Mesa, AZ - RV Service Center Adventure - Part 2

A bad day in the RV beats a good day at the office any time.

So, you probably wonder why Gary and I aren’t doing much these days? Well, so are we. And, as you can tell by the title of this blog - it ain’t a pretty story. Oh, no, in reality it’s just annoying rather than any problem. As you all know, we bought a new RV in October, hoping to leave all of our Simba problems behind us. And we did. But, little did we know that we picked up the Journey problems.

But, you’ve got to know that any time you buy a used vehicle, there are some issues that will need to be worked out. Hopefully, they will be small ones. Gary switched two wires and the bathroom exhaust fan now exhausts out rather than blowing in. He connected a loose wire and we now have bass in our speaker system. He turned around two defrost fans in front of the windshield so that they now actually blow onto the windshield rather than into the RV. Little things, and there have been a few others. The previous owners were an older couple who probably didn’t notice these problems. Gary notices EVERYTHING.

But there was one nagging problem. We noticed that any time we had 2 heating elements (microwave, electric heater, hair dryer, electric grill, toaster oven, Vitamix) going at once, we popped a circuit. Never did that before in any RV we’ve had. Hmmm. Of course, I was the one who was cooking and popped them and Gary was the one who went outside to reset it. Love these gender roles.

Obviously, the problem was in what is called the inverter-charger. Gary, of course, began testing it and trying to see what the problem was. He found a wire that was not even hooked up to anything so that’s a good clue. Soon the I-C failed completely and we could not charge the batteries in our RV. No lights, no front steps, no electricity. We got a new I-C on order from Winnebago. Luckily, our friends, Jerry and Shirley had a heavy duty charger which we borrowed and hooked up to our RV and used for a week.

Finally, Monday rolled around and we were due at the service center at 8:00 for the installation. At 7:30, we began pulling in our 3 slides. The 2 small ones - great. But, not the large one. 3” is as far as it would come. We tried everything in the manual. No matter what we did, it wouldn’t come in. Gary called Winnebago. Gary called the service center. Interestingly, he got wrong information from both of them. Even the Winnebago Service Rep gave him some wrong information. What irony: we couldn’t even get to the service center to get fixed. Finally, on Wednesday, a tech came out to our RV, noticed that there was a loose connection to the slide motor, hooked it up, pulled the slide in and we were on our way to the service center to get the I-C installed. 10 minutes.

They solidified the slide connections, installed the I-C and let us stay there over night so we could test everything. Isn’t this a nice campground?

Now that we are on a first-name basis with everyone at the service center - maybe we’ll get invited to their Christmas party.

Now, here’s the funny part: while we were waiting for the installation, we looked out the door to where RV’s are prepped for new customers. Guess what we saw out there? Sure enough our old RV, the Simba. Looks like someone had bought it. What are the chances that we would see that?

And, that’s why we haven’t been doing anything exciting - we’ve been doing RV.

Luckily the I-C failed completely while we were here in Mesa and we could get it all fixed by the dealer who sold us the RV.

Luckily this dealer was only 2 miles away.

Luckily we had extended care insurance which paid most of the cost except that which the dealer absorbed.

Luckily Gary is clever enough to do most of the trouble shooting himself. And I thought he was just a sex god.

Luckily we had friends with a charger. Thanks Jerry and Shirley.

Annoying, yes. Time consuming, yes. But not a major problem.

And, we remember:

A bad day in the RV beats a good day at the office any time