Full Time Living RV Mistakes | These things will cost you!

so we started full-time rving in August of 2022 and we had never RV before we had never owned an RV we didn't know much about it other than what my family did when I was back in high school but we never took care of an RV ourselves so there was a lot of learning curve and if you're in that position or maybe you're just getting going I think what we have to show you today is going to be really important to helping you save your time and save your money by not making mistakes that we made yeah we want to share with you some lessons that we learned the hard way the things that cost us a lot of money a lot of time and or frustration so grab your pen and paper and get ready I'll put the links to all the things that we talk about in the description um any of the recipes for the tank treatments all of that in the description so let's get started okay believe it or not I'm on here on the roof and I'm going to talk about gray tank smells two don't seem related but trust me there's definitely a connection here so when we first I mean for like the first year it seem like we kept having all these bad smells coming out of our our gray tank out of our kitchen sink and it was driving us Bonkers uh darling Cooks a lot so you know we think we got we had a lot of food a lot of oils with those kinds of things that were making their way down the sink and just weren't getting flushed out enough and so we tried everything we we ended up going to clean tank they did a great job they came in professionally clean the tanks and sure enough a couple weeks afterwards the smell came back and we thought how can this be so I started researching some things and go on on some online forums Facebook groups that kind of thing and I something caught my eye and it was about the exhaust that comes up see you're you have exhaust that come out of your gray tanks and your black tanks we have two gray tanks two black tanks and and apparently what's what's happened the problem was that there's a there's an exhaust pipe and these things are known I guess with different manufacturers I guess maybe all manufacturers for whatever reason they have a tendency to cut these exhaust pipes short so I noticed sure enough that I came up here and I took the lids off those little plastic lids and sure enough that I came up here and the PVC did not extend beyond the point that it needed to and what apparently was happening again I don't this is not my profession I don't understand exactly how this works but I think the stink smell was basically going up into the roof somehow and then it was making its way somehow back into the air conditioner and it was literally blowing back into into the kitchen so it's a crazy problem but I had already installed one of these things and I can't really think of the name of them right now uh they're made by Camco Cy the Camco Camco Cyclones I had already installed one of them so I knew that that may be a potential solution so I thought you know what I'm going to go ahead and just put them on all of all of the vents and sure enough I came up actually and I I removed all the remaining Vents and all of them had these PVC pipes that were coming up just a little bit short so I think that was really the root of our of our problem so I went ahead and installed these as you could see I had to kind of modify this one because it just just about knocks into the other one so I had to go and just literally cut the plastic off um but it it seemed to work just fine but the good news is is that it seems to have solved the problem so finally and it's just another classic case of something you don't know what you don't know I had no clue that those Vapors might might go up into the ceiling and somehow make their way back into the air conditioner and if that was blowing back down into our kitchen go figure so if you have that problem I think these things work great uh maybe that'll solve your problem another big mistake that we made or a lot hard lesson that I had to learn was I didn't know anything about generators I'd never really used a generator in any format uh prior to having an RV so we uh at very at first we got an onen 5500 got a used one I think that thing must have been 25 plus years old uh it did run uh we had to get you know get it up to up to Snuff and all that but um one thing that I didn't know much about was the relationship between ethanol and carburetors and again I am not an expert in this but all I know is that it became really easy for that carburetor to get clogged you're actually supposed to run those generators you're supposed to exercise them as they call it at least once a week and if you're hanging out in RV parks very much like we were in the very beginning people kind of frown on you running your generators it's a whole ordeal so I found myself dealing a lot with that generator not starting uh not being reliable and I didn't know if it was the carburetor I didn't know if it was something else but I ended up having to replace the carburetor and it was a $700 part from Amazon I ended up getting a cheaper one and trying a Chinese for $60 but all in all after a while I just got tired of dealing with it and so but one thing again in my travels is as I learned I figured out that somebody told me that using ethanol gas in small engines like this this is our little our small generator and the OWN when we had it I did get rid of it recently um using ethanol gas like you get at the regular gas station it has ethanol in it is a bad idea because it'll actually gum up your carburetor so again I didn't know this until I looked it up but you could actually go to gas station you can buy gas that does not have ethanol in it if you go to the right type of gas station so I found an app on my phone which I don't have but it's called Pure Gas and it's just a big directory of gas stations that sell gasoline that has no ethanol in it so that from now on that's all I'm going to put into any generator that I own that I runs off gas so we're bribing our dog to sit on the couch with me so to make the point about pet insurance all right so when we hit the road here buddy um we we didn't really think much about it and then [Laughter] um oh hug go uh we didn't we we didn't never thought about having pet insurance when we had our home and he was a puppy when he we left he was like a year U year and a half something like that and so uh he um we never thought about he needed coverage so we got on the road and we realized he was being exposed to a lot more elements uh a lot of dog parks uh a lot of nature eating things he shouldn't and he smells these treats and he's going crazy right now um but we knew that it would probably be a good thing to get pet insurance luckily my company contributes towards pet insurance for their employees so that was really really nice um we use a company called Fetch and um it really depends on where you live um so you'll have to research it to find out what's best for you uh but I have 15,000 on annual coverage they pay 80% and my deductible is 500 now I telling you this because it has saved us so much money Hugo got sick really really sick we still don't know what happened what he ate what he got a hold of um but we were in three emergency rooms within 2 weeks and he had to have all these tests run and it was it was pretty serious and then he got sick again uh when we were in Vegas and he had to go I think to the vet three different vets cuz we're moving so three different vets and so you can see how that will add up so fetch in the first year has saved us a ton so if you have a pet on the road I really would suggest you consider pet insurance it's it feels like it's a throwaway kind of thing you don't need it your dog's healthy our dog is Young and healthy and we needed it so consider that and uh maybe add that to your Necessities for RV life another big problem that we had when we first started being new br rvers um we had this problem twice is we were basically um when we were pulling out these black tank P or just these poles in general um you know you would pull them out pushing them back in I guess maybe we were putting some downward pressure and bending them a little bit and that is the worst thing that you can do because those things um It's Kind they're kind of soft metal but they're going into the the the input that they're going into is also metal so if it gets even slightly bent they won't go back in there straight and uh even worse they might get stuck and that happened to us not once but twice which means that our black tank was stuck open um and that's a problem so in fact once it happens the first time it happened it's so bad it it actually broke off so Alliance our manufacturer actually paid twice for different uh mobile RV techs to come out and replace these things we actually got kind of lucky because taking these parts off I once I saw what the process was to replace one of these it is a pain in the butt to replace one of these things because it's not just a matter of going and and switching out just a little part you actually it has this big long spring thing on it it goes all the way to the back and if yeah it's just an ordeal to fix these things so my best advice would be to get you some lubricant I like this teen brand um it's basically it's really just meant for anything that's metal on metal um it's not like grease it's it's it's a little bit different than silicone um but it's anything that's metal on metal like that it works really well um to just makes it slide in back and forth so now pretty much anytime that we mess with the tanks I just squired a little bit of this on there before I put that back in and absolutely don't force it so if it seems like it's a little bent just be you know make sure it's lubricated go in there and try to straighten it as much as possible and then push it back in be very careful when we first knew we were going to go full-time and before we even had our RV you know I started researching you know all the different things I didn't know because we knew nothing about rving and tank treatment was one of those things so I just trusted whatever they said that I saw in the video so we started off with happy camper uh we used that for quite a long time until the same thing that almost everybody says allar TS tank sensors stopped working pretty much except for the shower and we were getting smell and um I for us it just really to me didn't work that well so I decided to try some other things I tried two other brands it wouldn't even bother to tell you what they are again we still didn't feel like it was keeping things smelling okay and the tanks um you know being cleaned well so when we had um the clean tank people come out uh and and clean all of our tanks for us they prescribed that what they believe is the best thing for tank treatment and I know this is controversial and I know you'll probably gave me a million comments about how happy camper is great for you and and it is for a lot of people but for us this has been the thing that is cheapest and really kept the smell down and we really don't even notice our tanks at all so um it's I'll put the you know like the the recipe on the screen but it's basically Calgon um um beads the moisture bath beads Pine Sal and you just fill up with water so um you just fill the pine saw up to I have it marked a line and then I put two caps and this is the cute little thing they give you from clean tank I don't know if you can buy that online um and you put it in here and you really shake it up and now the thing is when you fill it with water it'll kind of bubble out you let that settle down don't fill it all the way up you need a little room to shake it but you shake it and you mix it all up and basically this bottle gives us four treatments so we would if we flush our tanks we'd put it in the tank so um you know quarter put it in the tank I I do it every I don't know four days or so five days you probably don't need to do it that much I just am very cautious with the takes um but it works really well and again it's pretty cheap now I will tell you this Calgon bath beads they are hard to find so order them you can order a three pack on Amazon and it's much cheaper and you I I you know how many Walmarts I've gone to looking for this stuff I don't know why it's not a thing anymore but you can get it on Amazon and of course any kind of pinea type product is fine so we give it the thumbs up it's what we use and it's our go-to another big mistake you can make as a as a newbie full-time rver is buying things that you don't really need but you don't know that in the beginning I definitely did that with this that is called a pep link router and the wires that extend out of it are an antenna that goes up that I actually installed on the on the top on the roof um so the idea with the peplink router is that you take like a SIM card that you would get for Verizon or AT&T or any of those those companies and so we were really under the impression that we were going to use starlink and Verizon as a backup which we did for a while but then through a series of events we figured out that um well the T-Mobile the family plan that's only 50 bucks a month and it also includes this router there's no long-term contracts no nothing we were able to get this and for the last many months that we've had this this T-Mobile router we've traveled all over the country or all over the West anyway and this we've been using this mostly we haven't even been using starlink hardly and we certainly haven't been using uh this Verizon so what it turns out is is that if we just had starlink and T-Mobile we would be totally fine I would not need that that mobile uh that pep Link at all I wouldn't need Verizon and it would saved me a ton of money because I think this thing was like I don't I want to say like $1,500 just for the router so my vote is is that you definitely do not need peplink I'm sure I'm probably going to get some negative feedback or whatever but I'm just telling you as somebody who's you know we're on the computers all day long my wife and I both are for work and then we we on Netflix and stuff at night watching YouTube or whatever so we use a lot of internet and the good thing about starlink and about T-Mobile is that they're both truly unlimited there's no throttling there's none of that so um you know I just think it's those those two are all you need so here's my two cents on buying a bunch of stuff before you get going full-time or maybe even just if you're a part-timer or sometime and you think I got to buy all this stuff I see in the YouTubers videos don't just get on the road get the basics get on the road and figure out what you really need because guys we've thrown out or given away or got rid of so much stuff that I thought we needed to get going for example um we had a little like gas grill and it was awkward it it didn't fit anywhere very well it was hard to clean it just was it ended up being a pain because I thought there's no way I could do this thing without a grill for us the Blackstone was a better it's more compact it's easy to put in and out so we had I gave the grill to my son in and I had all this bedding and extra pillows and all this stuff because I thought oh my kids are going to come stick no one's going to come stay with you they don't want to stay in your RV so don't feel like you have to Lug around all these extras of you know even towels and linens and all that stuff you really don't need the extras so really wait get on the road figure out what you need especially when it comes to the kitchen and and cooking and things like that um and you'll save yourself a lot of frustration time and money uh this may be obvious but it's definitely something that cost us a lot of money uh that we had to deal with and that was making sure that you bring your awnings in when it's when when it's windy or if it even looks like it's going to hint at being windy so we had an incident happen and it's it's kind of a weird deal cuz we really didn't feel like it was our fault we usually we felt like we were pretty careful about this but we were in Oregon and um we actually had this awning up here we had it we had it strapped down with those one of those Shades that connects the awning so I mean it was literally pinned to the ground screwed into the ground and darling and I were both just working our regular day jobs didn't really feel like that there was much wind going on outside because there wasn't but we had a a rogue wind that just popped out of nowhere and I mean it literally just ripped that ra that awning right up pulled those things out of the ground and just whipped it back uh basically damaged the arm I can't remember all all what happened to it basically it was it was a bad deal and we were only going to be at that Campground for a few days out later and so we actually had to get help from the neighbors to try to get it to take it down and that was an ordeal because we had to get these tall ladders that we had to borrow from the RV park and get some neighbors to help us to actually physically take it down and then as you can see it's a really big awning and we had to put that in the Toy Hauler and just kind of try to figure out when we were going to be able to get it replaced and of course they had to ship the replacement to us from Alliance and it was just it was an ordeal so uh and it was expensive as you can as you can well imagine because not only did we have to buy the awning which of course is not under warranty we also paid a tech to come and install it I'm glad we did uh but still it was it was an expensive repair so be careful with your awnings I think this is maybe a ride of passage for every RV owner but it's a tough one because it costs a lot of money and you need awnings I mean right it's not like you're not going to use them but you got to be careful that you take them in and out um you know when there has any wind going on okay we have a couple last tips one of them would be you know I see a lot of people talking about taking their RVs to dealerships to get them fixed and frankly that has never even crossed my mind we I don't even hardly remember the name of the dealership where we got our RV uh I mean because I consider myself to be a customer of Alliance not really a customer of rv1 or whatever it was um so it's just not feasible for us to take our home because this is it we don't we don't have a home we sold our home back in Florida this is it so we don't have the opportunity to take it somewhere and just drop it off because you hear those horror stories of people waiting mons months to get their RV I I just saw someone posted that they dropped it off in August and they still haven't got it back no that's that's never going to happen we can't do that and even I saw another guy who was a full-timer who took it to a dealer and was displaced for over a month now he's paying for a Airbnb in the mean in the meantime we're not going to do that so we actually are headed for a repair and we scheduled it with Alliance um way in advance cuz it it takes a while to get in and they told us exactly how long they think it's going to take we have about a cushion of a week there is no way we're going to be out of that thing for more than two weeks if if that hopefully that's the yeah hopefully that's not the case but we we highly recommend using mobile text um I mean we have yet to have really a bad experience with mobile text and we've been you know been all over the country but we've been pretty far and you know we've had them fix our awnings our our black tank pulls or you know just do all sorts of random things we had people come and install the solar but they always just come to us and it's really not that much more expensive at all than if you took it to a dealer and had them do it now we've had warranty work done with Tex you have to arrange for it in advance you have to check with your manufacturer to see what their process is and but sometimes it's hours out of pocket and I have never thought that they were at an unreasonable price and they they give you a lot more care you're talking straight to them and you can ask questions so it's it's just a much better deal than trusting that the dealer is going to give it back to you when they say they had going to okay and then you had one last point about storage yes so uh one of the lessons hard learned is you know when you sell all your stuff you think oh I don't you have certain things you just don't want to give away you don't want to get rid of um and for us it was a lot of memorabilia which things from the children's you know when they were little little drawings pictures things like that but there was also like little chapkis that I just really liked a lot and then we had taken we had the toy hauler we don't like the steps that go to the patios they're heavy they're awkward they're bulky uh we had a table that uh went with the uh bench seats that were in the garage and then we actually removed our uh kitchen table and the chairs and put in a desk so all those extra parts we thought oh well we need to keep those in case we ever sell the rig people will want those here's the thing add it up you're going to end up paying you know if you keep a storage unit for however many years on the road five years whatever that stuff's probably not going to be worth that much and so what I ended up doing is uh and I even shared a storage unit with my friend and we just finally got to the point where she was going to get rid of the storage unit we were going to get rid of all that stuff we actually threw it out and I don't really regret any of that because we were spending way too much money on it and then I just took all the memorabilia and the the stuff that I really wanted and I took it to my sister's house and she's keeping it for us so really consider how much you're spending and Mo and for me in five six seven years I'm going to want different Furniture so I don't it's just not worth keeping in most cases so really consider that and how much you're spending because it might be something you can get rid of so we hope these tips have been helpful for you maybe you've uh found something that you can use that'll save you time money or frustration if you did please leave us the comments below and of course like And subscribe uh H time for the video be over so see you next time bye byebye hey we're Barry and Darlene from like there's no tomorrow and we just want to ask if you if you like our videos if you like our content please like the video and then also subscribe to our Channel just by hitting the Subscribe button below there on YouTube and you can also hit that little notification Bell if you want to know the next time we're putting out a video just hit that and it'll let you know but we really appreciate your support it really helps us with YouTube and uh thanks so much for watching our videos thanks guys

Channel: Like There's No Tomorrow

Views: 10,542

Keywords: off grid, boondocking, rv, rv life, rvlife, RV Tip, RV Batteries, RV Water, RV Solar, Solar, RV Power, free rv, Kleen Tank, RV Tanks, RV Tank Cleaner, RV Generator, Generator Care, RV Awnings, RV Repair, Mobile RV Tech, RV Mistakes, Peplink, Starlink

Id: eFLgkBmg82w

Length: 25min 34sec (1534 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 22 2024