Fulltime RV Family: Sidelined
The brand new camper we purchased to live in turned out to be a nightmare. I’ll just start from the beginning.
The RV dealership delivered the RV to us in our driveway on a Monday about a month and a half ago. That Thursday, I went out to load it and get it ready to leave on Saturday. When I started putting the slide out it was making a clanking sound, which the dealership assured us was normal for new RVs when we did our final walkthrough. (It wasn’t.) But then there was a huge clank and THUD and the whole camper shook. When I looked at the slide cables I found that one was shredded and hanging on by a thread. We tried all day to get ahold of the dealership to have them fix it but no one would return our phone calls. Dave finally went into the dealership late that afternoon and stood there until someone would talk to him. With some moderate persuasion and the fact that the camper was 2 days old and unusable, they agreed to fix it the next day.
When we got it back later the next day, the slide was in working condition with no clanking. All seemed well.
The first night we stayed in it Dave filled up the fresh water tank and turned the water pump on. Water barely trickled out of the faucets. After he did some inspecting inside the camper, we went outside to find that water was pouring out of the underbelly and onto the ground. After shutting the water and pump off and finding the source of the water leak, Dave called his dad who is an experienced RVer. (Luckily, we were in the same town as his parents!) Behind a screwed in panel, they found that the PEX pipe wasn’t attached and a piece was missing, hence the pouring of water under the camper. After repairing the pipe, we tried the water which was now working. Except when we turned it to hot, nothing came out of the faucet. Like, at all. Thankfully this one was a simpler fix and Dave just had to unscrew a panel on the inside of the camper and turn the hot water valve on.
Fast forward to a few days later in Kansas where Dave was working. The temp outside was somewhere in the 90s and the camper was not far below that. (We know campers are difficult to keep cool in the summer. But we had our previous camper for 2 years and it was never that bad.) We covered all of the windows and skylights with foil and kept the door closed. We eventually realized that the heat was coming from the edges of the slide and there seemed to be a pretty big gap between where the slide and the wall were supposed to seal. There was still something wrong with the slide.
Another issue we came across in Kansas was that we went through a whole large bottle of propane in less than two weeks with only using the gas grill twice and having the refrigerator running on electricity. There had to have been a leak in the propane line somewhere too. This is where we started to wonder if we had ended up with a defective camper.
At the end of that week we left Atwood and took off for Wichita to visit some of my family. As Dave was backing the camper into my cousin’s driveway, I see that there’s a cable dragging on the ground under the RV. Slight panic. From what we could tell, the cable was supposed to be attached to the black tank valve and it had been dragging for quite some time during the 5 hour drive because part of it was shredded, too short, and it had torn up part of the underbelly. Being that it was an issue with the black tank, the RV was again, unusable. Twice now within two weeks of owning it.
The silver lining was that the dealership had talked us into an additional warranty that promised full coverage of on-site mobile repair. We lucked out to find a mobile repair tech in the area who was available, friendly, worked hard to get our repair done that weekend, and who would work with our warranty company.
Unfortunately, the warranty company that covered on-site mobile repair wouldn’t help us because the RV was still covered under the manufacturer warranty. And the manufacturer warranty wouldn’t cover the mobile repair fee. (Side note: I would do some thorough research into any added warranties before purchasing them for your RV; we only knew what the dealership told us, which was that on-site mobile repair could be a lifesaver when you’re living in it fulltime - not that the $$ spent on the extra coverage would be a waste when/if we actually needed it during the first year of owning it.) Like I mentioned before, we’re rookie RVers learning as we go. Well, lesson learned, and we won’t be purchasing an additional warranty again.
Our awesome RV repair guy, Josh, got everything put back together better than it had been before, so we asked him to check on something else for us. We had suspected that there was an issue with our RV battery because when Dave was hooking up the camper and using the electric jack, it should have been able to use power from the battery but it wouldn’t work unless it was plugged into his truck. Now, this battery was supposedly a brand-new battery that the sales team “threw in” for free when we made the deal for purchasing the camper. We were standing beside Josh when he checked the battery and said that it definitely wasn’t new, and that it was shot.
Later that evening, Dave went in to make the dinette table into a bed for my sister to sleep on. When he took the table down and placed it in the U-shaped booth…it didn’t fit. One side had too much space and the table dropped through to the ground. It was a smaller issue compared to some of the others, but added to the already-long list nonetheless.
This was the turning point where we realized that this RV was a lemon, was only going to bring us more problems, and that we needed to try to return it. Dave called the dealership and told the sales manager the many issues we’d already had. With some reluctance, he told Dave to look online at other RVs and they would see what they can do to help us trade it in. Trade it in. Trading it in would mean a pretty big financial loss on our part so we had to explore our options. Unfortunately, Nebraska RV lemon laws are very specific and ours didn’t qualify as a lemon. The best the manufacturer could tell us was that we could have it inspected at a dealership and if they deemed it completely unusable, they would replace the RV, most likely with an identical one to ours. After some research we found that this particular make and model of RVs were generally just poorly made and many others had countless issues as well. So even if it was deemed unusable, having it replaced with another just like it wasn’t an option.
After a great weekend seeing family we hadn’t seen in years, we left Wichita, headed back to our house and decided to stay there until we got this camper thing figured out.
This is where it got really difficult for us because we had to decide whether to take a significant financial loss and trade it in, or give up on the whole thing altogether (because living with 2 kids in a defective camper that needed fixed every time we moved it and that couldn’t withstand the elements was out of the question).
There was three-week period of being sidelined that Dave had to work in Kansas and stayed in an Airbnb while the girls and I stayed behind at the house. By the time the first week was over it seemed like an easy decision. The money wasn’t nearly as important as being together.
During those few weeks we had to try and make a deal with getting a new camper. The dealership tried to tell us they’d be losing thousands of dollars and that we were getting a deal. But after asking them to send us the numbers on the agreement, we were able to see that the money they’d be “losing” was being tacked on to the cost of our new camper and essentially onto our total loan amount. Our hands were basically tied if we wanted to stick with RV life and staying together.
The day we got the new camper they ended up giving us a last-minute rebate that helped us out a little, but we ended up with a camper that works well and fits what we need SO much better than the last one. We’ve been in it for over two weeks already and we LOVE it. We don’t love that we went through the stress of the last camper or that we lost money, but we are so glad that we didn’t give up on RV life and that we’re together.
