Archives for 2015

Oct 21 2015

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It’s always frustrating when you’re on a trip and something goes wonky in the Airstream. It used to drive me absolutely batty in the early days because I never knew how to fix anything. I remember that early in our full-timing experience (November 2005) we had a defective kitchen faucet and had to resort to calling in a mobile RV service technician in Oregon to replace it.

That was a bigger hassle than it might seem because we were in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California and (at least at that time) there was no cell phone service in the park. I made a few calls from the payphone in the park (remember payphones?) which was in itself a sort of adventure.

We finally ended up moving the Airstream to the town of Eureka so that the tech could meet us there and fix the problem. Our trip got disrupted, we had to pay $200 for parts and labor (later reimbursed under warranty), I had a hell of a time with a payphone, and we lost a day.

Now it’s ten years later, and we are traveling through Kentucky. Eleanor noticed yesterday that the same kitchen faucet is dripping at the base and leaking down into the cabinet below. But something is different now: we have a lot more experience and tools on hand to deal with things like this.

I got on the Internet to get Moen’s instructions, which are accurate but lacking in details for the novice. The basic solution to the leak is to replace O-rings, which isn’t terribly hard once you know how the faucet comes apart. The real trick was finding the parts. Being on the road makes it hard to get things via mail order, so rather than ordering Moen’s repair kit I had to figure out which size O-rings are needed and find them locally.

That’s why I’m posting this blog. If you’ve got the same Moen PureTouch filter in your Airstream kitchen (which is a single-handle chrome unit with built-in water filter), let me just save you some time and say that you will want one O-ring in the size 1-1/16 x 13/16 x 1/8 and one O-ring sized 1-1/2 x 1-1/4 x 1/8, plus a small container of pure silicone grease (not petroleum based grease of any type). I found all of these parts across the street from the General Butler State Resort Park in Carrollton KY at 8:00 this morning.

The hardware stores often have “Moen repair kits” which include the O-rings you need. Otherwise you can pick the O-rings out individually from the parts bin. My total cost including a small tub of silicone grease was about $7.

Taking apart the faucet is easy when you know how, which is to say that it took Eleanor and I about ten minutes to puzzle it out the first time. Most parts just unscrew. See Moen’s parts diagram for help. There are also lots of amateur instructional videos online, but sheesh, some of them are longer than the entire job. I didn’t watch any of them since I didn’t want to burn a gigabyte of my precious cellular Internet allowance listening to some guy say “uhhhh … ok … so here’s the screw and … uhhhh … I’m taking it out now …” for 30 minutes.

A large set of pliers is handy for the mounting ring if it’s stubborn. We also needed a Philips screwdriver and a 7/64″ Allen wrench, and a small flat-bladed screwdriver to pry off the old rings. Don’t forget to grease the new O-rings completely before installing them.

After replacing the O-rings we re-assembled the faucet and found the handle was on backwards. So we took it apart again and found a very very tiny embossed indication on the white plastic ring in the handle mechanism that said “TOP BACK”. This time it took only a minute or two to re-assemble the entire thing, thanks to experience.

With a few exceptions, I didn’t cover repairs like this in my Airstream maintenance guide because, well, it’s a maintenance guide rather than a repair manual. But I will talk about repairs we make in this blog because there just isn’t enough reliable information out there for Airstream owners. (The next edition of my guide will be expanded with more common repairs like this.)

I want to emphasize that the real difference between now and ten years ago is mostly my attitude toward repairs—and the ever helpful Mr Google. I didn’t know how to fix this faucet yesterday but at least I had a sense of where to start looking. Now I see how easy it really was, and I wonder why I ever thought I had to call an RV service tech for simple jobs like this.

The job was done before 9:30, which in my world means “before the teenager has awoken.” Now we are reviving her with hopes of getting to Mammoth Cave National Park this afternoon. It’s a great feeling to have fixed a problem ourselves, in about an hour (including going to the hardware store), and for $7. We didn’t lose a day and we learned something new before breakfast. That’s a good start.

Oct 19 2015

Weather changes

Through September I kept saying, “We’ve got to get out of Vermont by mid month or things are going to get tricky.” It wasn’t really news. After living in Vermont for years we all knew precisely what was coming, and when. The campgrounds shut down, water hoses freeze, and in an RV the daily propane burn becomes enormous.

The benefit of waiting was beautiful foliage everywhere. My brother and I took a last ride on the BMWs just to tour some of the dirt backroads of central Vermont and see it at peak.

Departing this late is always a dangerous game, as sudden weather changes are to be expected in fall this far north. We picked Friday Oct 16 as our departure date and it seemed like a good bet until we got to western Pennsylvania along the shore of Lake Ontario on I-90. Then we hit a sudden storm of sleet and ice pellets.

Eleanor and I watched in horror as the temperature plummeted from 47 degrees to 33 degrees in less than five minutes. Heavy sleet was pelting the car and the front of the Airstream, and covering the road in a rough sheet of treachery.

When that happens you have to start looking for options to bail out. There is no point in plowing forward with a trailer in tow when conditions are that bad. We got off at the next exit and filled up with fuel (where I took this photo).

Ten minutes later the storm had passed. It was just a little reminder of how things can change quickly in the north in October, especially along the shore of a Great Lake that produces its own special weather.

Sleet in October? I wouldn’t have been surprised up in northern Vermont, but down in Pennsylvania I felt fairly immune. I won’t make that mistake again.

For the rest of the drive along the lake and past Cleveland we were in and out of storms. We pulled over a second time at a rest area to consider options again, and decided that we’d make a choice at the split of I-90 and I-271. If the weather continued as it had, we’d spend the night boondocking at one of the usual commercial establishments known to allow overnight parking and we’d call our friends to tell them we weren’t going to make it to their house that night.

Far better to disappoint your friends by saying you’ll be arriving the next day, than to call them to say you won’t be arriving at all because you slid off the road. “Get-there-itis” is often fatal.

By the way, this experience is a very good reason to travel with both propane cylinders as full as possible during the late fall and winter season. You can easily find yourself spending an unexpected night along the road with only your propane supply to keep you warm, and on a freezing night the furnace will burn a lot of it.

In this case we were lucky. The weather got better as we turned south away from the lake, and we were rewarded with a spectacular sunset, and we made it to our friends’ home with no problems. Here’s one shot of us towing happily to the west, near the end of the sunset and a safe trip.

Now, two days later, we are in Jackson Center at Airstream. It’s not any warmer here. Last night I had to disconnect the water hose because it would have frozen solid. I’ve got a day of prep work to do for Alumapalooza 7, and then we will make a rapid exit to the south with the beaches of the Florida panhandle on our minds. We are definitely “chasing 72 degrees,” as many full-timers do.

Oct 13 2015

Time to Fall out

It is Fall in northern Vermont, just past peak foliage season, and that’s a clue that we are overdue to get rolling southward. The air has gotten distinctly chilly and the blustery winds that swirl the fallen leaves around are making it seem even colder. Believe it or not, winter is not far away. It tends to happen suddenly. I remember many a Halloween night as a kid, with snow flurries landing on my costume.

The state parks in Vermont close early because of this. Many closed yesterday and many more will close this weekend, as the trees go bare and the leaf-peepers head back home. The commercial campgrounds tend to follow suit, so we may have trouble finding places to camp until we get to Pennsylvania or Virginia.

That means this week is dedicated mostly to prepping to go. All of our belongings that have gotten scattered through the house and all of the “stuff” we have accumulated has to found, culled down, and re-packed for travel. That alone takes Eleanor and Emma several days. Then there’s a round of final goodbyes to friends, last-minute errands, and of course getting the Airstream ready to hit the road.

There are two jobs that always come up at this time. The first is cleaning the roof of the Airstream. It spends the summer under cedar and locust trees that copiously drop branches and leaves on the roof. This begins to turn to mulch in the frequent rains, and the tannins stain the solar panels and roof. So I always have to get up on the roof and carefully sweep it clean, then scrub it down, without sliding off and injuring myself. I did this job yesterday during a brief warm up to 72 degrees (the nice weather lasted a few hours, then went back to the usual gray and breezy 58 degrees).

During my roof inspection I found that the metal TV antenna support that I used to attach our cellular antenna has broken. Metal fatigue occurred in one of the 90-degree bends, leaving the support and the antenna a bit wobbly. It’s still serviceable for the moment but I will have to design a fix for it in the next few weeks. I also noticed that the sealant around the antenna base is pretty bad, so that’s going to need replacement too.

In my book, The (Nearly) Complete Guide To Airstream Maintenance I have a section all about roof inspections (and other types of inspections) which explains what to look for when you are on the roof. I recommend that everyone do a roof inspection at least once a year. Lots of problems start on the roof, unnoticed until it’s too late.

The second job we always have to do is eradicating the Mouse Of The Season (MOTS). We always get one in the late Summer or early Fall, except in the years when we get three. Rodent visitors are a fact of rural life, and they particularly love Airstreams. If you were a mouse, you would understand the appeal: lots of fluffy pink fiberglass insulation to burrow in, plenty of food in the cabinets, and no predators.

This year’s MOTS made his presence known a few days ago when Eleanor discovered sunflower seeds under the bed. We cleaned up the little stash he’d left, but couldn’t find a nest. For the past three nights I have awoken in the early morning to hear the unmistakable scritch-scritch sound of a mouse chewing on something that belongs to us, so we’ve torn the front bedroom apart looking for further signs.

Usually it’s easy to find Mouse Ground Zero: plenty of tiny droppings and shredded nest material, but this time we have found nothing. I was tempted to ignore it because the mouse will leave voluntarily when we start to tow on Friday, but then this morning he crossed the line. While sleeping at 6:10 am I felt something in my hair and brushed it away. MOTS was knocked clear by the impact of my hand, and we both had a bit of a shock. The thing he was investigating turned out to be alive (me) and of course I awoke to realize I had a mouse in the bed.

He made a quick and invisible getaway of course, but then further invited my retaliation by going back to his hidden spot and making munching noises again. That sort of poor judgement has sealed the fate of many a house guest, and this case will be no different. MOTS must go.

Traps will be set tonight, baited with every mouse’s favorite Last Supper, peanut butter. Ever-thoughtful when it comes to food, Eleanor commented, “We can use the cheap stuff.” Apparently we have good peanut butter and then some sort of lesser peanut butter that is reserved for bad houseguests. (You have been warned.)

Of course there are other jobs to do before a long trip, but they are simple. Water, propane, cleaning, lubing the hitch, clearing off the spider webs, testing the systems that have not been used in a while, and such basic stuff. By Friday we should be ready to move out, and the Airstream will begin its 2,000+ mile journey back to Arizona, with stops along the way to be determined.

Sep 27 2015

Knowledge is power

New Airstream owners are full of questions, and one of the most common questions has to do with energy usage when they are not hooked up to shore power. They’re always worried about running out of power, a version of the “range anxiety” that owners of electric cars often have.

That’s a legitimate concern, because once the batteries run out of juice, everything in the trailer goes off: refrigerator (even when running on propane), heat, light, water pressure … even the hitch jack won’t go up or down anymore. If it happens to you, you won’t forget it. It’s a pretty traumatic experience to have the entire trailer—your home and security–go dead.

The problem is two-fold: First, new owners really have no idea of how much power they are using at any given time (the battery monitor is pretty inaccurate); Second, the batteries are typically sized with just enough capacity for an overnight or a weekend if you aren’t running the furnace a lot.

Airstream provides those batteries because most people don’t use the trailer away from shore power for longer than a night or two. Yes, despite all the discussions about “boondocking” you may have seen online, and all the blogs written by hard-core off-the-grid travelers, the reality is that most travel trailers go straight to a campground and get plugged in. Problem solved.

But after a while, a minority of owners start to pine for something more in their travel experience, and that inevitably leads them to the need for more power, more efficiency, and a better understanding of what’s going on.

The quick answer for many is a generator … (insert sigh here) I’m not a fan of them. They’re noisy (even the “quiet” ones), they put out smelly fumes, you have to carry a gas can or extra fuel for long trips, they require maintenance (although nobody ever does it), you’ve got to store them and lock them up, and they are expensive. They also do a crappy job of charging batteries.

Hey, before you generator owners get all up in arms, let me say that if that works for you because you need air conditioning or because you really like hauling gasoline around in your truck (whoops, sorry for the sarcasm), that’s all fine with me. To each their own. (But if you own a generator solely because of your CPAP machine, Google “12 volt CPAP” and see if you can find options there.)

Personally I like solar energy. It’s free and endless. You can set up a cheap 50 watt panel on a cord to the battery for as little as $150, and just toss it on the ground, or you can spend a few hundred and get a really nice setup … or even a few thousand for a really nice setup with all the bells and whistles. No matter what, you’ll have power anytime the sun shines and it’s scheduled to keep shining for the next five billion years.

But let’s say you are a real cheapskate and don’t want to spend a penny on solar panels or a generator. How can you get more boondocking time out of your batteries?

The short answer is to learn how to conserve. Cutting back on use of electrical power gets into the same skills that boondockers need for water and propane conservation. Take shorter showers (the water pump is a big energy consumer), do less dishwashing or learn to wash very efficiently, use fewer lights at night, set the furnace temperature lower and sleep with a dog, etc. Conservation takes a little effort and a little practice, but it pays off immediately.

That’s about all you can do without spending any money. Then it gets into some upgrades, which will cost you something but I think all of the suggestions below are well worth the investment.

The first thing I always recommend to people is to understand where their power goes. To do this you need a real battery monitor, by which I mean an amp-hour meter with digital readout like the Bogart Engineering TriMetric series, or the Xantrex Link series. If it doesn’t have a “shunt” to be wired next to the battery, it’s not an amp-hour meter; it’s probably a cheaper voltage meter that guesses at amp-hour usage. You already have that, so you don’t need another.

With a real monitor you can see what each light and appliance is consuming, and identify the big users so that you can avoid them or upgrade them. Right off the bat you’ll see that your RV furnace is a huge consumer of electrical power, so you might want to consider an extra blanket on the bed or even a catalytic heater (which uses no electricity). Incandescent lights (on older Airstreams) are also big consumers, so if you don’t have LED you should seriously consider upgrading the most-used interior bulbs or entire fixtures.

The second piece of advice I give ~~cheapskates~~ friends is to simply add more battery capacity. There are several ways to do this, and the best solution depends on the layout of your Airstream. Usually people find a spot toward the front of the trailer (such as under a couch or in an external storage compartment) to install a bigger battery bank. At the same time it’s a chance to upgrade to Absorbed Glass Mat batteries, which last longer and are safer. Sticking with the electric car analogy, more battery power is like going from a Nissan Leaf (with an 80 mile range) to a Tesla Model S (230 mile range). Suddenly your “range anxiety” is greatly reduced and you can actually go places.

Both of the amp-hour monitor and larger battery options are less costly than a “quiet” generator or solar setup, with the advantage of always working regardless of sunshine or fuel supply. For most people, more battery capacity and better conservation are enough to get a few extra days of boondocking.

See? Knowledge is power, and in this case more power is a mostly matter of more knowledge. You’ve got options to explore. If you find yourself addicted to the off-the-grid lifestyle, you’ll want to start looking at solar and generator options … and if so, congratulations! It means you’re enjoying your Airstream and that’s a good thing.

Sep 23 2015

Numbers games

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I am in the business of publishing stuff about Airstreams primarily because it allows us to travel frequently as a family. It’s a fun job and I meet a lot of interesting people, but the big benefit is lifestyle. With the Airstream we can go out for long trips and it’s not expensive. “Will work for cheap travel,” might have been my motto in the early days.

Every time we are forced to travel without the Airstream I am shocked at the cost and reminded why most families travel rarely. At the moment I have an uncomfortable sensation of impending poverty as a result of traveling without the Airstream. We are in Europe, and it’s lovely, broadening, and expensive. The apartment we’ve rented in Milan is very nice, but there’s no denying that our cost per night is strikingly high compared to staying in the Airstream.

This year the Airstream will be out for roughly 20-22 weeks (not counting the time we are in Europe), at an average cost of about $25 per day including fuel & campgrounds. (It’s a low number because many days we are courtesy-parking in driveways for free.) We can be away from home for about five months on the same budget as a couple of weeks in Europe, even if you don’t count the airfare. In other words, our daily cost is about 10 or 11 times more expensive without the Airstream.

So yeah, I miss the Airstream. Someday I’m going to work out an European Airstream and travel in that.

If we were using an Airstream right now, we probably would have camped at Camping Ca’Savio (a 45 minute ferry ride away) when we wanted to visit Venice. Actually you can camp there right now in an Airstream if you want, because they have six of them set up as permanent rentals right by the beach. Eleanor and I rode a ferry from Venice and walked across the narrow peninsula (stopping for gelato along the way, as is mandatory in Italy) to check it out.

Even though we can’t roam as much as we would with the Airstream, it has been a good trip. I find it useful to take some time to reflect on everything from a distance. The past few years have been heavy with obligations and challenges, and now I think we have the chance to get back to the sort of life we have enjoyed in the past.

That means working less frantically, leaving more time our daily schedule for ourselves, and taking more time on trips. For example, it has been about five years since we attended a good old fashioned weekend rally that we weren’t hosting ourselves. I miss the simplicity of just showing up and hanging out with friends and fellow ‘streamers without any obligations at all. I guess you could say that my goal for the next few years is to “see more, live more, do less.”

This is part of the reason why there will be fewer Aluma-events next year and in 2017. It was a lot of work to run around the country to host five-day events in Oregon, Ohio, Florida, and Arizona (all the while doing advance work for new events in California and Ontario). So in 2016 Brett & I will be hosting Alumapalooza and Alumafandango only. Alumapalooza will continue as an annual event because it’s the “homecoming” event at the factory.

Other events, such as Alumafandango and Alumaflamingo will show up perhaps every other year. Alumafiesta in Tucson is gone forever*. So if you want to go to an “Aluma-event”, don’t wait for “next year”—there may not be one.

* The brilliant campground management decided they could make more money by refusing rallies during “peak season”, AKA the only time anyone wants to be there. They offered that we could hold Alumafiesta in May. Let’s have a show of hands: who wants to go to Tucson in May?

Cutting back the events has given me time to work on other projects, which is why I finally managed to complete my Airstream Maintenance book this summer. If you don’t have a copy, check it out. Initial reviews have been great on Amazon, Airforums, and blogs.)

And that brings me to a minor rant. This has nothing to do with Airstreams and probably few people other than me care about this issue, but I have to say publicly that Amazon has done a serious disservice to niche publishers with their Kindle royalty scheme. You see, Amazon says that if you publish your book on Kindle with a retail price between $2.99 and $9.99, they’ll give you a fair 70% of the revenue. That makes sense. After all, the author/publisher does the heavy lifting in this equation and takes on most of the risk, including research, writing, editing, design, and marketing.

But if you set a price above $9.99, Amazon cuts the royalty to 35%. This is their way of discouraging “expensive” Kindle books (since when is $10 expensive for a book?) In other words, Kindle authors gets less money for books priced at $19.00 than for books priced at $9.99. Amazon snarfs up the rest, even though their work is the same regardless of the retail price.

This sucks for a niche publisher like me. I can’t justify spending years writing lengthy niche books (219 pages in this case) which only a few thousand people will buy, and letting Amazon take 65% of the revenue. Basically, their Kindle pricing penalizes people who publish specialized information.

So I won’t sell my maintenance book on Kindle. Sorry, Kindle owners. But the good news is that Apple is more reasonable, and so you will find Airstream Life’s (Nearly) Complete Guide To Airstream Maintenance” in the Apple iBookstore at $24.99. You’ll even save a few bucks compared to the print edition, if you like e-books. I hope you’ll give it a look either way.

We’ll be back in the Airstream in October. In keeping with the “see more, live more, do less” philosophy, we have no particular agenda for the trip back west from Vermont to Arizona, but we will take some time to allow things to happen along the way. After all, taking extra days in the Airstream is easy and affordable. That’s a place where the numbers always work.