Get An RV Pre-Purchase Inspection
I had read about the National RV Inspectors Association NRVIA and their qualified pre-purchase inspectors. They inspect RV’s before you buy them, like a home inspection you would get before you buy a house.
I had planned on hiring someone to inspect our RV before we purchased it, however, the salesman at Camping World talked me out of it. He said it wasn’t necessary and would be a waste of money because Camping World completely goes through everything on the RV before we purchase it anyway and makes sure everything is working. We weren’t going to pick it up for 9 days after we bought it, so they would have plenty of time to inspect it.
Besides that, to get the RV that we wanted after months of shopping, we were spending about $10,000.00 more than what I wanted. So saving the $500.00 it would have cost for the inspection sounded good to me.
Well, it turns out, this was our second mistake in getting ready for our full-time RV journey. (Read about our first in my previous blog “Pick The RV First”) A couple of nights after we brought it home we were going to stay in it for the first time for one night in the lot where we store it.
I was working on something outside and Sherry asked why we didn’t have any hot water. I said I just turned on the propane and it would take a while to warm up. She said, “No, there is no water at all coming out of the hot side.”
Well, after several phone calls to Camping World, Good Sam technical support, 3 trips to local RV dealers, and many hours crawling around in the “basement” of the RV, I figured it out on my own.
I don’t know who, but someone sabotaged our hot water heater. There is suppose to be a check valve coming out of the hot side of the water heater. There was no check valve coming out of the hot water side, but there was one coming out of the cold side, and it was installed backward! So no water at all could get into the hot water heater. Therefore no water at all came out whenever the hot water was turned on.
I don’t know if it was the previous owner or Camping World who did this, but it was obviously done on purpose. I have no way to find out who did this. However, at the very least, Camping World should have at least noticed that there was no hot water coming out when they did their “thorough inspection”.
It does make me wonder what they were doing during the hours I had to wait after I refused to spend $10,000.00 on the 3-year warranty. I wonder if this could have been one of the very expensive repairs they warned me about during the pushy sales pitch.
The problems continue
A week later, we took the camper on our maiden voyage at a local campground. Other than the rain and storms all week-end, everything went well…. Until it was time to leave.
As I was preparing to hook up to the truck to leave, the hydraulics didn’t work. I knew when I bought it the batteries might be bad, and Camping World wouldn’t guarantee them. So I figured that was the problem, even though we had been hooked up to 50amp electric all week-end.
However, the generator started and worked the hydraulics, so maybe the batteries were not the problem? I took the batteries to Farm & Fleet to have them tested and their brand new tester said the batteries were fine.
Sometimes the hydraulics would even kill the generator, so I thought it must be the hydraulics.
After many hours of testing, diagnosing, charging, jumping, etc. I finally had Winninger Automotive test the batteries. It turns out Farm & Fleet’s new battery tester is a piece of junk. The batteries were bad and they were the problem the whole time.
The moral of the story: Get a pre-purchase inspection. The few hundred dollars it cost you upfront, could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars and many hours of agonizing labor.
One thought on “Get An RV Pre-Purchase Inspection”
Nice Post!
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