Motorhome Maintenance

The beauty of full timing is there is no landscaping, painting or hauling the trash to the street. But your motorhome is the most complicated vehicle you will ever own. And it needs periodic maintenance to keep it healthy.

Inspect problems immediately: In 1967 Pete had a 55 Chevy that stopped shifting into 3rd gear. He drove it for months, on the freeway in 2nd gear (ouch!). Finally, he set aside a weekend to repair what he thought were bad "synchros". When he crawled under the car, he found a loose shifter linkage. In 10 minutes the car was fixed and third gear worked again. Check all problems right away. There might be a simple fix. If not, then you can decide to postpone maintenance if it won't hurt to wait.

Maintenance Schedule: Your motorhome, appliance and accessory manuals each have their own schedule for maintenance. We have begun to combine these schedules into one.

Service Locations: Coach Care can work on any motorhome. Your manufacturer's web site should have a list of service locations.

Motorhome Procedures

Reading your motorhome manual and all the appliance and accessory manuals can be overwhelming. Here we reduce these manuals down to a small list of important steps. Note that the procedures for your brand and model of motorhome may vary from these.

Setting Up Camp : Follow this list and set up will be fun and quick.

Dumping your Tanks: : Our very unique procedure for dumping our tanks came from All Pro Waterflow.com.

Camping with 30 or 20 amps : What can you do to avoid tripping the breakers.

Breaking Camp : This procedure will keep you from making mistakes or wasting time.

Motorhome Computer Tips

Paperless Office: Our business for 35 years (04-2012) has been to write business and inventory control software. We use our own software and modified it to become as paperless as possible. The only paper we keep temporarily are receipts. These receipts are eventually scanned and stored as .PDF files, allowing us to destroy the paper and yet have a computer image for reference.

Browsers: Until version 8, IE or Internet Explorer was a lousy browser and we preferred Mozilla's Firefox. Today, we recommend Google's Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer/8. Chrome is simpler and provides for a larger viewing area. You can download Firefox, Chrome, Opera andSafari at no charge.

Thunderbird Email: looks almost the same as Outlook Express but has nicer features. Download Thunderbird for free .

AVG Virus Protection: Paying an annual fee to just keep your computer running is robbery! How many products that you buy require you to pay annually just to keep it working? You can get the AVG anti virus for free for one non-business use PC.Download AVG for free.

File Backups: Trust us when we tell you that eventually you will lose some or all of your data. We backup all our computers onto a USB External Disk Drive. Ours is a the Clickfee one TeraByte (1,000 gigabytes) and cost $125 (04-2012). It backs up all three of our computers daily without any user intervention. Get it, use it and your life of photos and data will be safe.

Fixes and Recoveries: Windows is a system that crashes and gets screwed up all the time (Apple users applaud here). There are hundreds of "fix" and "recovery" programs for sale. The program Eusing Free Registry Cleaner does a great job of fixing PC registry errors. The PC registry is a good idea gone bad and programmers pervert its purpose all the time. This can cause programs to fail to launch, run incorrectly or even crash.