February 22, 2024 • 15 mins
In this episode of our RV life journey, we dive into a week filled with unexpected maintenance adventures, tallying up to $2,500 in repairs. Starting with a hydraulic strut scare that had us limping down the highway to a surprising morning with no hot water, we share the ins and outs of dealing with unscheduled RV maintenance. Discover how we navigated these challenges, from diagnosing a sneaky check valve issue to coordinating with mobile RV technicians under tight schedules. We also discuss the importance of being prepared for the inevitable "when" not "if" of RV repairs, including budget tips and resources for finding reliable help on the road. Tune in to learn from our experiences and how to equip yourself for the unexpected twists of RV living.
If you have a topic you'd like us to cover in a future episode, give us a follow and share your suggestions in the chat!
Join the community by checking out beacons.ai/wanderingrvbabe and follow us on Tiktok @WanderingRVBabe, Instagram @WanderingRVBabe, YouTube @WanderingRVBabe, or Facebook Wandering RV Babe
If you have a topic you'd like us to cover in a future episode, give us a follow and share your suggestions in the chat!
Join the community by checking out beacons.ai/wanderingrvbabe and follow us on Tiktok @WanderingRVBabe, Instagram @WanderingRVBabe, YouTube @WanderingRVBabe, or Facebook Wandering RV Babe
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
What happened was I woke up tono hot water the other day, so
your girl had to wait to takea shower until later in the day when
it got fixed. But it didget fixed. One of the questions that
we get asked a lot is aboutour V maintenance. And let me just
tell you, last week we hada lot of our view maintenance to do.
(00:22):
Welcome to our page. I'm Kara, the Wandering our V babe,
and this is my driver Ryan.Today we're going to be talking about unscheduled
maintenance aka when what it breaks?That and we had how much this week?
Twenty five hundred dollars worth of damagethis week one week. So today
we're going to tell you what happenedand how you can avoid it. Well,
spoiler alert, you can't avoid it, but we're going to tell you
(00:44):
how to prepare for it when ithappens to you. Where are we sitting
on the floor? Who knows?Who knows? While we're sitting on the
floor, and we have a perfectlygood couch that we can sit on right
behind us. So we were leavingthis campground and we noticed on top of
one of our high dollarg struts itlooked a little greasy. Yeah, I
think that's a good way to putit. Not anything super concerning, but
(01:06):
just noticeable. And you know,all was good. We pulled the struts
up, life was good. Wehit the road. I think we had
a two day travel day, andso we stopped somewhere overnight and the problem
started when we left the overnight stopthe next morning. Yeah, so no
issues up to that point. Thehydraulics worked just fine, no big deal.
And then we get to the firststop, which was a gas stop.
(01:29):
We just went to go fill upand top off on diesel, and
as we're pulling out of the dieselstop, I noticed that that strut was
about halfway down. It wasn't actuallytouching the road, but it was getting
pretty close, and it was kindof just starting to inch down more and
more and more. Now, forthe record, that night before we did
have to kind of get ourselves reallylike in a weird situation, and there
(01:56):
was a divot right where that strutwent down, and so it had kind
of over extend. But we alreadysaw the signs of the leak when we
left the previous one. Then allof a sudden, now the strut's coming
down while we're driving a little disconcerting. Yeah, So we just pulled the
strut back up, but we didn'thave a ton of confidence that it wasn't
just going to start to inch backdown again while we're driving down the road,
(02:16):
which could be really, really dangerous. It was the strut that was
right in front of our tires,so if it had gone all the way
to the ground, one it wouldhave completely ruined that hydraulic strut, and
two it could have actually caused ablowout for the tires behind it. So
every time we turned a corner orevery time we saw an opportunity to pull
(02:38):
off into a rest stop, wewould do that and just double check it
and make sure that it wasn't startingto inch back down again. We were
practically like limping down the highway,maybe fifty miles at a time, just
checking and double checking multiple times overto make sure that it wasn't going to
be an issue for us. Whatare he doing, I don't know,
Okay, trying to look tough.So we finally got to a campsite and
(03:01):
we needed to find a mobile RVtech Like this is one of those situations
when you have to limp down thehighway thirty to fifty miles at a time.
Things have gotten desperate. It's timeto do something now. And I
think we were only staying at thiscamp site for about a week and a
half, which is a pretty shorttrip for us. Usually we like to
stay places a little bit longer.And then we were scheduled to move on
(03:23):
from there, and we knew wecould not move on and do another travel
day without that hydraulic struck getting fixed. You never know that could come down
and cause a ton of damage,So this has to be fixed. While
we're there. We found, luckilya technician. Now the office wasn't advertising
it, but we were on ourrow. We were driving down towards our
RV and noticed a sign just sittingout in front of somebody's RV tech.
(03:47):
So when we first called him,he was actually initially out of town,
which already gave me a little bitof heartburn because weren't going to be there
that long. He was out oftown, So now we had to kind
of coordinate when he was going tocome back in town to be able to
take a look at it and tellus what it was going to take to
fix it. Thankfully, we wereable to coordinate it to where he was
able to get us in and cometake a look at that strut. So
(04:09):
Cara was working at the time andI was just hanging out and he texts
me. He's like, hey,can I come by tomorrow? And I
was like, sure, cool,come right on over. As soon as
you're available, I will be availablefor you. Point number one, if
you're working with a mobile r Vtech when they say they're available, you
need to be available, especially whenyou're in a hurry. He comes over
and takes a look at it.He says, yeah, it looks like
(04:30):
the hydraulics are leaking. There's somethinggoing on here. I was assuming maybe
you'd just be something like he'd haveto replace a seal or something like that.
No, come to find out withLippert, you just replaced the whole
hydraulic strut. So we coordinated withhim and said get that thing ordered.
We're leaving next week at Thursday.I think it was, let's try and
(04:50):
get this done so we can breathea little easier. Right. No,
wrong, This is where things takean even weirder turn. I wake up
the next morning and there there's nohot water whatsoever. To my credit,
I texted her that night at liketwo am when I went to bed and
discovered that the hot water heater wasn'tworking. So she knew about this going
in, Yes, he did.I was very thankful for that. Now,
(05:13):
the text said that the hot waterpressure was really, really low,
which is true at the time.It was true when I woke up the
next morning, there was no hotwater, no hot water pressure at all.
You'd turn on the faucet, you'dturn on the shower, and no
hot water was coming out. Itwas ice cold. So, needless to
say, I did not take ashower that morning. She was stinky.
(05:34):
So that morning I wake up andobviously the first thing I start doing is
going to check on I mean,I discovered it at two o'clock at night.
I'm not gonna go out there andtry and work on it. But
ten o'clock that morning, I'm outthere taking panels off the wall, trying
to figure out what's going on.Clearly water's getting in because we have cold
water pressure. I checked the hotwater heater. It has water in it,
(05:55):
it has hot water in it.There's obviously pressure there, so you
think we're all going good. NotBut thankfully, as he was troubleshooting.
The RV tech came back over toget the part numbers so he could order
the hydraulic strut and offered to landa hand. So I basically just ran
through all the diagnoses that had alreadydone, kind of walked him through everything
(06:15):
that I had already tested. Andhe points out, after phoning a friend,
that there's a check valve on theoutside of the hot water heater,
which totally makes sense. So ifyou have a hot water heater, how
it works, at least with ourfifth wheel that has a manifold on it,
when you turn the hot water offlike you bypass the hot water heater,
it doesn't stop the hot water fromthe hot water lines from being filled.
(06:41):
It just stops hot water from flowinginto the hot water heater, which
takes the pressure off this check valve, and then your regular water can flow
through and it pushes against the checkvalve, but it can't get into the
hot water heater. So that's howthe manifold works. Well. When that
check valve is blocked or in thiscase damaged, it either stays open or
stays closed when it's not supposed to. It was closed. Luckily, this
(07:05):
was just a little cheap twenty dollarspart. But what I will say is
it looked a lot nicer than theone that came off of. The old
one was made of plastic and wellbroken. We pulled it off, and
the spring and everything was clearly showingthat it was not pushing to where it
was supposed to push. And thenew one was made of metal. I
mean, the stopper was still madeof plastic, but the actual device was
(07:28):
made of metal, and the springwas really nice and it had a nice,
little satisfying clink when it opened andclosed. So hopefully that means this
check valve is going to last along time. Fingers crossed. Now,
this damage could happen from a pieceof debris getting in or just wearing out
over time. Who knows. It'shard to say, but it's one of
those things to keep in mind.I didn't realize there was a check valve
(07:50):
there. I didn't quite understand howthe hot water bypass worked on the manifold.
So this was a great learning experiencefor me. So I now know
one more piece of information out ourwater. And he taught me, walked
it through with me, we replacedit. He didn't have any of his
tools with him because he had justbeen coming over to you know, take
a picture of a part number,and so we were able to just use
(08:11):
some of the tools I had.We were able to get it replaced,
and he was like, I'll justrun to the storm Goo grab it for
you, and you know, let'sjust call it day and thumbs up.
We got that part fixed. Sonow that the hot water heater is fixed,
we're back to the Hydraul extrat thatstill needed to be ordered. Yeah,
it's monday. He just got thepart number. We fixed the hot
(08:31):
water heater, and then he callsup Lippard, and Lippard's like, uh,
we can we do have the partavailable, and we can't overnight it.
Apparently they didn't give him the overnightprice. He comes to talk to
me. We're leaving on Thursday.So I was like, okay, so
it's Monday. They won't ship itout until Tuesday morning. If it comes
overnight, that means it arrives onWednesday sometime, we get the part installed,
(08:54):
and then we leave on Thursday.That all sounds great in theory,
but you never know. So somy first thought is, well, what
happens if we need to stay anextra day, so time to call the
campground. Yeah, most campgrounds,if they can, they will accommodate you
if at all possible. This onedid not. They were fairly rude on
(09:16):
the phone and just kind of saidlike, hey, we have somebody coming
in your spot on Thursday. Wemaybe have another spot, but we're not
sure, and if something happened thenyou're just gonna have to call a tow
truck to come and move your camper. Not super helpful, honestly, that
point in time, my biggest concernwas with the fact that it had dropped
(09:37):
down while driving. We'd seen thehydraulic fluid leaking. It's already been almost
over a week or so since wefirst started to notice all of this.
Is the strut even going to comeback up? Are we going to be
able to move should we need toif it doesn't arrive in time? And
we get it, they have todo their own business. We understand that
(09:58):
sometimes reserv can be really tight,but there were quite a few open spots
at this particular campground, and youknow, I get it. If you
can't accommodate us, you can accommodateus, but at least have that conversation
with us, and they just reallyweren't willing to do it. Sometimes that
happens with our V life too.But thankfully we didn't have to use Plan
(10:20):
D E F whatever plan we wereon at this point, we did not
have to use it because everything elsewent smoothly. Yes, we got the
part in. He told me itwas only going to be like an hour
or two install. It was threehours, no big deal, maybe two
hours fifteen minutes, I think,is what we ended up finally coming to
I. You know, no bigdeal. He charges by the quarter hour.
(10:41):
He has his hourly rate charged bythe quarter hour. And all was
well, I mean, I thinkin the end, I don't remember how
much we ended the spinning, butit's you know, over one thousand dollars
close to two thousand plus. Wealso had the hot water heater. All
that combined. It was a littlebit of a expensive week for us in
our V life exactly, but wewere able to leave on time. The
(11:03):
new strut is working great, andwe're back on the road and we still
have hot water. Shit happens.You're gonna have unscheduled maintenance with URV life.
It's just part of it. Itis you're literally there's nothing you can
do about it. I think oneof the one things that we could talk
about a little bit is cost.You need to have some money set aside,
something ready to go in case somethinghappens to you, not in case,
(11:26):
when, when, when something happens. The initial visit from an RV
tech is usually between one hundred andone hundred and fifty dollars. You might
have some variances outside of that,depending on the location you're at. More
popular areas might be more expensive,less popular might be a little bit cheaper,
but you're already gonna be looking atthat plus an hourly rate, plus
(11:46):
the cost of parts. Honestly,if I were you just my two cents,
i'd have at least five six thousanddollars set aside, if not ten
thousand dollars set aside in case somethinghappens, because, like with us,
you know you may not have beenable to move. So if something happens
and you need to get the workdone, you might be stuck wherever you're
(12:07):
at. You might be if you'rea full timer like us, you're just
stuck. If you're a part timer, you might be having to fly some
of your family homes so they canget back to work while trying to get
your RV fixed. It's not goingto be cheap at the last minute.
But the nice thing is that there'stons of resources out there, so there's
mobile RV techs. In fact,there's a website that you can go to
where you can find mobile RV techsall across the country. So wherever you're
(12:31):
at locally generally, you can lookat this website. What is the website,
it's RVTAA dot org, slash locate. If you want to go straight
to the locating button thing of ajigger, that's it. Or sometimes you
can even just go to the campgroundoffice and ask them. They will know
of people in the area who cancome and help you out, but in
this case they didn't. So inthis case they didn't. We just happen
(12:54):
to find one. And the nicething that we've found, at least with
RV text whether mobile rbtechs or onesthat are at a service station or dealership,
is they are incredibly friendly and theylove to teach our V owners.
Yeah, I mean anything that youcan absorb, like if you've got any
skill set whatsoever, be there justbe an extra pair of eyes, maybe
even be an extra pair of hands, just handing tools as they need so
(13:16):
you can learn what's going on andlearn what you might be capable of doing.
The hydraulic strut is something a lotof people would be absolutely capable of
replacing themselves if you've got all theright tools. And that's another point maybe
is have some tools. You don'tknow what all you're gonna need. I
don't know what all you're gonna need, but having tools and buying tools when
you need them and keeping them withyou is gonna make it a lot easier
(13:39):
to just troubleshoot and do a lotof the work yourself. Hey, friends,
thanks for listening. We'd love tostay connected. Follow us on TikTok,
Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, orFacebook at Wandering Rvbabe, or send
us a message or a comment withyour questions or travel ideas. Our website,
where you can find links to productsthat we share or merch is also
linked in the bio of each ofour social media pages Beacons dot Ai slash
(14:01):
Wandering RV bank. That's bac on s dot Ai slash Wandering RV Babe.
See you next time by Okay,but here's the issue. Okay,
if you ever run into an RVtech who's not willing to show you what
they're doing, run away, redflags, red flags all the way around.
(14:22):
Yeah, I mean either one,they are trying to like hold something
into their chests, like, oh, you don't need to know this.
I want you to call me everytime. Not for simple stuff. There
should be a lot of simple stuffthat you'd be able to do. But
or number two, they don't knowwhat they're doing. They don't know what
they're doing. Yeah, they don'twant you to see them screw up.
Any RV tech worth their salt willlet you watch them, and will let
(14:45):
you ask questions and will gladly answerthe questions that you ask. Watch them
like you're bathing them. But yousaid watch them, not watch them.
Watch I said watch. This iswhat you do for bathing? This is
that is so weird. You're sucha weirdo anyway,
What happened was I woke up tono hot water the other day, so
your girl had to wait to takea shower until later in the day when
it got fixed. But it didget fixed. One of the questions that
we get asked a lot is aboutour V maintenance. And let me just
tell you, last week we hada lot of our view maintenance to do.
(00:22):
Welcome to our page. I'm Kara, the Wandering our V babe,
and this is my driver Ryan.Today we're going to be talking about unscheduled
maintenance aka when what it breaks?That and we had how much this week?
Twenty five hundred dollars worth of damagethis week one week. So today
we're going to tell you what happenedand how you can avoid it. Well,
spoiler alert, you can't avoid it, but we're going to tell you
(00:44):
how to prepare for it when ithappens to you. Where are we sitting
on the floor? Who knows?Who knows? While we're sitting on the
floor, and we have a perfectlygood couch that we can sit on right
behind us. So we were leavingthis campground and we noticed on top of
one of our high dollarg struts itlooked a little greasy. Yeah, I
think that's a good way to putit. Not anything super concerning, but
(01:06):
just noticeable. And you know,all was good. We pulled the struts
up, life was good. Wehit the road. I think we had
a two day travel day, andso we stopped somewhere overnight and the problem
started when we left the overnight stopthe next morning. Yeah, so no
issues up to that point. Thehydraulics worked just fine, no big deal.
And then we get to the firststop, which was a gas stop.
(01:29):
We just went to go fill upand top off on diesel, and
as we're pulling out of the dieselstop, I noticed that that strut was
about halfway down. It wasn't actuallytouching the road, but it was getting
pretty close, and it was kindof just starting to inch down more and
more and more. Now, forthe record, that night before we did
have to kind of get ourselves reallylike in a weird situation, and there
(01:56):
was a divot right where that strutwent down, and so it had kind
of over extend. But we alreadysaw the signs of the leak when we
left the previous one. Then allof a sudden, now the strut's coming
down while we're driving a little disconcerting. Yeah, So we just pulled the
strut back up, but we didn'thave a ton of confidence that it wasn't
just going to start to inch backdown again while we're driving down the road,
(02:16):
which could be really, really dangerous. It was the strut that was
right in front of our tires,so if it had gone all the way
to the ground, one it wouldhave completely ruined that hydraulic strut, and
two it could have actually caused ablowout for the tires behind it. So
every time we turned a corner orevery time we saw an opportunity to pull
(02:38):
off into a rest stop, wewould do that and just double check it
and make sure that it wasn't startingto inch back down again. We were
practically like limping down the highway,maybe fifty miles at a time, just
checking and double checking multiple times overto make sure that it wasn't going to
be an issue for us. Whatare he doing, I don't know,
Okay, trying to look tough.So we finally got to a campsite and
(03:01):
we needed to find a mobile RVtech Like this is one of those situations
when you have to limp down thehighway thirty to fifty miles at a time.
Things have gotten desperate. It's timeto do something now. And I
think we were only staying at thiscamp site for about a week and a
half, which is a pretty shorttrip for us. Usually we like to
stay places a little bit longer.And then we were scheduled to move on
(03:23):
from there, and we knew wecould not move on and do another travel
day without that hydraulic struck getting fixed. You never know that could come down
and cause a ton of damage,So this has to be fixed. While
we're there. We found, luckilya technician. Now the office wasn't advertising
it, but we were on ourrow. We were driving down towards our
RV and noticed a sign just sittingout in front of somebody's RV tech.
(03:47):
So when we first called him,he was actually initially out of town,
which already gave me a little bitof heartburn because weren't going to be there
that long. He was out oftown, So now we had to kind
of coordinate when he was going tocome back in town to be able to
take a look at it and tellus what it was going to take to
fix it. Thankfully, we wereable to coordinate it to where he was
able to get us in and cometake a look at that strut. So
(04:09):
Cara was working at the time andI was just hanging out and he texts
me. He's like, hey,can I come by tomorrow? And I
was like, sure, cool,come right on over. As soon as
you're available, I will be availablefor you. Point number one, if
you're working with a mobile r Vtech when they say they're available, you
need to be available, especially whenyou're in a hurry. He comes over
and takes a look at it.He says, yeah, it looks like
(04:30):
the hydraulics are leaking. There's somethinggoing on here. I was assuming maybe
you'd just be something like he'd haveto replace a seal or something like that.
No, come to find out withLippert, you just replaced the whole
hydraulic strut. So we coordinated withhim and said get that thing ordered.
We're leaving next week at Thursday.I think it was, let's try and
(04:50):
get this done so we can breathea little easier. Right. No,
wrong, This is where things takean even weirder turn. I wake up
the next morning and there there's nohot water whatsoever. To my credit,
I texted her that night at liketwo am when I went to bed and
discovered that the hot water heater wasn'tworking. So she knew about this going
in, Yes, he did.I was very thankful for that. Now,
(05:13):
the text said that the hot waterpressure was really, really low,
which is true at the time.It was true when I woke up the
next morning, there was no hotwater, no hot water pressure at all.
You'd turn on the faucet, you'dturn on the shower, and no
hot water was coming out. Itwas ice cold. So, needless to
say, I did not take ashower that morning. She was stinky.
(05:34):
So that morning I wake up andobviously the first thing I start doing is
going to check on I mean,I discovered it at two o'clock at night.
I'm not gonna go out there andtry and work on it. But
ten o'clock that morning, I'm outthere taking panels off the wall, trying
to figure out what's going on.Clearly water's getting in because we have cold
water pressure. I checked the hotwater heater. It has water in it,
(05:55):
it has hot water in it.There's obviously pressure there, so you
think we're all going good. NotBut thankfully, as he was troubleshooting.
The RV tech came back over toget the part numbers so he could order
the hydraulic strut and offered to landa hand. So I basically just ran
through all the diagnoses that had alreadydone, kind of walked him through everything
(06:15):
that I had already tested. Andhe points out, after phoning a friend,
that there's a check valve on theoutside of the hot water heater,
which totally makes sense. So ifyou have a hot water heater, how
it works, at least with ourfifth wheel that has a manifold on it,
when you turn the hot water offlike you bypass the hot water heater,
it doesn't stop the hot water fromthe hot water lines from being filled.
(06:41):
It just stops hot water from flowinginto the hot water heater, which
takes the pressure off this check valve, and then your regular water can flow
through and it pushes against the checkvalve, but it can't get into the
hot water heater. So that's howthe manifold works. Well. When that
check valve is blocked or in thiscase damaged, it either stays open or
stays closed when it's not supposed to. It was closed. Luckily, this
(07:05):
was just a little cheap twenty dollarspart. But what I will say is
it looked a lot nicer than theone that came off of. The old
one was made of plastic and wellbroken. We pulled it off, and
the spring and everything was clearly showingthat it was not pushing to where it
was supposed to push. And thenew one was made of metal. I
mean, the stopper was still madeof plastic, but the actual device was
(07:28):
made of metal, and the springwas really nice and it had a nice,
little satisfying clink when it opened andclosed. So hopefully that means this
check valve is going to last along time. Fingers crossed. Now,
this damage could happen from a pieceof debris getting in or just wearing out
over time. Who knows. It'shard to say, but it's one of
those things to keep in mind.I didn't realize there was a check valve
(07:50):
there. I didn't quite understand howthe hot water bypass worked on the manifold.
So this was a great learning experiencefor me. So I now know
one more piece of information out ourwater. And he taught me, walked
it through with me, we replacedit. He didn't have any of his
tools with him because he had justbeen coming over to you know, take
a picture of a part number,and so we were able to just use
(08:11):
some of the tools I had.We were able to get it replaced,
and he was like, I'll justrun to the storm Goo grab it for
you, and you know, let'sjust call it day and thumbs up.
We got that part fixed. Sonow that the hot water heater is fixed,
we're back to the Hydraul extrat thatstill needed to be ordered. Yeah,
it's monday. He just got thepart number. We fixed the hot
(08:31):
water heater, and then he callsup Lippard, and Lippard's like, uh,
we can we do have the partavailable, and we can't overnight it.
Apparently they didn't give him the overnightprice. He comes to talk to
me. We're leaving on Thursday.So I was like, okay, so
it's Monday. They won't ship itout until Tuesday morning. If it comes
overnight, that means it arrives onWednesday sometime, we get the part installed,
(08:54):
and then we leave on Thursday.That all sounds great in theory,
but you never know. So somy first thought is, well, what
happens if we need to stay anextra day, so time to call the
campground. Yeah, most campgrounds,if they can, they will accommodate you
if at all possible. This onedid not. They were fairly rude on
(09:16):
the phone and just kind of saidlike, hey, we have somebody coming
in your spot on Thursday. Wemaybe have another spot, but we're not
sure, and if something happened thenyou're just gonna have to call a tow
truck to come and move your camper. Not super helpful, honestly, that
point in time, my biggest concernwas with the fact that it had dropped
(09:37):
down while driving. We'd seen thehydraulic fluid leaking. It's already been almost
over a week or so since wefirst started to notice all of this.
Is the strut even going to comeback up? Are we going to be
able to move should we need toif it doesn't arrive in time? And
we get it, they have todo their own business. We understand that
(09:58):
sometimes reserv can be really tight,but there were quite a few open spots
at this particular campground, and youknow, I get it. If you
can't accommodate us, you can accommodateus, but at least have that conversation
with us, and they just reallyweren't willing to do it. Sometimes that
happens with our V life too.But thankfully we didn't have to use Plan
(10:20):
D E F whatever plan we wereon at this point, we did not
have to use it because everything elsewent smoothly. Yes, we got the
part in. He told me itwas only going to be like an hour
or two install. It was threehours, no big deal, maybe two
hours fifteen minutes, I think,is what we ended up finally coming to
I. You know, no bigdeal. He charges by the quarter hour.
(10:41):
He has his hourly rate charged bythe quarter hour. And all was
well, I mean, I thinkin the end, I don't remember how
much we ended the spinning, butit's you know, over one thousand dollars
close to two thousand plus. Wealso had the hot water heater. All
that combined. It was a littlebit of a expensive week for us in
our V life exactly, but wewere able to leave on time. The
(11:03):
new strut is working great, andwe're back on the road and we still
have hot water. Shit happens.You're gonna have unscheduled maintenance with URV life.
It's just part of it. Itis you're literally there's nothing you can
do about it. I think oneof the one things that we could talk
about a little bit is cost.You need to have some money set aside,
something ready to go in case somethinghappens to you, not in case,
(11:26):
when, when, when something happens. The initial visit from an RV
tech is usually between one hundred andone hundred and fifty dollars. You might
have some variances outside of that,depending on the location you're at. More
popular areas might be more expensive,less popular might be a little bit cheaper,
but you're already gonna be looking atthat plus an hourly rate, plus
(11:46):
the cost of parts. Honestly,if I were you just my two cents,
i'd have at least five six thousanddollars set aside, if not ten
thousand dollars set aside in case somethinghappens, because, like with us,
you know you may not have beenable to move. So if something happens
and you need to get the workdone, you might be stuck wherever you're
(12:07):
at. You might be if you'rea full timer like us, you're just
stuck. If you're a part timer, you might be having to fly some
of your family homes so they canget back to work while trying to get
your RV fixed. It's not goingto be cheap at the last minute.
But the nice thing is that there'stons of resources out there, so there's
mobile RV techs. In fact,there's a website that you can go to
where you can find mobile RV techsall across the country. So wherever you're
(12:31):
at locally generally, you can lookat this website. What is the website,
it's RVTAA dot org, slash locate. If you want to go straight
to the locating button thing of ajigger, that's it. Or sometimes you
can even just go to the campgroundoffice and ask them. They will know
of people in the area who cancome and help you out, but in
this case they didn't. So inthis case they didn't. We just happen
(12:54):
to find one. And the nicething that we've found, at least with
RV text whether mobile rbtechs or onesthat are at a service station or dealership,
is they are incredibly friendly and theylove to teach our V owners.
Yeah, I mean anything that youcan absorb, like if you've got any
skill set whatsoever, be there justbe an extra pair of eyes, maybe
even be an extra pair of hands, just handing tools as they need so
(13:16):
you can learn what's going on andlearn what you might be capable of doing.
The hydraulic strut is something a lotof people would be absolutely capable of
replacing themselves if you've got all theright tools. And that's another point maybe
is have some tools. You don'tknow what all you're gonna need. I
don't know what all you're gonna need, but having tools and buying tools when
you need them and keeping them withyou is gonna make it a lot easier
(13:39):
to just troubleshoot and do a lotof the work yourself. Hey, friends,
thanks for listening. We'd love tostay connected. Follow us on TikTok,
Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, orFacebook at Wandering Rvbabe, or send
us a message or a comment withyour questions or travel ideas. Our website,
where you can find links to productsthat we share or merch is also
linked in the bio of each ofour social media pages Beacons dot Ai slash
(14:01):
Wandering RV bank. That's bac on s dot Ai slash Wandering RV Babe.
See you next time by Okay,but here's the issue. Okay,
if you ever run into an RVtech who's not willing to show you what
they're doing, run away, redflags, red flags all the way around.
(14:22):
Yeah, I mean either one,they are trying to like hold something
into their chests, like, oh, you don't need to know this.
I want you to call me everytime. Not for simple stuff. There
should be a lot of simple stuffthat you'd be able to do. But
or number two, they don't knowwhat they're doing. They don't know what
they're doing. Yeah, they don'twant you to see them screw up.
Any RV tech worth their salt willlet you watch them, and will let
(14:45):
you ask questions and will gladly answerthe questions that you ask. Watch them
like you're bathing them. But yousaid watch them, not watch them.
Watch I said watch. This iswhat you do for bathing? This is
that is so weird. You're sucha weirdo anyway,
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