DIY RV Repair & DIY Maintenance - Full Time RV

today we're going to tackle eight do-it-yourself maintenance and repair items [Music] below you'll find the time stamp for each item that we discuss in the video so if you're looking for a specific item it'll be in the description below and then the other links that we discussed in the video those will be in the description below as well so Stacy do you imagine first up on the DIY list is Phil's given me a new throne yes your grace my castle right so I deserve the best throne possible the toilet we have now I hate it so much mainly we're switching it out because it's no longer ceiling we've tried to make adjustments but it just won't hold a tight seal so that's the main reason it's getting out of here there are two other reasons I hate that toilet and then wanting to switch it out even before the seal issue first up is when it rinses the bowl it has these teeny tiny little jets in the back of the toilet and so it only mainly rinses the back there whole bowl doesn't get a good rinse and the second reason is because the seat itself is curved and it's hollow so it has all these ribs underneath and cleaning it is near impossible so we chose a Dometic model 310 when we get it all installed we're gonna show you what we love most about it but for now let's build a work first thing I'm gonna do is cut off the water pump and we're not connected to city water so I don't have to go outside and turn that off long as the pumps off we shouldn't have any water coming to the toilet but I am going to flush it and get whatever water is in the line out water should be out of the line first thing is getting the water line off I have a towel back here just in case there's any water seepage a little bit behind there's a little bit of water in there okay alright sorry the water line detached and the two bolts are the nuts off the bolts holding it to the floor so it's loose it's ready to be lifted off the floor however now comes the part that I hope I don't need when gloves for so I'm gonna attempt to pull it off the floor and set it inside a plastic bag without dripping any water or anything that could be on the bottom of it all over the bathroom floor alright lift it up into space easy peasy look at that it's on there look wobbly before I put this toilet on I spared you the dirty details I didn't clean up the flange area a little bit before I put this back on there and it did swap out my glove so I had clean gloves on touching the clean toilet so now I'm going to tighten the bolts down make sure it's nice and snug to the floor and then I'm gonna reattach the water landing fingers cross we should be good so last thing I'm gonna do is turn the water back on and give it a flush or two and see if she's got any leaks anywhere look at that got water at the very top and then see how she's holding water that looks good alright so now I'm going to I want to check and make sure there's no water you can backside of it we are dripping leak-free looks like the toilet is holding the water where it should be main reason we chose to Dometic 3:10 is it has the Jets the water jets all along the top of the toilet so the water's going to come out in a circular pattern from the top and push everything down or our old one if you saw in the video where it just kind of sprayed in the back and got half the bowl so this is going to help keep the bowl cleaner and also the seat itself has no ribs so this one would be much easier to keep clean and then the other great feature is the toilet seat and the lid both just slowly closed or quiet closing lids so Stacy should be happy on her new throne next on the DIY to-do list is to change out my nightshade motor it's acting very weird it only works intermittently and I have to keep pushing the button like so push it push it push it and as you can see it has a mind of its own so I'm going to swap out the old motor with the new motor and I've done the Sun Shade motor already I did that last year and I'm not gonna bore you with the step-by-step details on this install so I'm gonna link the video to the solar shade install that we did in its if I can do it anybody can do it trust me one of my maintenance items that I frequently take care of are my locks around the RV to include the bike rack and my hitch locks these in particular because they're on the back of the RV and they're more susceptible to the water and the dirt and road grime and whatever else is thrown out while we're driving so for my locks back here I used a three in one lock dry loop and it gets in there penetrates it loosens up the locks and keeps them nice and lubed on the inside if you will and then I'll check it with my pee and make sure that everything is working well cycling into twice one of the reasons I like to three in one lock dry loop Lube is that it dries pretty fast and it doesn't attract dirt back here and that's a big problem driving down the road kicking up the debris so as you notice I did spray the key before I inserted it into the lock just to make sure that the tumblers on the inside of the locks got even coating of the lubricant itself one of the few things that I think I can tackle on my own is changing the oil in my generator the oil and air filter so that's what I'm gonna attempt today alright so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put my Cummins approved air filter I'm gonna change it out first we've got the outer wing nut holding the case in that then there's another wing nut holding the air filter cover in place you take that off your filter plate we're not remove the old filter and these are recommended to be changed out every 500 miles or 500 hours of use so we're there I think we're overdue absolutely you can see the difference between the old and the new this one's very clean as new this one's been used for a minute we'll put this in and push to this place now I'm going to put the cover back on just like that our filters changed all right so the first thing I have to do is run the generator get to oil up to temp for a few minutes and then I'll cut it back off let it cool for a second and then I can drain the oil so let me start the generator all right now onto the old chain so I've got my my oil collection bucket here the oil drain plug is right here so it's good I'm gonna undo this drip it into the bucket and then under this cover here is where the oil filter is all right so oil is drain plug is back in and tight now I'm going to open up the panel and I've got to get the oil filter which is up inside here all right so I can get my hand if there it does turn all right now I would take my fram oil filter and this was cross-reference with the own in part I went to advanced auto in the cross-reference the hone in part so take a little thing the fingers take a little oil put it around the gasket such create that seal and then manipulate it back up in there all right that's good and hand tight I didn't crank it down that's it from this side now we get to go out and clean everything up now I'm ready to add the Valvoline oil back to the generator this one is approved by coming so that's why I went with it I'm going to add three quarts of this and then I'll check it make sure we're good all right right where it should be and we're good [Music] so I ran the generator for a few minutes just checking for leaks underneath good to go no leaks I did put the tarp back under there so that I could tell if there was a leak real easy and if there was a leak I would catch it on the tarp and not on the ground because I'm sure they would frown upon that so now that I'm done with that I'm gonna go ahead and check it again and just make sure the level is where it should be and now I don't need to add any more to it so all right right where it should be and we're good now that all that's done I'm gonna document the hours 974 hours on here so 150 hours from now I'll redo it again my monthly maintenance tasks also include doing my slide seals and that's inspecting them and making sure they're clean and they're not cracking and what I like to use on them is the three-in-one RV care rubber sealed conditioner which provides a layer of UV protection and it helps keep the seals nice and moist and prevents cracking so you just simply spray it on and then you wipe it wipe the excess off and of course I'll do that all the way down the side the slide seal all right today we're going to change out our showerhead the one that we have currently failed onedrive and the top of it cracked so water leaks out the top and then the on/off switch doesn't completely shut off the water and when we turn it off if there's a steady stream coming so we're really not saving much water so we're gonna swap that out for this guy right here alright so I've got my pizza's here got a new shower hose showerhead and the water shut off now I'm going to apply a little bit of tape to the threads just so we don't have any any leaks I probably one wrap should do it on here and then I'm gonna put a piece on the base of the showerhead as well you know I always do these backwards I know there's a certain way you're supposed to do it so that it doesn't come off when you're threading whatever you're attaching so I'm going to add this piece then I'm going to add these shower hose all right now before I add this hose I'm going to take the other hose off into put a piece of this tape around that so let's go inside the shower and take that one off all right so now we'll attach the new shower head all right so I've got it connected I'm trying the on/off switch and as you can see the switch is off and I still have water trickling out so thumbs down on that so we've had that Oxana genic showerhead for over a month now and obviously I've had the chance to use it quite a few times and I got to tell you I'm not in love with it this thing costs 260 bucks and compared to the old one I think I like the old one better the old shower head was a low-flow showerhead but it didn't aerate it to create more pressure for us which is what this one does for that extra money this one has a neck on it that's very awkward in the shower for us adjusting Heights and for when I'm showering without washing my hair it's difficult to do and women you know how important that is on a non hair washing day now as far as Phil when he's showering he has to raise a showerhead really high and then the spray is so strong water goes on the ceiling it goes over the shower onto the floor so water's going everywhere so if I had to rake this for pressure I'm gonna give it a 9 but for everything else about this showerhead I'm giving it a 5 to me it's not worth the money if I had to do it all over again I would have just gotten a low-flow showerhead instead of spending the 60 bucks for the aeration so if you have one of these showerhead let us know what you think and let us know if you would buy it all over again one of my more important maintenance check off items is getting up here on the roof inspecting the seals inspecting the roof just in general and then once I clean it I apply my 303 UV protected and I'm really can't about applying this because I definitely do not want to have to repair my roof or replace it before its time so coming up here and inspecting it was a good thing this time because we found that one of our maxxair vent covers is missing broke clean off we we hit some trees and our last outing when we were leaving and we didn't realize that we knocked off or broke off one of our maxxair vent covers nor did we see it hit the Jeep behind us or hearing anything but we obviously hit something big that caught it and ripped it off so just another indication that it's imperative that you get up on your roof inspected check it clean it stay on top of the maintenance if you want to know more about how I maintain the roof check out our annual maintenance video which will be linked below I know to do yourself item is troubleshooting sometimes you're gonna have issues that pop up and you're gonna need to run them to the ground before you make a call so one of my troubleshooting issues today is playing with the water pump we've been having problems with it where it's sounds like it's still running you get the the small or or even after the water is turned off I can't hear it but Stacy can hear it the drives are crazy so I do have another pump as a spare in case something does happen to this especially when we're boondocking but before I just swap it out completely I want to try to figure out if there's a problem actually with the pump or if I have a leak with either water or air somewhere in the system turn on the pump run a little water just to get the pump to activate all right so pumped is activated and as you could hear the pump is still working and still pushing water through somewhere and it'll do that for about a minute or so and then it stops we haven't noticed any leaks on the inside so reading the manual on this sure flow water pump you know it said to check the obvious loose connections at the palm in the strainer so that's we're going to start with but I'm just going to check the connections make sure they're good and tight then they turned a little bit so they weren't as tight as they could be so we'll get those nice and tight all right so I turned the water off leading on the inlet side from water from the pump into the rig so that when I took the strainer off and it had water running freely so here there's something in it we go plastic there's plastic in here yeah and it looks like just bits of plastic in here I don't think this is causing a clog but I'll rinse this out and clean it real good and then I put it back on all right so I tighten the water lines on the pump I took the strainer off cleaned it ran the water through again and the pump is still running after the fact you could you could hear that perp but it's almost like it's burping can't see any visible leaks out here so the next step is I'm gonna go inside I'm gonna check all the water lines to the sinks to the shower to the refrigerator washer dryer or washer and the water heater and we'll see if there's any any kind of leak coming from those areas so troubleshooting continues we've gone through the entire rig we've checked all the water connections made sure they were tight no obvious signs of leaks anywhere we made a phone call the Tiffin talked to them they try to walk me through a couple things and I had already done those so what we came down to was need to swap out the pump so I'm going to take the old pump out put the new pump in and cross our fingers that we don't get any more burping after we stop running to water all right so the first thing I did is I killed the 12 volt switch by the front door to cut off power to the pump so trying to pump on does not come on we've run the water through it in the rig so we know that it's off and it's not running the next thing I'm going to do is turn off the water coming into the pump here just to make sure we don't get any residual from the tank so I'm just gonna take these two wire nuts off where the wires are connected this one in this one there's only two wires that are connecting so power has been disconnected so now I'm just going to just connect the water lines all right so what lines have been disconnected [Music] all right I'm removing the old strainer and putting it on the new pump as the new pump didn't come with one all right so I put a little plumber's tape on my connections here so when I reattached it when I reattached it I don't get any leaks looks like it's on pretty tight so there should be a pretty straightforward install just these two wires connect to the red and black wires respectively on the rig we attach the water lines and bolt it back down and we're good all right she's bolted down I'm gonna start connecting the water lines tight so now I'm connecting the wires back together all right so I'm gonna connect this one and then I'm gonna wrap this one around it and then hopefully the wire nut catches them black enough that was in the middle but what see I don't know if I have it now I may have to strip that right so they're all connected good everything's good and tight moment of truth Stacy wind hit the 12-volt switch so we should have power like turn it on and then we'll run some water through the showerhead and see what we get they're pressurized okay pressurize the showerhead off no more burping so that was our our issue mister pump something on the inside with the pressure valve according to the tip and tech might have gone bad so we've got the new pump installed it's all quiet Stacy won't hear anything now so I think we have a successful water pump installed all right so I'm done with my maintenance and I do it yourself stuff I just want to reiterate don't be afraid to get in there and tackle these things I am NOT an electrician nor am ia plumber nor would I have done any of this in my sticks and bricks I would have made a phone call and that's going to come out and fix it for me but when you're on the road and this is your house and you just need to get out there and learn the systems learn how to do these things I don't like electricity I don't like messing with it but as you can see how I did this was really simple I mean it was a few steps and it was swapped out the troubleshooting methods that I used as well just help rule out that there was no leak anywhere inside the rig so again doing your maintenance doing the the do-it-yourself type stuff that you can tackle it's it self gratifying to know that you've done this and it you've fixed it it didn't cost a dime other than maybe the part you know I am NOT a professional by any stretch of the imagination but I'm getting better and I'm feeling more confident each time I tackle something I hope this video is helpful so thanks for watching and if you haven't already subscribed hit that subscribe button down below and just remember you can find us on Facebook Instagram and our village and until next time we'll see you on the road there's all the pieces

Channel: You, Me & the RV

Views: 62,213

Rating: 4.9657612 out of 5

Keywords: RV repair, rv maintenance, do it yourself rv maintenance, diy rv mainenance, rv roof maintenance, rv water pump troubleshoot, rv water pump, motorhome repair, diy rv repair, rv maintenance videos, rv maintenance and repair, rv maintenance costs, motorhome maintenance, motorhome maintenance tips, tiffin rv maintenance, allegro rv maintenance, tiffin rv upgrades, required tiffin maintenance, annual rv maintenance, required rv repair, allegro rv repair, best tiffin upgrade

Id: G2Kx8Exdq4g

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019