Day 60 / 305

Saylorville Lake Sunny 70 Degrees

One of the biggest challenges of living full-time in your RV is navigating major repairs. I always wonder about people who aren’t knowledgeable in the repair department. We are lucky that Champ performs all of the maintenance and can fix most anything. ‘Most’ is the operative word here. In our weekend warrior days there were only two times in 15 years that we had to put our RV in the shop. One time was for warranty repair and another was an electrical issue that happened after a lightning strike that he was having trouble tracking down. Both times the unit was in the shop for several days, while they diagnosed and ordered parts. Since we didn’t live in it we viewed it as a bit of an inconvenience but not a life interrupter.

We started having trouble with the AC side of our heat pump the last day we were in Texas. This is a repair that requires very specialized equipment and parts that often can only be ordered by people in the industry. The prospects of getting a mobile service out here to look at it was slim to none. We were facing the prospect of having to take it 100 miles away to the Winnebago Center for who knows how long. Not a good situation when you are full-time and have two cats living with you. I called several heating and cooling companies and none of them would even consider looking at an RV. If there is a mobile RV Repair Service in Central Iowa I have not found them yet.

This is where the old saying ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ comes into the story. The last three years of my working days I enjoyed a slacker job working as a secretary and dispatcher for a heating and cooling company that had been a customer during my banking years. I took a shot in the dark and got hold of their service manager, who in my opinion is one of the best HVAC guys I know. He also happens to live near where we are and works after hours on his own.  He agreed to come to our site and have a look. Wheww! We dodged a bullet on this issue, but we know there is a real possibility a situation may require the unit to go in the shop, even for us.

I’ve read many horror stories shared by full-timers of valuables being stolen from their RV while in the shop. Units not being plugged in and food spoiling in the fridge. Being left hanging for days or weeks once the shop has the unit. The stories are many and none of them pretty. The moral of this story? My favorite 4-letter word, Plan. Just like the Emergency Room situation in March, this is another area where a little proactive research when you arrive at a new area will be well worth the effort if the situation arises.

Until tomorrow…