dump them down the toilet.

Sometimes I have the water pump turned on as I dump the buckets of water down the toilet and sometimes it’s turned off. Having it turned on means even more water flushes down, which is great, but it also uses up water from the fresh water tank. So, whether or not I have the water pump turned on depends on whether there are people waiting behind us at the dump station, as it will take a little longer for us to fill the fresh water tank if we flush a few extra gallons down the toilet as part of the dumping process.

Now that the black tank is completely flushed, Mark begins emptying our kitchen gray tank. We have two gray tanks, one for the kitchen and one for the shower. We empty the kitchen tank first because it is dirtier and has more things in it (like broccoli bits) than the shower gray tank which is just sudsy water.

While he works on emptying the two gray tanks, I get to work cleaning the toilet.

RV dump station tip woman cleans toilet and bathroom

If Mark is mucking around in gross stuff outside, the least I can do is muck around in gross stuff inside. This also gives us a clean bathroom when we set up camp.

Since we have a hatch in the toilet room that we leave open a lot, the toilet lid and the floor often get dusty in just a few days. So I remove everything from the toilet room and clean everything, including the floor.

Over the years we’ve found that the toilet bowl — more so than the black tank itself — can be a big source of foul odors. Unlike household toilets, RV toilet bowls are basically dry except during flushing, so urine can end up drying in the bowl and producing an odor.

Also, the flow of the flushing water doesn’t necessarily rinse every inch of the bowl, so some areas simply don’t get rinsed all that well, even when using the toilet’s spray nozzle. So, I go to town on the inside of the bowl as well as everything else.

We use two enzyme/bacteria based RV holding tank treatment products: Happy Campers RV holding tank treatment has worked best for us in extreme temperatures (very cold and very hot) and for controlling tank odors. RV Digest-It holding tank treatment has worked best for us in moderate temperatures to break down the solids in the tank.

Because these are both basically solutions of living critters, the toilet cleaning products we use can’t be too toxic or the colonies of feces-eating bacteria can’t get established and become self-perpetuating. I’ve been using Murphy’s Oil Soap for the last few years with good results.

This is the soap that is recommended for cleaning the rubber roofs on the tops of RV’s, which is why we had it on hand to try on the toilet a few years ago. In addition to being biodegradable, what we like about it for cleaning the toilet is that it assists in keeping both the seals in the toilet bowl and on the black holding tank valve lubricated. I used white vinegar for cleaning the toilet for a while, and after a few months the black tank valve got really sticky. Since switching to Murphy’s Oil Soap a few years ago, that valve hasn’t gotten gummed up.

Periodically, we’ve found the seals in the toilet bowl have stopped holding water which meant the bowl drained completely dry between flushes. This allowed foul odors to come up from the black water tank. This problem is usually due to mineral and gunk build-ups on the seal.

So, I give that seal a really good cleaning too. The critical areas are on both the top and bottom surfaces of the rubber seal, that is, between the seal and the toilet bowl (the top side) and underneath the seal where the dome flapper (the “waste ball”) closes up against it.

RV toilet assembly and flapper valve installation

A disassembled RV toilet shows what the rubber toilet seal looks like without the toilet bowl sitting on it. To prevent it from leaking and draining the toilet between flushes, I scrub both top and bottom of the rubber seal.

I make sure the water pump is off at this point and hold the toilet flush lever down so I can get at the underside of the seal.

Often, the build-up is due to having hard water in the fresh water tanks which is very common in Arizona and other western states where the fresh water comes from deep, mineral rich aquifers.

RV toilet flapper cleaning tips

The seal needs to be completely free of mineral deposits on both the top and bottom, so I clean the area between the seal and the bowl on the top (red arrow) and below the seal on the bottom (the backside of the seal in this view).

At this point, depending on what Mark is up to outside, I’ll move on to other cleaning projects. If we have nearly emptied our fresh water tanks prior to coming to the RV dump station, it may take 10 minutes to refill them. Also, sometimes the potable water spigot is a little ways beyond the waste water dump area, requiring Mark to move the whole rig a few feet forward.

So, if there is time, I will clean the bathroom vanity sink and then move on to the kitchen sink. Depending on our plans for the next few days and depending on how much time I have at the RV dump, I may also add the holding tank treatment to the black tank, via the toilet, and add it to the gray tanks via the bathroom sink, shower and kitchen sink.

Sometimes, however, I prefer to wait two or three days until those tanks have some liquids in them before adding the holding tank treatment. And sometimes I add just a half tank’s worth of holding tank treatment at the RV dump station and then add the other half a few days later once the holding tanks have become partially full.

Of course, we add a capful of bleach to our fresh water tanks every few months, and that totally obliterates any colonies of anything that have started to grow in any of the holding tanks (including the fresh water tank) as the bleach water works its way through our plumbing system from the fresh water tank to the gray and black waste water tanks.

So, for us, creating fully self-sustaining communities of healthy organisms in any waste water tank is not 100% doable. But by using non-toxic cleansers we can help them along in between bleach blasts.

So, all in all, there is a LOT a girl can do at the RV dump station. We find we are both much happier about the whole process when we each have a set of tasks to do when we get there that are not only similarly grungy but are equally important and that take place in different parts of the RV.

The best part is that when we leave the RV dump station to go set up camp in a new, beautiful location, not only do we have empty waste water tanks but our bathroom is clean and fresh too.

Happy cleaning!!

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Goodies I use for my jobs at the RV Dump Station:

More RV tips and Tricks:

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More of our Latest Posts are in the MENU.
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Hitch Tighteners – Anti-Rattle Hitch Clamps Stop the Creaks & Wiggles!

We carry our bicycles on the back of our 36′ fifth wheel trailer with a Kuat NV bike rack inserted into the trailer’s hitch receiver (we reviewed the Kuat bike rack here). We installed this bike rack in 2012 and it has been great for the past five years of our full-time RV travels.

Kuat NV Bike Rack on back of fifth wheel trailer RV

We carry our mountain bikes on the back of our 5th wheel with a Kuat NV Bike Rack

To keep the bike rack from dragging on the ground in crazy places like steep gas station ramps or deep gulleys on small roads, we had a “Z” shaped “hi-low” hitch riser made. This raises the rack up quite high, so now the first thing to hit the ground is the hitch receiver itself rather than the bike rack.

Hitch extension with Kuat NV bike rack

A “Z” shaped “hi-low” hitch riser raised the bike rack so it can’t drag on the ground in a gully or dip.

As is often the case with hitch receivers, the bike rack isn’t a perfectly tight fit in the hitch receiver riser, and the bottom of the riser isn’t a perfect fit in the trailer’s hitch receiver either. So, the whole bike rack tends to wiggle.

We’ve used various shims to make it all tight, but too often they would wiggle loose over time, and eventually the bikes would be jiggling all over the place on the rack again.

Using a shim in a bumper hitch

We wedged shims in to tighten things up, but it wasn’t an ideal solution

Last fall we stopped in at JM Custom Welding in Blanding, Utah, to talk with Jack, the man who had made our “Z” hitch riser (more info about it here). We wondered if he had any tricks up his sleeve for making our bike rack arrangement less wobbly.

JM Custom Welding Blanding Utah

Mark and Jack of JM Custom Welding in Blanding, Utah

It turns out that he had solved this very problem for other customers by making a hitch tightener. This is essentially a hitch clamp that fits over the end of the hitch receiver and snugs up whatever is inserted into the receiver with some lock washers and nuts.

Bumper hitch tightener for car or RV hitch

Jack put this nifty hitch tightener on our hitch receiver.

Bumper hitch tightener for bike rack

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So, we got two of them, one for the top and one for the bottom of our “Z” shaped hi-low hitch riser extension.

Hitch tightener on RV for bike rack

He put a second hitch tightener on the trailer’s receiver as well.

The difference in the amount of movement of the bikes was absolutely astonishing. They were rock solid now!

Hitch tightener for bike rack mounted in bumper hitch

Looking down at both hitch tighteners on our hitch extension.

After installing the hitch tighteners, which was just a matter of tightening the nuts, Mark drove the rig around the JM Custom Welding dirt lot while I walked behind and watched the bikes, and they were steady as could be.

Hitch tighteners on bumper hitch mounted bike rack

Hitch tighteners at the top and bottom of the hi-low hitch riser extension.

Hitch tightener for bike rack mounted in bumper hitch

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But unlike the shim solution we’d used before, these hitch tighteners have stayed tight without needing any adjusting or fuss for several months and several thousand miles of driving on all kinds of roads.

Kuat NV BIke rack and bike rack extension and hitch tightener

The whole system is completely rigid now and has not needed any adjustments in six months of use.

The hitch tighteners do make for some extra steps if we want to move the bike rack from the hitch receiver on the trailer to the hitch receiver on our truck. However, we’ve started hauling our bikes in our truck in a different way using a furniture blanket, so there’s no need to take the bike rack off the trailer any more.

Mountain bikes on truck rather than a bike rack

An easy way to get the bikes from the trailer to the trail head!

Jack makes these hitch tighteners in batches, so if you are passing through Blanding, Utah, perhaps on your way to or from the beautiful Natural Bridges National Monument, just a mile or so south of Blanding you can stop by JM Custom Welding and pick one up! In 2016 the were $38 apiece.

We discovered later that hitch tighteners of various kinds are also commercially available. So, if Blanding, Utah, isn’t in your sights, you can choose from many different kinds of hitch clamps online.

However, a visit to Jack’s welding shop is very worthwhile, especially if you need any kind of custom metal fabrication done on your RV. He is very creative and does excellent work.

While we were in Jack’s office, we noticed a display of his for a folding storage solution for the beds of pickup trucks he’s created that fits right behind the truck cab. He calls it the “Jack Pack” and it is essentially a framed canvas storage bag the width of the truck bed that is easily opened to throw your bags of groceries into and then easily folded away when you need to haul lumber or fill the truck bed with something else.

If we didn’t have that part of our truck filled up with extra water jugs, we would have snagged one of those from him at the same time!

We’ve got a few more links below.

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Info on hitch tighteners and hitch clamps:

There are many brands of hitch tighteners on the market. These are a few:

There’s also a “Z” shaped hi-low hitch riser available:

If you need custom metal fabrication work done:

Related Posts:

Our most recent posts:

More of our Latest Posts are in the MENU.   New to this site? Visit RVers Start Here to find where we keep all the good stuff. Also check out our COOL NEW GEAR STORE!! *** CLICK HERE *** to see it!