We SCREWED UP! - Our 6 Biggest RVing Mistakes

hey there everyone for those of you that don't know who we are my name is Jenny and I'm David and for the last two-and-a-half years we have been traveling the country in our 2017 Keystone springdale Summerland 2020 QB and we have made some mistakes while traveling thankfully though none of those mistakes have been catastrophic like we've never rolled the trailer off a cliff or had something break while going down the road on the interstate causing a wreck yeah we've never even had a tire blowout but we have had some mistakes that we have thoroughly learned from and we're going to be sharing those mistakes with you guys today in hopes that you guys don't make the same ones we have we made our very first RVing mistake literally the second we bought our travel trailer and that's because we bought it brand new now travel trailers 5th wheels and motorhomes are just like cars in that they depreciate a big chunk as soon as you drive them off the lot now we spent 14 thousand four hundred dollars for our trailer when we bought it new but if we would have bought a used travel trailer same model that was about two or three years old we would have only spent about nine thousand which would have saved us roughly five thousand dollars a lot of our viewers only use their rigs a few times a year so a two or three year old used RV has the chance of being very lightly used and in condition that is comparable to new looking back at our mindset at the time we went new instead of used because we had never RV before so we really didn't know what to look for in a used RV and we really felt like there would be something that we overlooked that would come back to bite us very shortly after making the purchase and that's unfortunate because they've been making this exact model of trailer for quite a while now so our used options were wide open we learned the hard way that buying your RV new it doesn't necessarily mean that there's nothing wrong with it or that its components are gonna last on our travel trailer for instance the tongue Jack broke at only our second campsite that we ever took it to and our fridge failed after only six months of owning it and it needed a component replaced so our advice to prospective are buyers is to let the original owner take that massive depreciation hit and buy lightly used take your time and be patient and eventually that lightly use rig is going to come along the next big mistake David and I made when we first hit the road was not being bear aware we're from Indiana and the largest predator there are coyote and we actually didn't encounter them ever when we were in Fort Wayne so when we first hit the road and we're camping in the middle of nowhere we didn't even think about bears in the area so whenever we would have a bag of trash we would put it in the bed of the truck and then we drive it into town and throw it away well that came back to bite us in the butt after only a few days at a campsite in Vermont we had a black bear wander into our campsite jump on the back of our truck and we just had this tonneau cover it was like a leather a thick leather tonneau cover that folded up and I woke up at 6:15 in the morning to a bear shredding it open and pulling all of our water jugs and our rug and a table out that was in there there wasn't any trash or anything that it could actually get to but it smelled like there was so we weren't bear aware at the time and we had no idea that a bear would come into our campsite looking for food like that but then we found out that not only can bears smell seven times better than a bloodhound and bloodhound smell is thousands of times better than ours but they can smell food that is in an unopened container and they'll search for things like toothpaste and deodorant to eat too after we had this encounter with this black bear at our campsite which was terrifying by the way we did a ton of research not just on black bears but also on mountain lions coyote there are larger coyote even wolves in the north so we've done tons of research we have thoroughly educated ourselves and we are much more bear aware now we also learned a very scary sort of fun fact about bears in general whether it's a black bear or a brown bear they can get into anything that you can get into with a crowbar ever since doing that research over the last two years we have had zero counters with any larger predators no there's no mountain lions no coyote it's been great another big RVing mistake that we made is that for the longest time we had the incorrect drop on our ball mount when we first bought our RV we didn't have any idea on what to go with so we really relied on the salesman at Camping World which is where we bought our trailer and I I distinctly remember when we bought our trailer that he just went to the rack of their ball mounts and he just grabbed one and was like this will work for you and I remember even thinking at the time that he has no idea how tall my truck is he didn't know measuring on the coupler Heights on our trailer so how did he know that but I just know being the ignorant person I was at the time I didn't know much about our being or telling I just trusted him that that was the right drop and over time I started to notice that we were experiencing some trailer sway and the back end of our truck was really sagging a lot lower than I thought it was our trailer hit our trailer setup you know if this is our truck and this is our trailer had that like you know sag right at the hitch point that I knew just wasn't correct and we were also experiencing uneven tire wear front to back the back tires were wearing way faster than the front tires all of this led me to think hey maybe we don't have the right ball mount height so I checked online on how to measure that and turns out sure enough ours was way off and we actually needed a straight ball mount for our height of truck and the height of our trailer so for those of you that are thinking maybe you don't have the right ball mount height either maybe you're experiencing some trailer sway or your truck and your trailer are sagging at the hitch point or even worse if they're raised at the hitch point then you need to measure to see what you need and it's pretty easy first make sure your truck and your trailer are on level ground your trailer is disconnected from your truck and it is completely level then take a tape measure and measure from the ground to the top of the opening of your wrist xever tube then again with your trailer perfectly level and on level ground measure the distance from the ground to the bottom of the coupler then take the first measurement you took for your truck and subtract from it the measurement you took for your trailer and that will give you the ball mount drop that you need however if that number is negative then you actually need a raised ball mount and then hopefully it will solve a lot of your towing problems like it did for us another big mistake that we have thoroughly learned from is not scooping out campsites ahead of time we have gotten into some big pickles let me tell you one of the first camp sites we went to actually literally the first cans like we went to we were stuck in the mud for four extra days and then the second camp site we went to we were also stuck in the mud and then when we finally got out here to the southwest our very first time we got stuck in really soft sand twice so needless to say we've gotten stuck a lot now for some reason it took us a year to figure out that the best way to prevent ourselves from getting stuck or dragging our stabilizers even which has happened more than once I don't know how one of them is still attached but it is it was to drop our trailer at a larger very easy to get to camp site that I find on free campsites net or compendium comm in a specific area that we want to camp at will drop our trailer there and then we'll drive just the truck in and scope out sites now we have found some awesome camp sites doing this you guys there was one where we literally took a forest service road and zigzagged it up a mountain and the whole time I was saying myself there's no way the trailers gonna make it up here there's no way and then it opens up to this awesome epic site and we're both just like we gotta get the trailer up here so then we went back and we picked up the trailer and took it up there and it fit just fine and we did just fine but if we hadn't ever thought about the idea to drop our trailer first and then take just the truck in to scope out a site not only would we never have found that campsite but we definitely wouldn't have camped there I I never would have let David take our trailer up that forest road to get up there to begin with plus if you drop your trailer and drive just your tow vehicle in or to your towed vehicle in then you can go so much faster down the forest roads or the BLM roads and you can find you know the much more secluded campsites you don't have to worry about getting stuck in soft sand you know you could scope it out wander around at first make sure that it'll be big enough for you to pull into and then also you can make sure that you'll be able to get back out of it we've gotten ourselves into some skinny campsites let me tell you and we had to figure out a way to turn around in the campsite before we could pull out because the road was too narrow to back out we to dump the trailer off the other end so the one thing that we have really learned our biggest helping hand in us finding epic campsites is to drop the trailer first another mistake we've made while RVing has been not having a generator we obviously have a generator now but for the first three months we were on the road we didn't have one we had installed solar on our RV before we even hit the road and we just didn't think we would need a generator for any reason and we found out the hard way on our fourth month when we were spending part of our summer in Southern Illinois and the highs were in the mid to high 80s with really high humidity it was unbearable to be inside and it was unbearable to be outside and we didn't have a generator in order to run our air conditioner so what we did is we ended up having to drive an hour and a half to a town where we could purchase a generator and it was a big construction generator I wish that we had originally gone with this one it would have saved up so much money and so many headaches to just go with a Honda generator to begin with but we ended up with this big really loud construction generator in order to run our AC when we switch from that to an inverter generator we went with a Westinghouse and luckily we now have this Honda generator and we've done a propane conversion on it if you're interested in the propane conversion that we've done on our generator there will be a link to that in the description below and we love this generator it is more efficient it's quieter and it's a lot more reliable than the other two we've ever had and we're so glad to have it now this combined with our easy start on our air conditioner if you're interested in that installed that link will also be in the description below these two things combined make it so that we can run our air conditioner it is so nice knowing that if we have an incredibly hot day and we don't have anywhere that we can go right away that we can run our AC and it's no big deal having our generator is also really nice when we get a string of cloudy days in a row then we can run our generator in order to charge our batteries back up and for those of you that have solar on your RV like we do it's a really good idea to also have an inverter generator to charge your batteries when you're in situations like it's gonna rain a few days in a row or it's gonna be cloudy a few days in a row or it's gonna be really hot in you run your AC and for those of you that don't have solar it's basically a necessity to have a generator if you're going to be going boondocking and you want to run any of your 120 volt appliances all the mistakes we've talked about so far we made within our very first year of RVing so i mean i kind of give us a pass for making those but this last one we're gonna talk about happened just a week ago and we've been our viewers for three years now so you know i can't say i was a newbie this one i have no excuse for and that is forgetting or not even really knowing that certain maintenance things needed to be done to our vr RV specifically replacing the anode rod this is the old one that i just took out about a week ago and this is a new one and you can see how far depleted this old one is you're not supposed to let it get down to this steel rod and if you do you can actually damage your water heater tank and what can happen if your anode rod gets too depleted like this one is that the ions in the water will actually start to attack the steel water tank instead of attacking the anode rod and it will make it start to rust and if if you wait too long before replacing your anode rod to a nice new one like this then holes can actually start to rust in your tank causing your tank to leak now hopefully I don't know for sure but hopefully I didn't wait too long even though this is a three year old anode rod and you're simply supposed to replace them once a year I'm really hoping that our tank didn't start to rust and we avoided you know having permanent damage to our water heater now going along with that there's actually another piece of RV maintenance that I haven't done yet that I need to and that is the wheel bearings I have never repacked the grease on our wheel bearings and I'm really worried that that's gonna come to bite me in the butt here pretty soon you're supposed to replace or I mean you're supposed to repack the wheel bearings every 10,000 miles and we have way more than 10,000 miles on our trailer the reason I haven't repacked the wheel bearings is just because I haven't had a good chance to yet but I will in two months we'll be visiting my parents so we'll have the trailer on their driveway a nice clean environment and I'll have all the tools that I need to repack the wheel bearings just need them to last two months and we'll see when that time comes whether or not that this mistake is a big mistake or you know I avoid disaster this time - and one thing we've done woeful timing that isn't a mistake is taking all these goobers on the road with us look at this big happy donkey and look at that little happy kitten over there and there's a big grumpy kitty right here all of our animals have an absolute blast with us on the road they thoroughly enjoy it and so now we are gonna go ahead and call it a night we're gonna take this big pup on a walk and feed everyone because it's a dinnertime and we're gonna go ahead and catch you guys later [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Fate Unbound

Views: 605,849

Keywords: rv, full, time, rving, rver, full time rv, full time rving, full timing, rv life, rv living, full time rv life, full time rv living, fate, unbound, fate unbound, travel, trailer, travel trailer, camping, camp, mistakes, mistake, rv mistakes, rving mistakes, rver mistakes, rving mistake, rv mistake, rver mistake, We SCREWED UP! - Our 6 Biggest RVing Mistakes

Id: v7MVYZPI0CY

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020