A Retrospective: Best and Worst RV Mods
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We’ve made quite a few changes to the RV. So far, the best two really are a tie. One is safety related, and the other is convenience. On the merit of category, the safety one probably wins, but the convenience one is a strong runner up.
Safety: Titan Disc Brake Conversion by Performance Trailer Braking
This modification seems like it would be unnecessary, but I have no idea why they ship 40ft and 15K-lb trailers with drum brakes (except as a cost cutting measure). The disc brakes allow us to stop on a dime, probably in the same or possibly even less distance than with an unloaded truck. They’re that good.
Convenience: RVLock V4.0 Door Lock from RVlock.com
We wouldn’t own another RV without this. It seemed like a pricey investment at the time, but the convenience of not having to carry or use keys is huge and it was well worth the money.
On the other hand, I have to say that the worst modification we made was the whole-RV RO system. It’s great in theory, and having clean drinkable water from nearly any source sounds great. However, we’ve had nothing but problems with leaking seals – which pop up randomly after weeks of properly functioning. We’ll get a month of leak-free use before having to tear apart the system and rebuild it, then we’ll find a pool of water in the storage area where the system is installed. I’m not sure if we’re just getting poor quality O-rings (tried a few different sources) or the manifold is cheap (it wasn’t), or if we’re over or under-tightening (don’t think so)… but at this point it just takes up space because we’ve essentially written it off, and will be removing it in the near future. Maybe we have a bad manifold, but YMMV with this mod and our experience has not been great.
Moving forward, we’re going to be ditching a lot of the things we carry in the RV but don’t use: a large telescope, an inflatable SUP board, tons of smaller items that together take up a lot of space, and try to optimize our payload based on the last two years of use. We’ll be looking for some sort of fencing so that we don’t have to keep the dogs on tie-outs, we’ll be keeping the pop-up shelter and hammocks and folding table and chairs. But it’s time to look at how we’re using things, and get rid of what we’re not using to make room for what we will.
