Deciding What You Want

How To Avoid Serious Trouble On Your First RV Trip

24 November 2015 by Alex Hale

It obviously makes a lot of sense to be excited when you first get a new RV. And you should be, but you should also be cautious since you're depending on your RV for a lot of your needs. The first trip you take with your RV is going to be important since you haven't fully tested it yet. Here are a few things you can do to try and avoid having something happen--such as getting stranded or having a dearth in your living needs.

Avoid Going Too Far

You really need to have the RV fully checked before you go too far in it. Generally, it helps to make sure that you get all of your checks done at the actual dealership. Following that, try not to go too much farther than your insurance's mileage limit for towing. This is especially important with RVs due to the fact that you will likely be visiting a remote area. There are many types of insurance that offer towing, but there are a number of other services available as well that you can purchase separately.

Thoroughly Check Your Water Heating System

It's important for you to actually test the tank to see whether it's working or not. You can test it by turning on the shower and then timing how long it takes to heat back up. Also, you should thoroughly check your propane system to make sure it has comparable abilities.

Check Electric Systems

You'll want to check both the inverter and the generator in the RV. It's a good idea to check the generator first. Then, you should take the RV off of all other sources and turn on the inverter. From here, you can make sure that your key appliances can run off of it for a long enough time to serve your purposes. To see your expected energy consumption, take the listed amps for your appliances, and multiply those amps by the number of minutes/hours you expect to use those appliances on your trip. Then, add your numbers up for each device to see what you can run on amp hookups.

There are obviously going to be limits, and it's important to learn what they are in order to make sure that you don't run non-essential appliances such as a television if it isn't necessary. It's also important to check what appliances work so you know what you have to work with if you can't use power from the camp. It's common for fuse problems to make it hard to use certain appliances. It's good to know if this is the case so you can potentially fix it beforehand.

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