Please note: My apologies for the dog barking and the train on the recorded Podcast. Also, I referred to AGM batteries as AMG batteries for some reason.
When it comes to RVing and camper van travel road hazards are a part of the adventure. We’ll talk about how you can avoid – and possibly minimize – the downside of RVing on this edition of the Rolling Home Podcast.
If you thought dewinterizing was all you needed to do before starting your summer adventures I have news for you. There are other things that need attention and can go wrong and need to be fixed.
Well, we are officially into the sixth month of the year and wow has 2023 passed by ever so quickly. I have gotten the opportunity recently to go on some quick excursions in our camper van, and on one of those excursions ended up us having some major maintenance done. It was the fact that I lost one of my tires. They were the original Nexen tires that come on our Winnebago Travato 59G that we have.
I had read online on numerous occasions about the fact that there was some trouble with the Nexen tires for some people but not everyone.
Some people who had trouble with the Nexen tires had already replaced them after 20 or 30,000 miles, but then others had said they had gotten the full 40,000 recommended miles out of their Nexen tires.
Well on a recent short trip I lost the left rear tire on our camper van. It basically just came apart. You know how these big rigs on the highway have these retreaded tires where they retread the top of the tire where the tread is on these multi-ply tires. Of the tires on a Promaster are 10 ply because they carry a lot of weight. The tread on our tire came off just like the big truck tires on this rear left tire.
So I had to put on a spare, and if you remember I mentioned on a previous Podcast that I had added a spare to my rig a year or two ago, whatever, so the spare came in handy.
When we returned from our trip I ordered a set of new tires for our Travato and got those tires put on about a week or so ago. It was a maintenance situation that I really had not anticipated undertaking because our tires only had 28,000 miles on them. I was expected to go at least 30 or maybe 35,000 miles on that set of tires. But they are rated at 40,000 miles. I think the new tires I purchased are rated at 60,000 miles. So who knows what I’ll get out of them but I knew it was getting time to replace them considering the stories I had read, and that had to be done before we could full engage in our summertime travel.
Well, I had thought that after dewinterizing that was about all the maintenance that I needed to do other than clean the van up, and maybe do some TLC to the outside and lubricating some different parts like that.
But I quickly found out – and I’m getting ready to go on a short trip this weekend – when I went to check a few things I tried to turn on our rooftop MaxAir fan. Well, it came on but the power lid did not open. So, I did a little research and found out that the mechanism that opens and closes the lid is probably bad on the MaxAir fan. So that’s another matter that I’m going to have to take care of sooner or later. In the summer you want your fan to work even though we will be using our air conditioner as well. But you want your fan to work because when boondocking and things; I really don’t run the air conditioner that much since it means I have to run the generator. So that’s something I’m going to have to take care of.
Now, I had kind of put off fixing our bathroom fan which had gone out some time ago. I had bought everything to fix it but was lazy and did not do it because we mainly used the MaxAir fan to vent the hot air from the van anyway. So now I’m going to fix both fans at the same time when I have my ladders out and stuff and get that all that taken care of.
As mentioned earlier, they are a couple of maintenance items that I had anticipated before I started traveling this summer.
If you’ll remember back perhaps a Podcast or two ago I mentioned that we had some really bad storms that had come through our area in Central Arkansas on March 31. There were a couple of tornadoes in the state and some came through here and tore up a bunch of property, and our electricity was off nine or 10 days. If you’ll remember I said we were in good shape because I just hooked up the van’s generator to our house, our freezer, our refrigerator, and to run lights and our TV, and ran that thing pretty much throughout the duration when our electricity was out.
I want to tell you that Cummins generator on our Travato did a great job. I was very impressed. I have a little portable generator that I thought I would use for different things so I would not put so many hours on the Cummins generator, but I’m a believer now. That thing ran, ran and ran. I think it loves to run. It hates to sit up and not run. But that being said I put a bunch of hours on the generator so that’s another maintenance item that I’m going to have to do sooner than later is change the oil and do the maintenance on the generator.
Finally, on top of that it’s time to get the oil changed on the Promaster chassis, so that is something that I’m going to have to take care of sooner than later as well. So I’ll probably just do the oil change on the Promaster the same time I do the Cummins generator oil change. It’s just one of those things, if you use this equipment it is going to need maintenance, and it is kind of hitting me all at one time.
And one final thing. I’m thinking that soon I’ll be looking at putting some batteries on the underside of the motorhome aspect of our camper van, and also on the chassis of the Promaster. Because we bought our van in 2018 so we are looking at four or five years on those batteries. I’ve maintained them and everything but they have a lifespan and they may be something that we may be looking at. And I’ve been kind of looking at possibly turning them into lithium, the ones that run the coach. But I don’t know if I want to go to that extent just yet. The AGM batteries have worked great. I would love to have the added power of the lithium but there is the aspect of cold winters that I don’t know if I want to have to deal with, and as you well know the cost upfront is more although they are supposedly longer lasting than the AGM batteries. But I have had some good luck out of these AGM batteries.
Well, that’s it for another edition of Rolling Home. I would just like to encourage you to following Rolling Home on your favorite listening platform, and drop me a line at rollingforhome@gmail.com, visit the blog at rollingforhome.wordpress.com. Remember, home is where you park it. See you again soon on another edition of Rolling Home!
Rolling Home 