Shit That Broke on our Summer 2025 Trip (so far!)

RVs are terribly built, and ours is on the low end of average. Pressure to be cheap and lightweight on a bunch of stuff that’s not safety-critical means that stuff breaks all the time. Here’s the list from this trip:

• Propane regulator cracked and leaked propane – Fortunately this happened before we left and was pretty easy to replace before anything exploded.
• Car battery kept dying while towing the car – We briefly test-towed the car before we left, but that wasn’t sufficient to discover that the tow car is wired in some weird way where the battery isn’t charged by the RV while it’s being towed. It looked like it was wired that way at some point, but upon further inspection there appear to be two completely separate wiring harnesses, but only one of them actually connected to anything. Fun! For the one that is connected, the RV does directly power the braking system in the car, which is great, but the car has to be in accessory mode to unlock the steering, which draws power, and after 2-3 hours of towing, the car won’t start. Fortunately, we had brought a jump starter to get it going again, but it wasn’t great to keep deeply discharging the car battery. We solved this by attaching a car charger via the cigarette lighter to back-feed the electrical system, delivered by Amazon to our campground in Bismarck. We connected this to our power station each time we towed.
• Numerous hinge screws pulling out – The “cabinetry” in this rig seems to be made of pressed cardboard, so it’s no surprise that screws are pulling out. We’ve fixed this by adding some adhesive in the hole and screwing it back in. Seems to work okay.
• Leveling jacks wouldn’t stay up – This one is on us; we didn’t check the hydraulic fluid level before we left. It was on our to-do list but somehow got missed. Everything was fine for the first few days, but then after retracting the jacks leaving Bismarck, one started slowly dropping down to about 3″ above the ground, which was OK on I-94, but would be a huge problem if we actually hit anything. After doing a bunch of research, it sounded like we might have air in the hydraulic line. We then checked the level, and sure enough it was low. After adding a quart of ATF purchased from Walmart in Fargo, all is good.
• Refrigerator hinge broke – Perhaps holding an entire refrigerator door on two hinges made of 1/8″ plastic isn’t a great design choice. Fortunately, Amazon can deliver a new one to Saginaw, Minnesota in only two days.
• Door doesn’t close all the way – Our RV has a common door type that incorporates a hard outside door and an inner screen door. The theory is great–you open the main door and both doors open, but you can also just close the screen door. Unfortunately this requires three parts to line up pretty closely, and doing anything “pretty closely” isn’t a strength of RVs. They get out of alignment all the time. There’s no real solution; we just keep adjusting things to make them mostly work, and then have to shut the door hard and pull on it when we engage the deadbolt.