Our rig’s levelers stopped working the other day. Fortunately we discovered this when trying to level verses trying to retract.
RV Levelers
I crawled under our RV and discovered a wire hanging down in front of the rear tires. The inside control panel showed no power. We had driven on some rough roads duting the previous few days, which could have caused the issue. Looking on youtube, I discovered other people had issues with the ground wire connector for the leveler control component (mounted on the middle of the chassis with the fill reservoir in front of the rear tires). The common cause was corrosion. That’s what I figured this was.
So I disconnected the house battery, and crawled under to find the connections. Sure enough, one end of the cable was still bolted to the chassis with the other end dangling with a broken o-connector on it. So I had to hunt for the original connection with the other half of the o-ring.I found a – (neg) pole on the side of the leveler component and carefully loosened the bolts to reveal the other half o ring. By the way, make sure you have a spray can of a rust lubricant. It can be difficult to loosen rusted bolts under the rig. I had a can of PB Blaster, which worked great the rusty bolts I encountered.
Broken ground cable
The cable looked like a battery cable – it was 4-gauge 24” with o-ring comnectors at both ends. I called one of the auto parts stores and that turned out to be be the best source – already made up and about $10. An easy cost-effective bolt-on solution. Yeah O’Reilly Auto Parts of Yucca Valley, CA!
Once you get an RV, you want to start exploring. But you also need to have a plan for general maintenance and occasional repairs. This includes knowing what you might run into with getting your state inspection done in as timely fashion.
Rig size, Scheduling, and Herd Mentality
When we purchased our used Entegra Odyssey, it came with a temporary plate – just like any other vehicle. I called to set up a state inspection, and discovered it wasn’t necessarily an easy process.
Even though the RV is a class C, it is rather big for most service garages. Ours is about 12.5 ft tall. As I found out by calling a local shop, standard shop doors cannot accommodate that size. The shop owner referred me to a couple of shops that might be able to do it. Two were RV businesses. Whereas normal scheduling for a car or truck might take you a couple of weeks to get in, both places couldn’t fit us in because of the season. It was August and, of course, everybody (yes, herd mentaility) who has owned a rig knows you’ve got to line up early for winterization.
Be Prepared to Do the Repair Yourself
The State inspection for RVs isn’t cheap. It’s about twice the price of a car inspection. And heavens if there is a problem where service labor and parts are required.
In our case, everything passed the inspection except 3 out of the 5 LED marker lights were burned out (I thought LEDs were supposed to last forever). The estimate was that it would take 2 weeks to get the light bulbs at $7 a pop plus shipping. They could schedule out about 3 weeks, with the labor expected to be a couple of hours at a hefty $175/hr. And that was if they didn’t run into any problems.
The price and schedule seemed a bit out there from what I was expecting. Who knew, maybe it was because of the shortage of available workers. In any case, I figured it was only a few light bulbs. How hard was it going to be to fix those? I’d already done that on my cars.
Well, it turned out that these bulbs were LEDs and not covered by your local auto parts store. Not to be deterred, I called the manufacturer of the RV and got the part number. Better yet, they gave me the type and manufacturer of the part and their part number. I called the manufacturer (Jupiter Lighting Group) and could get the bulbs for $3 per pop, plus shipping within a couple days. According to them, it was a simple job to pop out the old bulbs and connect the new ones. Sounded good to me, so I ordered the parts.
A few days later, I was on top of the rig, trying to pry out the bulbs. I had to pry them out with a small pry bar and a screwdriver because the RV manufacturer had injected some sort of putty in the mounting holes, which was solid as a rock. Apparently, nobody in manufacturing thought of who would have to change out these bulbs later down the line.
But I was relentless. Finally, using a pair of surgicle hemostats (yes, they come in handy) I was able to tweeze out the wire without it breaking to remove the bad bulb, connect a new one, and make sure it worked. After finishing all three, I went back to the shop and finally got the official State Inspection sticker. Yeah!
BTW, look for more blogs about general maintenance. I know there will be more repairs on the horizon.
