RV questions, answered straight

Six things, all free, about ten minutes total. A real share of mobile RV calls end with a technician finding one of these, and you still pay the trip fee of $75 to $150 and the one hour labor minimum for the privilege of learning it.

• The breaker panel. Your rig has 120 volt breakers, and they trip. Look for one sitting between on and off. Push it fully off, then fully on.
• The GFCI outlet. This is the one that catches everybody. A single GFCI often protects several other outlets downstream of it, including the one behind the fridge or in a bay you never open. When it trips, those outlets go dead and nothing looks wrong. Find every GFCI in the rig, including the ones in the bathroom and outside compartments, and press reset.
• The propane valve and appliance lockout. Is the tank valve actually open, and is there propane in it? Beyond that, most propane appliances lock out after a few failed ignition attempts and stay locked out until you reset them. A fridge or water heater that "died" right after you ran a tank empty is usually just sulking. Turn it off, wait, turn it back on.
• The shore power pedestal. Before you blame the rig, blame the park. Pedestal breakers trip, and pedestals in older parks are genuinely worn out. Try a different pedestal if the park has one free, or plug something simple into it and see.
• The battery disconnect. Almost every rig has a master disconnect switch, and they get bumped. If your 12 volt side is completely dead, no lights, no water pump, no fridge control board, check that switch before anything else.
• The 12 volt fuse block. Blade fuses, usually near the converter or under a dinette seat. Pull the suspect one and look at the metal strip through the plastic. Spares are a couple of dollars at any auto parts counter.

None of that is a trick to talk you out of calling. If you go through the list and the problem is still there, you have just given a technician a much better starting point, and the call gets shorter and cheaper. That is the actual point.

Because 50 amp service is not 66 percent bigger than 30 amp service. It is more than three times bigger, and this surprises almost everybody.

A 30 amp RV cord is one 120 volt leg carrying up to 30 amps. That is roughly 3,600 watts, total, for the entire coach. A 50 amp cord has two separate 120 volt legs, each carrying up to 50 amps. That is roughly 12,000 watts. The plug looks like a bigger version of the same idea, but electrically it is a different animal.

Now the air conditioners. One rooftop unit draws somewhere around 12 to 16 amps while it runs, and considerably more for the instant it starts. Put two of those on a 30 amp cord and you are already near the limit before you count the converter charging your batteries, the fridge on electric, the microwave, and the coffee maker. So the breaker trips, or the pedestal breaker trips, and it is not a fault. It is arithmetic.

Two other things worth knowing. An adapter that lets you plug a 50 amp rig into a 30 amp pedestal does not create power, it just makes the plug fit, and your rig is still limited to 3,600 watts. And low voltage is the real danger, not tripped breakers: a crowded park on a July evening can sag well below 120 volts, and running an air conditioner on low voltage is how compressors die. A surge protector with a voltage cutoff is cheap insurance against a repair covered on the AC page.

These get used interchangeably in conversation and they are four different things. The confusion is why people misdiagnose their own rigs.

Your RV really has two electrical systems living in one box. A 120 volt system, same as a house, runs the air conditioning, the microwave, the outlets, and the fridge when it is on electric. A 12 volt system runs the lights, the water pump, the furnace fan, the vent fans, and every appliance control board.

• Shore power is the cord to the pedestal. It feeds the 120 volt side, and it also feeds the converter, which makes 12 volt power and charges your batteries. This is why nearly everything works on shore power.
• A generator feeds the 120 volt side too, exactly as if you were plugged in. It is shore power you brought with you.
• Batteries feed the 12 volt side only. They do not run your air conditioner. They run your lights and your pump.
• An inverter is the piece people miss. It converts battery power up to 120 volts so you can run household things without a generator. It is doing the opposite job to the converter. Many rigs have a small one wired to only a couple of outlets, which is why one outlet works off grid and the rest do not.

Practical version: if only your lights and pump are dead, look at 12 volt, the batteries, and the disconnect. If only your outlets and air conditioning are dead, look at 120 volt, the cord, and the pedestal. If everything is dead, start at the pedestal and work in. That one distinction will save you a phone call now and then.

On batteries alone, realistically no, and the numbers are worth seeing because the desert is exactly where people want this to be true.

A rooftop air conditioner pulls roughly 1,300 to 1,800 watts while running. At 12 volts, that is well over 100 amps coming out of your battery bank continuously. And out here it is continuous: in July the unit does not reach setpoint and cycle off, it simply runs. A common pair of lead acid house batteries has maybe 100 usable amp hours between them. You can do that division yourself, and the answer is well under an hour.

Solar does not rescue it either, not at the scale most rigs have. A few hundred watts of panels on the roof produces a few hundred watts, and the air conditioner wants five times that all day. The setups that genuinely run air conditioning off grid are large lithium banks, a serious inverter, and a lot of panel, and that is a system that costs real money, not an accessory.

So boondocking in a Mojave summer means a generator, which is why generator work is a busy category here and why a generator picks the worst possible moment to refuse to start. Winter boondocking is a completely different and much friendlier story, because the furnace fan is a 12 volt load and your solar is easily up to it. The cold nights are not the problem out here. The heat is.

Very often it is not broken, and this is one of the most misdiagnosed complaints in the valley. It is physics.

Most RV fridges are absorption units. There is no compressor. Instead a heat source, propane flame or an electric element, drives an ammonia cycle that pulls heat out of the box and dumps it into the air behind the fridge, out through those vents on the side of your rig. The whole machine depends on being able to dump heat somewhere cooler than the box.

When the air behind the fridge is 110 degrees, and the sidewall it is bolted to has been baking in direct sun all afternoon, there is much less temperature difference to work with. Many absorption fridges are rated to maintain a certain number of degrees below ambient, not to maintain a fixed interior temperature. So at 110 outside, the unit can be working perfectly and still let the box drift up into the fifties. It has not failed. It has run out of physics.

What actually helps: park so the fridge vents face away from the afternoon sun, add a small fan in the upper vent to pull hot air out of the chimney behind the unit, keep the box full because mass holds cold, freeze things before you leave, and stop browsing in it. What tells you it is genuinely a fault: it also fails overnight when it is 70 degrees out, or it works on shore power and not on propane, or it has stopped cooling entirely rather than partly. Those are real, and the ranges are on the cost page.

Because of how they are built, and no, your rig is not special. This is close to a universal RV experience and it is worth explaining so you stop paying people to chase it.

The common design puts small metal probes through the tank wall at a quarter, a half, and three quarters. When liquid reaches a probe, it completes a circuit and the panel lights up. The problem is obvious once you picture it: waste, tissue, and grease stick to those probes and stay there. The circuit stays closed. The panel keeps insisting the tank is full when it is empty, or reports levels that are pure fiction.

Grey tanks foul just as readily, mostly with soap scum and cooking grease. Tank rinsing, a full tank of water and a cleaning treatment left to slosh down the road, and dumping only when the tank is genuinely full so the flow has enough force to scour, all help. Sometimes they fix it. Sometimes the probes are simply coated for good.

The real fix is a different technology: sensor strips mounted on the outside of the tank that read the level through the wall and never touch what is inside. That is an upgrade rather than a repair, and it is a reasonable thing to ask a technician about while they are already under the rig for something else.

Yes, and it is the cheapest insurance in RVing. An RV plumbing system is PEX tubing and plastic fittings assembled quickly at a factory, and it is generally happy somewhere around 40 to 60 psi. Park water supplies are not regulated for your benefit and can run well past that, high enough to split a fitting behind a wall.

That is the part worth dwelling on. A burst line in an RV does not politely spray the bathroom floor. It runs inside the walls and into the laminated floor, which is the same failure mode that makes a neglected slide out the most expensive repair on the coach. A regulator costs less than a tank of fuel. Buy the adjustable brass one with a gauge rather than the little inline brass button, because the cheap ones are crude and restrict your flow to a trickle.

Also worth doing: turn the park water off at the spigot when you leave the rig for the day. Everybody knows this. Almost nobody does it.

You need to think about both directions here, and most people arriving from elsewhere only pack for one of them.

Winterizing is not irrelevant. Pahrump sits above 2,600 feet in a high desert valley, and high desert means the temperature falls off a cliff after sunset. Winter nights below freezing are a normal occurrence here even when the afternoon was pleasant. That is enough to split a low point drain or a water filter housing on a rig left sitting. If you are storing the rig through the winter rather than living in it, blow out the lines and put antifreeze in the traps, same as anywhere. If you are living in it, you are running the furnace anyway and the risk is mostly the unheated wet bay.

But the season that eats rigs here is the other one, and there is no standard word for preparing for it. Summer is what breaks things in Nye County: UV cooking the lap sealant on your roof until it cracks, air conditioners running for months without a break, slide seals and awning fabric going brittle, tires aging out from the sun long before the tread wears. If you only do one seasonal job on a rig in this valley, it is not a winter job. It is a roof inspection and reseal, covered on the roof page, and it is the best money an RV owner spends here.

It ages it while you are not there, and it is a slower and more expensive process than most owners expect.

Ultraviolet light breaks down every polymer on the outside of your coach. Lap sealant around the vents and skylights hardens and cracks, which lets water in the two days a year it rains. The roof membrane chalks and thins. Decals lift and go crazed. Awning fabric loses its flexibility and then tears the first time real wind catches it. Tires develop sidewall cracks and time out on age rather than mileage, which is why a rig with plenty of tread can still be riding on tires nobody should trust at highway speed. Inside, the dash and any vinyl in a window's line of sight go hard and split.

Covered storage is the honest answer, and out here it is worth what it costs. If covered is not an option, a quality cover, tire covers, and closed shades are all real mitigation. And whatever else, do not let a rig sit for two years in this sun without somebody looking at the roof, because the sealant will fail silently and the first sign will be a soft floor, not a drip. That is the sequence that turns a cheap job into the expensive one described on the slide out page.

Less than people assume, and it is worth knowing what you are actually asking about.

Mobile RV repair is not a licensed trade in the way that electrical or plumbing contracting is. There is generally no state RV technician license to hold. So "licensed" for a mobile RV operator usually means the ordinary business licensing side: a registered business entity, a Nevada state business license, and the local licensing Nye County requires. That is real and it is checkable, but it is not a skills exam.

Insured is the part that matters more to you. A technician carries general liability insurance for the same reason you would want them to: they are working on the roof of your house, on your propane system, and on your electrical, and if something goes wrong, that coverage is what stands between you and an argument. Asking to see it is a normal, unremarkable request, and any real operator has it handy.

Certification is the skills answer, and it is voluntary rather than required. The RV Industry Association runs a technician certification program, and the RV Technical Institute trains and certifies to levels. Certification is a genuinely good sign. Its absence is not proof of anything, because plenty of excellent RV techs in this valley learned in the field over twenty years and never sat the exam.

So the practical set of questions is short. Are you insured. Have you worked on this specific system before. What do you charge to come out and what is your hourly rate. A technician who answers those three plainly is telling you most of what you need.

They should, and if somebody quotes a firm number over the phone for a problem nobody has looked at, that number is either padded to cover the worst case or it is going to change.

What you can honestly get before anyone rolls is the trip fee and the hourly rate, which is why both are published on the cost page rather than hidden behind a contact form. What you cannot get is a real repair price, because the whole point of the visit is to find out what is wrong. The normal shape of a mobile RV call is diagnosis first, then a conversation about what it will cost, then you decide. You are allowed to say no, and you are allowed to want a second opinion.

More about what happens between the call and the truck arriving is on the how it works page.