Category: Revelation

Between Trips

I forgot to mention that while we were in Ohio, I was picking the brains of Steve, who is the group expert on the various systems about the two Victron devices that showed up on the app, but which I needed a PIN to connect to.

As an aside, if you’re an RVer, get used to installing apps. I have two apps for finding discounts on diesel fuel, MudFlap and Open Roads. I have another for planning trips and navigating called RVLife, but as I mentioned in a previous post doesn’t always get it right. And another called InControl for doing all the stuff inside the trailer that you can also control from a touch screen inside, like turn off lights and setting the HVAC temperatures. I have one for booking boondocking sites called Harvest Hosts and at least three more for finding other campsites, and one for the National Parks Service, one for finding scenic drives, and two from CAT Scale – one for finding weigh scales and the other for actually weighing the truck and trailer. More about that later, maybe. One for leveling the trailer when we camp. And then we come to the electrical system.

There is an app for monitoring the surge protector. There is another for monitoring the inverter/converter. And another from Victron that in our trailer monitors the solar controller, and something else called the “smart shunt”. I believe the smart shunt controls the division of where energy goes to the inverter, whether batteries or solar. I believe if you don’t that, you end up having to unplug or turn off the inverter when you connect to “shore power” (ie. 120Vac), and maybe even switch between charging the batteries from solar power or using the batteries for powering the trailer. Oh, and while I don’t have that type, there are lithium batteries that have Bluetooth and another app to monitor them.

So anyways, Steve was walking me through how to get a code off those two Victron devices so I could reset the PINs. And it wasn’t easy, because neither was where Steve thought they would be, because the previous owner moved the batteries inside the trailer instead of outside on the tongue, and when he did so he took the smart shunt out of the box it normally lives on. So once I found the smart shunt, it was relatively easy to get the PUK code from it. But the solar controller was another matter. It was a pretty blue box in side the pass through. But the sticker with the PUK code was on the opposite side from the door to the pass through, and it was hard up against another big on-off switch.

After banging my head a dozen times while squeezing my shoulders through the pass through door, I finally got a clear-ish picture of the sticker. And there was a large screw blocking the last two digits of the PUK.

So several more head bumps later, I removed the screw and got a picture. But because of the close quarters, it was really hard to get a clear one, and there were 3 digits of it that could have been sixes or they could have been fives. The cut and paste from my phone thought they were all sixes, and so did Vicki. But the app said it was incorrect. I thought 2 of them looked like fives, so I tried that and failed as well. I then asked on Facebook, and several people, including Steve, correctly identified them all as fives.

So now I have all the monitoring one could ever hope for, although damned if I know what to do with it all. The smart shunt seems to be monitoring how many amp-hours we’ve used from the batteries, which will probably be very useful when boondocking. I’m also insanely curious to find out how much the solar panels charge up the batteries, especially in the sort of shady campsites I tend to favour.

Meanwhile, we needed to get the leaking shower taken care of. When I called the dealer we bought it from (Meyer’s RV Superstore), they said they were booking 3 weeks out, but they’d try to fit me in on the 15th. Since we were leaving on our next trip on the 21st, we were a little concerned. But nobody wants to be in a trailer with me after I haven’t showered for a week. So we brought it in.

What followed were a few strange claims from the service manager, who I assume was playing broken telephone with the actual repair guys. Here are some of the things we got told:

A picture from our first trip in October 2024.
  • They couldn’t reproduce it. (We could – just run the shower down the drain for a few minutes, or fill up the kitchen sink and drain it, wait a minute, and look under the trailer)
  • The bathroom sink and the shower go to the black tank, not the grey tank. (The same leakage was happening with the shower and the kitchen sink, so it’s extremely unlikely they went to different tanks, even if we hadn’t taken the access panel off the underside of the shower and saw the pipe heading straight towards the kitchen drain)
  • They can reproduce it, but only if the grey tank is full. (We saw it when the grey tank was empty. I don’t think we’ve even ever filled the grey tank.)
  • They managed to find a piece that needed to be glued back in.
  • The shower does go to the grey tank, but the bathroom sink goes to the black tank. (I verified it when I got the trailer home, and the drain from the bathroom sink definitely goes towards under the shower, not forward to the toilet.)

But given all that, they got it done in plenty of time – we actually picked it up Friday the 18th. But then came the bargaining. They wanted to charge us over $500 for the repair. It wasn’t included in the extended warranty we paid over $2,000 for . I argued that it was a pre-existing condition that showed up the very first time we tried to take a shower. They asked if we had any proof of that, and I produced a blog post about our trip last October, where I foolishly stated I’d fixed it, even though we hadn’t tested it after caulking the seam. I guess that worked, because they said that as a one-time gesture of goodwill, they’d only charge us for the labour, and not the diagnostic charge. So it ended up being somewhere around $130. More acceptable. We parted on good terms, and Vicki gave them a glowing review on Google.

That gave us the whole weekend to de-winterize and prep for our next trip, to Cowans Gap. Which is where I sit right now, writing this in off-line mode even though I probably won’t be able to post for the rest of the week.

First RV trip of the season Part 2

So after our RVLife inspired detour, we actually arrived at the park. Actually we were starting to get a little crabby with each other, because of the stress of the drive in the gusty winds and rain, but it all melted away when we drove through the gate and did a U-turn to drain our tanks. Because as we were getting ready to “Let-Er-Rip” (any fans of Happily Ever Hanks reading this?) another truck towing a 22MLS came in the gate. We introduced ourselves, and recognized their names from the Facebook group.

After we dumped, we moved to the fresh water tap that was shown on the park map (I believe I mentioned in First RV trip of the season Part 1 that the information we had said that there weren’t water spigots at each campsite.) While we were there, before the park host coming by and telling us about the water hookups, we saw and exchanged introductions with another couple from the Facebook group who were heading out, and who pointed out another couple who had just arrived ahead of us and were still backing into their spot.

Once we got told about the individual spigots, we left the common tap and headed to the campsite with our fresh tank nearly 3/4 full. Even if we didn’t need it, at least we knew we wouldn’t be blowing away when it got windy.

Backing into the campsite only took a few attempts, I’m definitely getting better at this. Still not good, but better. And setting up is also getting a bit more organized and smoother. After we set up, we took the dogs for a walk and went around introducing ourselves to the other 22MLS families. I don’t recall if we met them all not that evening, but in total there were 7 22MLSs parked there. The spot next to ours was reserved for another member of the group, but they’d decided not to drive in the driving rain and so missed the event. There was another couple with daughter who were pulling a different Keystone Cougar, not a 22MLS but something a bit longer and with a “bunkhouse”. They showed up after I got the photos and videos below, but were part of our group.

We spent 3 nights at Van Buren. The weather was rainy and windy a lot of the time, but I did manage to get drone up one morning. Most days were spent alternating between hanging around inside the trailer when the weather was terrible, and hanging around somebody’s picnic table shooting the… breeze, usually with a drink in hand. Evenings we spent at Mark and Kim’s fire pit enjoying a bonfire, even in a light rain, again with a drink in hand. We missed having that on the last night because it was raining quite hard.

I don’t want to sound like a snob, but other than a cheery wave or two, I don’t think we interacted with the campers that weren’t part of our group.

The group on the other side of us away from the 22MLS group were two trailers who were together. They had a very nice looking blonde lab, but unfortunately Riot made any conversation impossible. I wish we could get him to stop barking at other dogs. Another group at the campsite were kind of jerks. They tended to leave very early in the morning and come back around sunset, but one day they left their music playing through their outside speakers all day when they weren’t there. They had one 5th wheel camper, and three trucks. Two of the trucks had resonators on the exhaust, and they looked home made. Obviously you want your truck to be extraordinarily loud when you’re leaving a campsite at dawn, especially if you spare every expense to make a good resonator.

Vicki took a shower the first day and we discovered that in spite of my thinking I’d got the leak fixed last October, it was still leaking. We did some experiments and discovered it’s not leaking at the seam that I’d caulked back then, and then caulked again with a more robust line of caulk just before we’d left on the trip. It was actually leaking even if we put the water straight down the drain. Vicki removed the access door in front of the shower pan, and neither of us could see or feel any leak. One of our Facebook group members, Bryan, came over and took a look too, and he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from either. I think we all agreed there was a tiny bit of dampness, but the insulation in there wasn’t wet, so we thought the leak was probably at the interface between the piping and the grey tank. Later on, Vicki discovered that it also leaks when we pour a lot of water down the kitchen sink, which makes sense because the pipe from the kitchen sink meets the pipe from the shower quite near the entry to the grey tank.

With sadness we said our good-byes on the Sunday morning and headed off to the Harvest Host we’d booked for the night. The driving wasn’t bad, there was a bit of wind, but no driving rain and the trailer wasn’t being pushed around so much.

The Harvest Host was a winery/restaurant, and it was closer to the half-way point than the distillery we’d stayed on the way out. It also had a functional kitchen. I set up the trailer while Vicki went in and ordered dinner for us both. After all the stress of driving and all the socializing and drinking, it was nice just to collapse in the recliners and eat a fairly decent but very expensive hamburger.

We got home mid afternoon on Tuesday, and the forecast for that night was for below freezing temps and possibly snow, so I couldn’t rest as much as I wanted to. I had to re-winterize immediately. I only had two jugs of anti-freeze, which turned out to be barely adequate. I plugged the trailer into the garage and turned on the tank heaters, because I had no way to dump the grey and black tanks from the last night and I wasn’t sure I’d put in enough anti-freeze in them.

It was snowing the next morning, and the forecast was for several more days of below freezing lows, so I wanted more anti-freeze to put more in the tanks for when we put it in storage. The Home Depot website said that they had 100 bottles of it at the second nearest store, so we headed there and then spent over an hour occupying several associates trying to find them. We found the empty shelf with the bar codes, and one of the associates told me his app told him they were in the storage above the shelves on another row, but we went there and couldn’t find them. So then our group of associates dispersed all around the store to check various theories about where they might be.

After this drawn out and frustrating process, I went home and discovered that Lowes said they had them and offered next day delivery, so that’s what I did. I probably ended up with more than I needed in the fresh tank, but at least I was satisfied with how much was in the black and grey tanks so I didn’t have to run the tank heaters any more.

It was a great trip, and I really enjoyed meeting some of the other members of our 22MLS Facebook group.

First RV trip of the season Part 1

Last year, after putting our trailer away for the winter, we sat down and decided that it would be safe to de-winterize it and head out in late April, and just to be really safe, we’d head 5 hours south so we wouldn’t have to worry about sub-freezing temps while we were out.

And that was a really good plan, until Vicki and I both got really interested in the Facebook group for people who owned our brand of trailer (Keystone Cougar Half-Ton 22MLS). And it turns out that some of the members of that group had decided they were going to meet up at a campground in Ohio called Mary Jane Thurston State Park. That’s nearly a 6 hour drive away, especially if you consider how slow you drive when you’re towing a travel trailer. But Vicki got really enthusiastic about the idea of going there. And so did I after a while.

So on the last weekend of March, we went to the RV storage lot and brought our baby home. And with the help of a bunch of sort-of consistent sets of instructions, we de-winterized her. Drained the water tank and all the water lines of anti-freeze, flushed the lines with fresh water, filled the fresh tank about half way up with a cup of bleach, and let it sit overnight. The next day, drained the fresh tank and filled it with fresh water and ran all the taps until the water stopped smelling of chlorine. Afterwards, Vicki complained that she didn’t like the taste, but to me it tasted exactly like the water tasted when I lived in an apartment building in North York Ontario. But I took the point, and next time I disinfect the tank like that, I’ll flush it twice.

While we were getting ready to leave, we got a phone call from Mary Jane Thurston State Park. They said they had some flooding, so they were moving our entire group to Van Buren State Park, which isn’t too much further way. When they said “some flooding”, I envisioned wet fields and maybe puddles, but later one of the 22MLS group went over to look, and the water was up to the seats of the picnic tables and there were geese paddling around. The new park was very nice, nice flat newly paved trailer pads and full electric and water hookups (and a sewer dump at the entrance). Actually, the campsite info we found before we went said they didn’t have water hookups at each site, so on the way we were filling up the fresh tank when the camp host came over and said “we have water at each site”, which my travel addled brain initially interpreted as “the ground is wet”, but I soon realized really meant there is a spigot at every site.

I have to commend the staff at Mary Jane Thurston for being proactive about this and making sure we didn’t end up scattered and disorganized when we arrived and found the campground closed.

Because of the length of the trip, we decided to stop along the way at a Harvest Host. A Harvest Host is a business (often a winery or farm (which is where the name comes from) but now includes brew pubs, distilleries and other businesses) that allows you to park overnight. There is an annual membership fee, but the overnight stays are free, but you’re generally expected (strongly expected) to buy about $30 or so of whatever their product is.

The host we stayed at was a distillery. They had a restaurant, except the company that was staffing his kitchen left last week, so we ordered from another restaurant down the road. This was actually our first “boondocking” experience. “Boondocking” means staying without water, electric and sewer connections. I’m pleased to say our batteries lasted fine, with only a small amount of conserving. Vicki bought some nice distilled spirits to meet our expected buy.

Both days of travel were pretty fraught, with strong gusty winds and driving rain. I was pretty fried at the end of each day’s driving.

There is an app called RVLife Trip Wizard, which is a highly rated trip planner and navigator which takes your rig width and height into account when navigating so you avoid low bridges and narrow streets. It kind of didn’t work for us. Here is part of the route it sent us on:

RVLife’s route

And here is Google, showing how that “road” turned into a tractor track halfway through:

Fortunately the driveway for the barn on the left is big enough to do a K turn in. I think the driver of the school bus I followed up the road was amused.

Already getting excited for next season

In a triumph of hope over expectations, I’m currently preparing my cross country skis for this winter. But I’m also getting ready to start the RV season as early as possible. So far, since we winterized, we’ve been out to the trailer a few times to unpack some things, pack some things, and to switch the license plate holder from the left rear light to the right rear light because the old position was blocked by the ladder. I still need to do something to stop the dinette table from slowly falling down.

Yeah, I know my caulking isn’t extremely smooth

In a search for places where we could go early that were open, likely to have no time below freezing or only a few hours of below freezing at night, not overrun with blackflies, and with at least a water tank fill station, sewer dump station and electrical hookup, my eyes turned south to the Ridge and Valley section of Pennsylvania.

Thanks to a referral from somebody on r/GoRV on Reddit, I booked a week in late April in Cowan’s Gap State Park. It looks nice. Too bad they don’t allow drones. (But of course every drone person knows they can ban you from launching or recovering in a park, but they can’t ban you from flying over it, so I might get some footage by launching from outside.)

It’s 5 hours due south of here. According to a gardening site, the average date of last spring frost is late March down there near Pittsburgh, but early May up here, so it’s probably pretty safe from a frost point of view. The trees might even be greened up.

My plan is a day or two before the trip, we’ll bring the trailer home. Hopefully we can park it on the road, but if not we can pull it into the driveway. We’ll re-install the batteries, hook it up to electricity, and get everything charged up. We’ll leave the anti-freeze in the grey and black tanks because why not? There probably isn’t more than a gallon in each. Also we’ll hook it up to the outside tap, fill up the fresh tank and then open the low point drain to flush it out. Maybe repeat that a few times. Then run all the hot and cold taps to get rid of any antifreeze in the pipes. Actually, I wonder if there would be any point in doing this once from the fresh tank and once from the “city water”? I’m unsure if I should fill up the fresh tank at home – doing so would increase the load we’re pulling, but also would protect us if the water filling station isn’t working.

The anti-freeze we buy is supposedly non-toxic so it probably is perfectly fine to let the drained anti-freeze run into the storm sewers. Considering once I saw a policeman shoveling horse shit into a storm drain after a “meet the public” police event, I wonder how much they care about the water.

Once this de-winterizing is all done, we’ll leave the trailer plugged in overnight so we can leave the heat on to keep anything from freezing, and also give the fridge time to cool down. Then get it packed and ready for an early departure.

Can’t wait!

Winterizing the RV

The great thing about RVing is that there a million YouTube channels out there to help you learn things. The bad thing is that those channels often contradict each other.

When you winterize your RV, the main thing you have to do is to get all the water out of the system so that it doesn’t freeze, expand, and crack your pipes. And by the way, you should also remove any liquids inside, especially if they’re in glass bottles. That includes things like dish soap and cans of Diet Coke.

The first thing you do no matter how you’re going to winterize is to drain as much water as you can by opening the drain on the fresh water spigot and also the two low-point drains, and opening at least one faucet (some people say to open them all). One video also suggested that you then drive it around a few miles to slosh any remaining water out.

There seem to be 2 main schools of thought with the fresh water system. The first is to use an air compressor to blow all the water out of all the pipes. We don’t have an air compressor, so I ruled that one out.

The second main method is to replace the water with anti-freeze, or in some cases just to dilute the water with anti-freeze. The is a special pink non-toxic anti-freeze that is made especially for RVs. Other anti-freezes are definitely discouraged, probably because they might harm the plastics or they just might kill you if some of it gets left in your fresh water tank.

Now the anti-freeze method has two sub-methods. The first one tells you to install this bypass thing on the intake side of your pump so you can use the water pump to suck the anti-freeze into the system. I didn’t want to install anything, and I especially didn’t want to pay somebody to install anything, so I kept looking for more options.

The second sub-method I found was to use a funnel (or a cut up water bottle) to pour anti-freeze into the fresh water tank, and then use the water pump to pump that anti-freeze through the system. It appears that uses a lot more anti-freeze, but it also looks very quick and easy, so that’s what I was originally going to do.

One thing all these different videos do is tell you about how to treat the hot water tank. We have a tankless water heater and it was nearly impossible to find information about winterizing it, and what we did find was contradictory.

Vicki and I struggled for quite a bit of time trying to feed anti-freeze through the fresh-water hook up, but nothing was going in. We tried buying another funnel, and a few other things, until we suddenly realized there was a spring loaded thing that looked like its job was to prevent water flowing in unless there was a certain amount of pressure behind it. Maybe if we’d had one of those big funnels like they use in NASCAR we could have got enough pressure, but it seems like we needed to rethink.

We went into the RV and opened up the box where the water came in. My hope was we’d find a pipe we could unscrew from a connector and pour the anti-freeze into the fresh tank. But after trying that, and discovering that the inside pipes were too narrow to put our funnel into, we noticed something interesting. There was a bit of clear plastic tubing with a screw-on fitting. The plastic was slightly stained with pink. I immediately knew what that was – a tube to siphon anti-freeze out of the bottle and into the pump. All I had to do was to figure out where to connect it. After 5 or 6 false starts, I finally figured out that this nice little brass fitting on the pipe leading into the pump contained both a capped off connector and a valve. I eventually figured out the right setting of the valve (you’d think it would take at most two tries, but you’d be underestimating my ability to get things wrong) and it started siphoning anti-freeze out of the bottle and into the pump.

We ran all the taps until we saw a good stream of pink coming out, both hot and cold. That included flushing the toilet and holding down the flush until it was running very pink. We put in some of the magic liquid down the toilet that breaks up poop and toilet paper – possibly TMI but we have a clear segment on the black tank drain hose, and we can verify that it actually works.

So with all that done, we now have anti-freeze in all the pipes, and also in the grey and black tank. Although the tanks probably have a mix of water and anti-freeze, they’re big enough and the amount of water in them is so small that even if they did freeze they probably wouldn’t burst. Next we pour some anti-freeze down all the drains, and in the toilet to make sure the p-traps and the toilet ball valve are full of pure anti-freeze, not water-anti-freeze. And lastly, we removed another connector and poured about a quart of anti-freeze into the fresh water tank. Again, the fresh tank is as empty as we could make it, but there might be some residual water in there, so putting that anti-freeze in there will make sure it doesn’t freeze.

I’m second guessing myself now and wondering if I shouldn’t have run the taps for longer and get more anti-freeze in the grey tank, but I think we’re probably fine. If it looks like it’s going to get really cold this winter, I might run out to the trailer and throw another gallon down the drains.

The last thing I did was to remove the lithium batteries and turn off the two electrical shut-offs (I think one isolates the batteries and one isolates the solar panels). I asked about this on Reddit, and a bunch of people said I should remove them, a bunch said they’re fine to leave them, and a few said “might as well remove them just to be safe”, and that’s the opinion I went with. Of course I had to do this last, after the trailer was parked at the storage site. But because I wanted to make sure I knew how to remove the batteries before I took it there, I had turned off the battery isolation switch, so when we parked the RV the tongue jack was going really slowly, because it was probably only drawing power from the solar panels.

So we sadly said goodbye to the trailer for the winter, although we’ll probably visit it a couple of times to fix some of the problems I mentioned in the previous post.