How To Set Up an RV Campsite | First Time RV Camping Help

hey guys Brian and Aaron here we just rolled into the Chehalis RV camping resort which is a thousand trails here in Chehalis Washington I think it's the first thousand trails yeah this is like the og thousand trails so so we just rolled in here and a lot of people been asking how we set up our campground how we break down and you know all of that kind of day-to-day stuff on a moving day so we just rolled in the RV we just backed into a spot that we fit in but we haven't done anything else we haven't done any leveling we haven't opened the slides we haven't unhooked the truck we haven't done any of that stuff so we're going to walk you through that process right now [Music] first up we use this app level mate Pro I will link to it in the description below it's an app and there's a sensor inside where we turn the sensor on it tells you how far off a level you are let me come on focus there we go so it tells us that we are 3.75 inches down on the driver side four inches down on the driver side and then front to back we don't worry about until we're unhooked because then with the tongue Jack we can bring the trailer up and down so we're going to go ahead and put down some of our leveling blocks here and then we're gonna back up on to them and we're gonna see what the number reads so let's go ahead and do that real quick so we use the links boxed these orange things and they're kind of like Legos a little bit they have holes in them where we can stack them together and we usually end up making a pyramid when we want to come up a couple inches we'll try this and see if it's enough sometimes we only need to do one level sometimes too the last place we're at we had to do a three-level pyramid so we'll see if we can do just a two level pyramid today [Music] all right what are the results so that brought us up but we're still between one inch and 0.75 down on driver side so our comfort level is kind of within half an inch up or down like you you wouldn't think that half an inch or an inch even as a lot but when you're only talking eight feet from one side to the other an inch is actually quite a slope so like when you're laying down a bed you feel like you're kind of rolling when you're walking you feel like you're walking uphill and downhill or kind of sideways so we like to be within half an inch on the app either way we actually kind of prefer to be a little down on driver for some reason so we're going to we're gonna let the GoPro keep rolling here we're gonna kind of adjust ourselves in the site here and then next time we talk to you hopefully we'll be level [Music] all righty so after moving and adjusting where the trailer is in the spot and then putting the pyramid underneath the wheels and kind of maneuvering a little bit on there we are between 0.25 and 0.5 at top one it kind of goes in between so that's our happy place yep and like we said the bottom number there front to back it doesn't matter right now this is just to keep this so the the thing we really like with the level of a pro is it keeps us from like you know hanging in the door putting down a level and doing that and kind of eyeballing and stuff because we've put down the level before in the front hallway and depending on where it sits in the hallway it shows you something different so at least this is consistent and we know what numbers on here where we're comfortable with and also all that rocking back and forth it's kind of abnormal but the entrance to this side up here where the truck is the truck is on a slope so every time I would put it in park and take my foot off the brake it would kind of settle back into the gear so it would roll back so we figured out how far to go foot off the brake we're right on top of the pyramid now so we're happy so now we're going to start we got to get unhooked from the truck and then we're gonna put all the stabilizers down and let's let's just be honest here the next step after getting the rig where it's supposed to be front to back is to get the kids out because unless they're having a really good day they get really antsy as soon as the truck stops so we we kind of find a spot for them we've got a bunch of like outdoor toys like sands toys so we just kind of plop them down and let them play while we get the rest of the stuff set up before we can head inside so our first step here is we get our two big blocks of wood and put them underneath our tongue jack just to kind of give it a head start with coming down and so we'll do that [Applause] and normally while she was doing that I'm not filming so while she's doing that I am hooking up the power cable because the tongue jack in the landing gear and all that stuff they run on electricity we do have a battery and of course we could run it off the battery but I don't see a reason to do that because I have electricity right here behind me okay so we have a 50 amp trailer but this is a 30 amp sight and that is not a problem because I have an adapter it's called a dog-bone that goes from 50 which is for huge blades or three blades and the ground 230 which is two blades on a ground so I'm gonna put this on the end of my cable here and then plug it in here flip the breakers on and then I have a surge guard on here that tells me whether or not the power is good we've run into problems we've been to I think two campgrounds now where I've had red lights on that which means we have to move so hopefully this will be fine yeah it should be so I'm gonna go ahead and hook that up now also whenever hooking these things up you always want to make sure the breaker is off we've only been to one campground where there is not a breaker it's just like a breaker in your house like in your garage or your utility room its breaker like this down this off so you make sure it's off before you hook up your power make sure it's seated all the way because a loose connection is a bad connection so now we flip it on and I could check my lights and I don't know if this is gonna show up on camera but everything is green so green all across the top green on the bottom so we've run into Red's here with neutrals reversed and all that that's not good so now that I know this is green I turn the breaker off because I'm gonna be hooking up the other end to the rig so breakers off I leave all this as it is and then I bring the cable out to the rig all right now this kind of connector I don't know what it's called but I never encountered one before owning an RV it's this big guy here it just goes in kind of off-center and then you twist it and you screw it on that's it for that so now we go back over here and flip the breakers all right so now now we're going to go back over here the tongue jack and do the rest of the disconnection okay so with the blocks down and the power on now we can run the tongue jack down so it's a little wobbly but the trailers heavy enough where it kind of squish everything out so we hold the thing [Applause] all right now I'm gonna stop real quick so you can hear me because this is pretty loud so down here where is the where the receiver goes into or sorry where the hitch goes into the receiver there's a gap on the top which means there's weight on this system here so what I do so I know how high to come up before I can start messing with the bars so I just watch that gap as soon as that gap fills up that means the weight has come off of the truck and the tongue jack is actually starting to lift the back of the truck which is where I stopped okay so now that that gap has been filled I know that all of the weight is off of the truck and the tongue jack is actually or the yeah the tongue jack is actually lifting the rear of the truck up so now I'm going to disconnect the the trailer electric and then the breakaway cable and the chains and eren eren toys does the chain on her side this is called a husky centerline this is a weight distribution and sway control hitch so what happens is these bars here as you're driving around the bars help push the weight towards the back which helps distribute everything and also because they are solid bars that helps a lot with the side-to-side sway as you're driving but it's a little bit of a pain to you know put on and take off so with the weight off of the truck these bars can now be taken off and you saw that one over there was kind of loose it's not loose enough we got this tool here that helps you kind of pry it off so we're gonna go ahead and do that now I will do my side and then Aaron will do her side there's this little aluminum bracket here that keeps the bar from popping out over these pegs while you're driving is when you turn really tight like if I if I turn really tight to the driver's side this bar is gonna slide in really far and get loose and if I didn't have this that pin sitting here holding it it could actually pop out over top of this and then everything goes crazy so you always want to make sure that these are there and when we take them off to make sure we put the little cotter pin here and then when the bar comes off we immediately put those back here so we know where they are so now I'm gonna pry this guy off you just kind of set it under here use a lever up like that and then I saw another guy on YouTube who was reviewing this thing who had a really good tip instead of trying to do this I'm like getting yourself way down into the ground you just take this hook it on here and push help lift it lift it with Ben's power and it pops right off so now with that loose there's a what's called a safety pin you just pop it out of here I'll show you this is not a good angle it's one of these guys here it just goes through and just keeps that bar from sliding out so that is in there this big ol bar slides out and like I said we store all of our hardware immediately so the pin goes back in here and we just lay these under the front and I put the bracket back in immediately and I put the pin in the bracket so I don't lose it so now this side is done so now we're going to do air inside and then we'll talk about how we get off the ball I didn't need to use the tool since I'm uphill all right so now that we have the bars off we have to get the actual rig off of this ball so we can get the truck in the trailer finally disconnected we use a hitch lock partially for security although I don't really think anyone's going to come and steal an entire RV however it is also a nice peace of mind because this well not come out of there what if that came out while driving that would be bad because then that whole system could work itself loose and then you can pop off the ball so I recommend using hitch locks for security but mostly for peace of mind while driving so now this is ready to go so we need to get the weight back onto the truck because the way that this bracket works is it's got a little shovel shaped hook that hooks under the ball so we need to get that down so we can pull it out of the way so I'm gonna watch this gap again mm-hmm and as I run the tongue Jack down that gaff is going to reappear after it has reappeared I know that the weight is back on the truck and then I can undo the the tongue ball lock all right so the gap has reappeared and I have my elbow on the bumper of the truck too so I can actually feel the truck start to go down so now that the weight is back on the ball I can open this and now you see this little kind of shovel shaped thing it actually cups the bottom of the ball to keep it in this coupling here so now that this is open I have to go back up coming off that ball was not as clean as we like and that's actually because we forgot to put bees down these are just big chunky rubber tire chocks that we would put down on the tires that are not on the Levellers with without these on there and because we're not on a level spot what happened is when it starts to come off of the truck the trailer actually rolls back just a little bit more - which is obviously not a good thing so we were distracted because we're filming this for you guys that was our bad 100% so we're gonna go ahead and put these down so it doesn't move anymore and we're okay but always remember try not to get distracted while doing this we thought you know we've done this fifty eight times we were good you never know man so we're gonna go ahead and put these down and then we'll continue with this process up here so back up here wheel chocks are down we're good to go so now we are disconnected from the truck but I'm gonna go and put this back together so we want that down and then I put the lock back on it [Music] we just moved the truck we always like to do that as soon as possible so we're off of the road so other people can get by and we're not holding up traffic today we're going a little slow so it's a good thing that were on a quieter Road normally when Brian is moving the truck I am leveling front to back with the tongue jack so we use the same app we had before saying right now we're 11 and a half inches up so we need to come down quite a bit far we can come down [Applause] now we are going to put the extracts on on the wheels to stabilize this more and then we'll put the stabilizers down to stabilize this even more and then we can open up the sides so this is an X chock what this does is it goes between the wheels because then you have tandem axles which means you have two axles with wheels close to each other so this goes in between and then you crank it down and it opens up and it grabs onto both tires so as you're inside walking around without these the tires can kind of roll like this but with this in place the tires are opposed to each other so they can't roll at all so we're gonna put this down crank it down to the tool that it comes with do it on the other side then we'll stay well so like everything else that we're working with here I'll have links to this in the description down below we really like the ax chocks because when we've not used them like when boondocking and at Walmart parking light you can really feel the trailer kind of swaying so with these on they're just kind of locks it down nice and tight and we've we really like them once Bryan has the X stalks on then we can put the stabilizers down we use the link block the same ones we use to do the leveling on the other side to kind of go under the stabilizers so they don't have to come down as far [Music] [Applause] we also put the temperature gage sensor outside right underneath our leveling block so the stabiliser blocks so we remember to get it when it goes and it's usually in the shade that way too so it can give us a better read on the temperature when putting the stabilizers down we also use the leveling blocks to raise the level of the ground because the way that those they kind of scissor down and you really don't want them coming down more than like a 90-degree angle in the bracket that comes down and the leg that goes to the ground because then you're really not gonna be stabilizing anything so in the front here not a big deal we couldn't go down very far anyway in the back you might be able to see it it'll come down a lot farther and that's where we don't want it to go too far because then it won't have any any like strength to keep things from moving around this angle right here is what I'm talking about from here to the bar that brings it back up we don't want to go past 90 degrees we want to keep it yeah what's the acute I'm gonna keep it as an acute angle because then it's just a little stronger when it's a nice day and we're getting set up Vector just hangs out in the truck it's about sixty degrees right now and we're in the shade so he's perfectly happy perfectly comfortable not too hot not too cold and the reason we Lehman here cuz we do have a lead that we can tie him up to but he just he doesn't like it he's not an outside dog so he just he just kind of hangs out hailer high hangs out in the truck and then when everything's ready and everything's open up we bring him inside alright so this is an RV door it's a little different from residential door so I've got a there's a grab bar here that doubles as a lock to keep this door secure during travel so you just kind of lift it up and swing it out of the way a couple locks now the door is open there's also a screen door on the inside that has its own little handle here and then when you're using the screen door this slides and closes and operates as the handle but for right now we're gonna leave that hooked up and the stairs just kinda fold out of the bottom one - we've got a little boot scrubber thing on the bottom there so that's it now we're open now Aaron's going to go inside and run the slides out and while she's doing that I'll show you what they look like as they come out we can't get in and out of the living space until we open this slide here we go we want to go slide up [Music] that slides out the first big slide up and we have three slides and you can kind of see that the living room is now out we've piled some stuff up for travel today but the kitchen is still in you kind of see that here kitchen slide is still in and so it's the bunkhouse so the bunkhouse gets pretty small I have some drawers that opened up while they were in there that's okay the controls for the other two slides are in a different place they're in kind of our control panel in this rig so you can see here is where I did the first slide and then the other slides are all part of this area you've got slide one is the kitchen slide 3 is the bunkhouse oh I'm going to open up the bunkhouse and you guys can watch now all the slides are out all that's left now is for me to hook up the water this site does not have sewer so I'm just gonna have to show that to you in another episode probably gonna do a whole episode about black tanks in my experience with them after you know we've been on the road for six months and we've been it - we're coming up on sixty campgrounds now so I've hooked that thing up and unhooked it a lot so I have a lot to say about it but for right now I'm just going to hook up the water and before I do the water I want to talk to you about my water hose this thing is literally a life changer it is the zero-g hose it is not one of these white king CLIs hoses [Applause] it's this so it comes in a bundle it's really loose and floppy I can wrap it up around my elbow I don't have to fight with it it just goes where I put it anyone that's dealt with one of these white RV court or anyone that's dealt with one of these things knows how much of a pain in the rear they are so when after I found out zero jiho's these only come out if I am really far away from my water source right here I'm about ten feet away so we have plenty of plenty of the zero-g hose so I'm gonna go ahead and hook that up real quick also real quick always use a water filter this is blue guy and a pressure regulator which is this brass guy right here so mine froze at one point so now zero is twenty but this one has a dial on the top you can adjust it with a screwdriver I had it set to about forty 45 psi which is what I've read is recommended so now when it gets water going through it it shows about sixty but I know that that's my 40-ish so I'm gonna go ahead and hook this up to the spicket here and then hook up the hose and plug in the rig I always do a Wye splitter up on the spicket so I have manual control here and also we have a black tank flush that I can hook up to the other side whenever we can use that not really applicable to this campground but I just leave this on here it's got a little tension relief hose those come with the filters and then I've got my pressure regulator before the filter and then I've got the filter and then we're gonna have the hose coming from here out into the rig so let me go ahead and hook this up in here I've got this little flappy dude here and I can get straight out to the outside down here so I just feed my hose up through there and I actually like to prime my hose to get all of the water out of it so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go over the spigot now and these are in the locked position so I'm going to get the water flowing make sure there's water so now I'm gonna run the water through the pressure regulator the filter and the hose up to the rig over there and as soon as the water starts coming out that hose that's dangling out I'm gonna stop it now the reason I pride in the hose is because that's 25 feet of air that I don't want to shove up into the rig it's probably not going to damage anything but I don't want to risk it so I prime it through there before I hook it up so now there's only you know a couple inches where it's dangling so then when I go inside there's not a lot of like sputtering and water jackhammering and all of that so I'm just going to hook this up to my inlet and done that's how we set up when we get to a new place the kids are eating lunch corndogs yay we're gonna fix some lunch for us so we'll catch you next time don't forget to Like comment subscribe visit us over at five to go calm and we'll see you down the road [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Five2Go

Views: 349,259

Rating: 4.9136529 out of 5

Keywords: rv camping, first time rv camping, first time rv setup, first time rv, campsite, five 2 go, five2go, full time family, rv tips and tricks, full time rv living in a travel trailer, rv traveling across america, full time family rv, full time family rv living, fulltime family, rv, rv family, rv family living, rv life, rv life full time, rv life with kids, rv lifestyle, rv living, rv tour, rving, travel trailer, camping, rv america, rv newbie, how to rv, fulltime rving, rv vlog

Id: lNiXv8RLZxg

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018