27 BIG Lessons RVers Learn the Hard Way - Things Every RVer Owner Should Know

We've been living in an RV for five stinking years and if you were to come up to us on the side of the road and ask us yo what's your best 27 tips to live in an RV or travel make life a little bit easier well guess what you're about to find out. Welcome back to Happily Ever Hanks and if you're new here our channel provides a slew of information related to RV living and we bring it to you in an entertaining way. That's a warning. I am just so excited let's dump I'm excuse me I mean jump right into the first one. When you're dumping your tanks for the first time or even if you've been doing it multiple times do yourself a favor and test your connections by pulling the gray tank first. Normally you don't empty your gray tanks before your black tanks you do that after but just to make sure that all the connections are completely secure give it a little letter rip on that valve make sure it's flowing nice shut it and now you're good to start. When getting ready to move your RV make sure you're always checking your slides before you actually move them in and out. I can't tell you how many times we've actually walked into the RV and realized had we not checked we could really jack some stuff up in here. Chairs, pictures, toys, rugs, you name it it's gonna get caught up in those slides if you're not on top of it so make sure you check it. Get in the situations of backing up your RV at a campground don't stress it if you need to get out and look. I don't know how many times I personally have felt stressed like I'm on some sort of time crunch everyone's waiting on me nobody cares. Get out look make sure you're not going to do any damage to yourself or your rig and then you'll be good to go. Sometimes I'll tell him hey I don't know what you're gonna do here so mate can you just get out and look and I'm glad we did. Leaving the RV for the day and you're nervous about a flood do yourself a solid and just turn off the city water connection so you don't have to worry about a situation like that happening. If you shut it off at the spigot and you don't have any running water no flood's gonna take place. Take it from us I think the biggest cause for concern when it comes to damaging an RV is water itself. Water and RVs are just don't go there girlfriend. Kill the source and have some peace of mind. Everybody gets into this lifestyle is like where's all the hot water I hear you. If you are looking to cut down the time it takes to reheat your hot water consider flipping on the propane and the electric at the same time. Good one. It's not an instant heater situation but it does help. These RVs can be really rocking if you know what I mean. So help you decrease this by actually utilizing things like chocks. Our biggest one is we use those x-shocks in between the tires. They stabilize you from forward to back motion like it's locked in tight. Yes we also like to wedge blocks underneath our stabilizers and I've seen people with travel trailers do the same with their scissor jacks. Check all your tire pressures the morning of leaving rather than doing it in the night before. Don't take shortcuts. Temperatures fluctuate overnight so you may have a tire pressure at nighttime of this and then you wake up in the morning and it's actually this. A good rule of thumb is colder temperatures create lower pressures within the tire and hotter temperatures create higher pressures within the tire. So check it before you actually take off for the day so you know you're actually according to the standard of what's listed on the tire. Are we going a little too fast for you? Just try to keep up. Sometimes the temperature drops a little low when you're sleeping at night. What you can do in this situation is not go out and buy a heated water hose. Don't worry about that. All you're going to do is disconnect your city water connection. Put that hose away and then just run off your water pump. But first make sure you have a little bit of water in your tank to get you through the night. Love it! How many times have we seen people get their awnings ripped off? I just learned where the term awning came from. When the winds just go and take your awning you go out and you're like ah! Whether you're going to sleep at night or you're leaving for the day, don't leave the awnings out. They're like children. You can't leave them unattended. We're flying away Dorothy. Where's Toto? During travel days when you're actually towing your RV, there's a thing called a seven-way pin which basically controls your trailer brakes and your trailer lights. If you pull over for the night and you do not unhook your seven-way pin, your tow vehicle battery will continuously be drained. So we recommend that you unhook it. But the biggest tip is make sure it's actually re-engaged before taking off. We did this one time and we traveled down the road for a couple hours and boy oh boy we didn't have trailer brakes or lights. Wow! Whoopsie. We screwed that one up. No thanks. Thanks. Sometimes you go to campgrounds or a friend's property and your RV's here and the connections are way over there and you're like do yourself a favor and carry a couple extra connections. We like to carry around extension cord for our 50 amp electrical connection and some extra sewer hoses. Trust us, when you're getting ready to let it rip and you don't have enough sewer hoses to get to the connection, you're in a bit of a pickle. I'm liking these. Me too. Utilize big empty parking lots to practice your driving skills and more importantly your backing up skills. Go to Walmart where no one is out in the desolate areas of the parking lot. Take the time to practice while you can before you actually get to the campgrounds. Practice those big swings and the backing up and all that fun stuff. Hey, you're not gonna hit anything out there. Hopefully. Yes. Do your darnest bestest to not show up to your destination with full bladders and empty stomachs. What we like to do is find a rest stop about an hour before our destination, we empty them bladders, we get a snack, so we show up to the campground like this. So that you're not hangry. Am I right or am I right? Cause I'm the one that gets hangry. You're always right. Who are you waving at by the way? I don't know. This next tip could save you thousands of dollars. It's a little bit cringy if I may say so myself. You get some overzealous neighbors, friends, family that come up to you while you're unhooking or hooking back up, just stop. Give them your full attention and then go back to what you were doing. This is no place for multitasking. You got ants in your pants? It is oh so too common to find ants running around your RV, but if you don't want them to be living the RV life with you, here's what you can do. We got something called taro ant bait gel liquid that they are attracted to, but once they take it back to their colony, it kills them. I've also heard of diatomaceous earth soil. People say that you can actually find it in the gardening section and it helps to cut down on their exoskeleton. I don't know. This is very scientific. Give it a whirl. You are hooked up and ready to hit the road, but you gotta do that final walk around. Heck, maybe do two final walk arounds. You can never do enough walk arounds because you might be missing something you left hooked up to the water or you might see that a jack is still down or the door's open. Ask us how we know. Yeah, because it's happened to us. Finding yourself in pickles out on the road with your RV, utilize mobile RV repairmen rather than the actual dealerships. You'll actually get things addressed much more quickly and sometimes it's a little more affordable. Mobile techs, they're very knowledgeable people and some of the minor repairs or even major, they will offer you guys suggestions that you may not have thought of in the first place. And you don't have to pack up your RV and be out of it while it gets repairs. Ask us how we know. Yeah, happened again. When you're loading up your RV for travel, you're loading up for the first time, make sure you place the heavier stuff in the front of the rig versus the back, you know, because of like weight distribution and all that fun stuff. Cut down on some of that trailer sway because if you put the heavy loads towards the back, your trailer's gonna be like, whoo, and you don't want that down the road going 60 miles an hour. You know, when you get to the campground, you plug in and you finally get the ACs pumping because you're like, well, something to help cool down your rig a lot faster. Open up your fans on the inside, your max air fans, and what that's going to do is speed up getting that hot air out of the room. I only keep them open for a couple minutes and then I shut them and let the ACs do their thing. Remember folks, hot air rises, so let her rip out the top. If you have steps that make contact with the ground, make sure those steps are not touching the ground anytime you are maneuvering the rig. If you're lowering the front, if you're auto leveling, because it can push those steps down and bend the frame of your door and then it's all messed up. Don't take shortcuts, just double check before you make adjustments. Running a battery juice out on the road, quick easy tip for you, if you're in a pinch, hook it up to your truck, your tow vehicle, back to that seven-way pin connection I was talking about. Once you plug that in, you're actually going to get trickle charging through that connection onto your RV battery. Have a picture of your license plates on your phone so when you go to campgrounds that need that information, you got it right there. RV freezers, for whatever reason, have a lot of frost that builds up on the back of them and instead of driving yourself madly insane by chipping away or using a hairdryer, utilize chintzy cutting boards. Place them on the back there and then the frost will build up on that cutting board and all you got to do is peel it away and you're good to go. You know the best time to know the total length and the height of your rig is usually when you're driving. Measure the total length of your rig and your height when you're fully connected to your tow vehicle. Sometimes campgrounds will ask you this before you arrive there, what's your length? Sometimes you'll get to bridges and you're like, oh s**t, we spent hours trying to diagnose and figure out why are we not getting any battery power. Lights aren't working, slides aren't working. Do yourself a favor and save some time. Go and check to see if anyone accidentally bumped the battery disconnect switch. There's one thing you listen to us about, don't unhook your RV until you look. We continue to do this, it just happened last week. Do we follow our own advice? No, that's why we make these videos so we can go back and re-watch them. How many times have we had to re-hook back up, re-park the camper, all because we're off just by this much of the electrical cord. It's just so much fun. RV life baby, just look before you unhook. Not sure where to put some items on travel days because it doesn't fit in a cabinet, especially large valuable ones, camera equipment, computers, guitars. We throw a ton of stuff on the bed, mostly because it's in the front of the rig, it's not going to be bouncing around as much, and it keeps it safe. Write that one down. Put that one in your back pocket. And while you're placing that one in your back pocket, check out these other videos right here because we have so much other stinking content you need to go back and catch up on. And we're going to see you next Thursday. Peace out. Bye guys.