We are busy doing all the things that RVers have to do to stay on the road. That’s what Ruff Road is up to while we are here in lovely Florida, enjoying the sunshine and family and friends.
What We Do When We Aren’t Traveling
RV, Car, and Generator Maintenance
We’re at our home base, here in Central Florida, which we return to each year. This is where we do our maintenance and more. First, RV maintenance includes replacing my air filter this year, replacing the oil filter, replacing the fuel filter, and changing the oil. In addition, we’ll grease all the fittings underneath. This motorhome requires 16 quarts of oil! We order from Amazon, it makes it easy.
Next, we need to do the same with our towed vehicle. We’ll change the oil, air filter and oil filter there. Finally, we’ll change the oil in our generator and the filters, fuel, oil, and air filters. That one is a bit of a pain to do, but doable.
We are DIYing these oil changes ourselves. We’ve done it many times now. It saves quite a bit in labor costs.
How much is all this?
This year’s expenses for the oil changes is approximately $500. We did purchase a $150 air filter for the motorhome. It has never been replaced and it’s due.
How long will it take you to do all these things?
The towed vehicle should take about 30 minutes. The motorhome is not difficult, so that’s another 30 minutes to an hour. Now, the generator, that one should only take about 30 minutes, plus a little aggravation. The aggravation for our generator is changing out the filters. It is not easy to maneuver to change them. So, all in all, it will probably take about two hours to do all three.
Amazon and Other Yearly Orders
However, this is just a fraction of what we’re doing here. We also are doing a lot of Amazon orders because that’s really hard to do on the road. Unless you can get to an Amazon locker or you stay a private campground that allows UPS or Fed Ex deliveries, you will not be able to have Amazon deliveries sent to you.
We usually stay in state parks, Army Corps of Engineers Parks, or national parks and these places do not allow deliveries or even mail from the USPS. You can’t get Amazon there and Amazon does not send general delivery to a post office.
So, unless you’re near an Amazon locker or unless you are at a private campground that allows it, getting your Amazon packages is going to be a little bit difficult when you’re living the RV life and traveling. This is why when we get to our home base every year, we order things like air conditioner filters, water filters, anything that needs purchasing for the upcoming year.
Other Orders
We order from other places, too. For example, I’ll shop around for best prices for our dogs heartworm and flea and tick preventative medicines and order a one year’s supply.
So, a lot of orders are coming in because we’ll be somewhere for long enough that if there is a delay or anything, we will still get it.
Getting our Amazon orders or any other kind of orders we need to get in is just easier when you’re in one place for more than a few days. Of course, when we are on the road, we do have things sent to us general delivery and we have our mail forwarded to us general delivery. When we are traveling though, it is mainly ordering from Amazon that is a problem.
RV Repairs
The third thing that we’re going to be doing while we’re hanging out here in lovely Florida, enjoying this nice, warm weather, is getting to have some repairs done. Yes. Stay tuned for recap on that. If you live in your RV, you know that repairs are just part of the game and some repairs we can do ourselves and some things we need an expert to do the repair.
What We Need to Fix This Year
We have a mobile RV tech coming out. We have a water pump issue and it’s a very common issue. I see it a lot in the forums. It’s when you are hooked to your your city water, and your freshwater tank keeps filling up. That’s a check valve issue. Also, we found out that there’s a valve inside our RV pump. I don’t know if they’re all like this, but we have a problem with the one in our RV pump. Therefore, we’re getting that replaced.
Another issue we are having is, we have sprung a leak near our door and we’ve got to find out where that’s coming from, although we strongly suspect it’s coming from where our awning is attached to our RV and the caulking has worn away. I tried to repair that, but it was really hard to get into. We’ll need an expert for that, as well.
This Repair is a Big One, Literally
And, the other thing that we are getting done is we are getting our windshield replaced. That’s a big one! Stay tuned for all of these repairs. We’ll share them with you and we have a couple of other, minor things like the gaskets around our windows are starting to shrink up. We don’t know if that’s fixable or if we’re going to have to replace them.
This One is Another Big One!
Here’s another big one! We have a generator repair that must happen and we are going to try to DIY that ourselves. If you watched our Mesa Verde video, we shared our adventure while camping at Mesa Verde National Park with no electric hook – ups and our generator would not stay running longer than 5 minutes. The code that it displays shows that it is the water temperature sensor. So, it’s a little sensor. That’s it. That’s all it is. But, because that sensor is bad, it shuts down the generator so it doesn’t overheat. It thinks that it’s overheating. So, that has to be changed out, which sounds easy, right?
Something to Consider…
Here’s just a word of warning to all of you thinking about RV life. When you are living the RV life, often you will find that things aren’t as easy and straightforward as they seem. Many things we have learned. For us and our generator, in order to get to this part we have to drop the entire generator down out of the RV, which is a little cumbersome. It’s not as easy as it sounds because the space is very tight. So anyway, we are going to try a couple of things first before we go there, but those are just some of the repairs we have going.
Watch for Upcoming Videos on These To Dos!
So, to recap, we’re going to be doing our maintenance. We’ll be sharing that with you. We have got our Amazon orders in and we’ll share what we get every year with Amazon and we did buy drapes for the bedroom that looks really nice and upgraded some of our video equipment. And, we are also going to be doing those repairs. Some of the repairs will be DIY and some will be by our RV tech.
There you have it. This is what Ruff Road is up to while we are here in Florida, between visiting and enjoying this lovely area. We are doing all the things that RVers have to do to stay on the road, RV living and traveling. So, until next time, happy travels, y’all.