Classic Motorhome Mistakes to Avoid
Basic Mistakes to Avoid
We’ve made some basic mistakes in our motorhoming time; some have been quite costly and some just a bit inconvenient. We hope that by providing these we can help you avoid the same errors! If you have any of your own to add, please let us know.
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Check your tyres periodically, or get an expert to. We had a blowout on a tyre which was already on the van when we bought it. The entire tyre de-laminated and did considerable damage to the underside of the vehicle on a Spanish motorway- Keep your leisure battery topped up. If you let it go flat (over periods of disuse for example), then you’ll soon find it no longer holds any charge. We found this out when our heating refused to work one very cold evening on the coast near Skegness
- Driving off with your windows or skylights open isn’t to be recommended. We got away with this quite a few times, then finally we found our main skylight being removed with a loud band on a motorway. It cost us several hundred euro’s and a detour across France to get it replaced. We’ve met people who left windows open when driving off and having a similar ‘forcefully removed’ problem!
- Fridges need servicing. The gas burner they use only lasts a few years then dies and stops cooling your fridge down – the French engineer thought our failed burner was probably 10 years old. Not great when you’ve just stocked the fridge and freezer up
- Don’t let your van water system freeze! We’ve done it, and we know of others who have. It’s an easy mistake to make and basically destroys your hot water heater as the expanding ice peals open the metal pipes. You discover you’ve done it when you come to run the water heater and it leaks like a sieve. There’ll be a way to drain the water from your hot water system – make sure you do it before them temperature gets below freezing
- Awnings and wind don’t mix. We left our awning out while camping in Scotland, waking to a loud bang in the middle of the night. A storm had come in, the wind had ripped the awning off the side of the van and flipped it onto the roof, with one leg narrowly missing the windscreen. We’ve also met people who have accidentally removed their awning by driving the van into an obstacle like a tree
- Travel with spare fuses of the right type for your vehicle. Our Talbot express blew a fuse once which once again meant no heating on a very cold night in Scotland
Ha ha…I think we’ve all got a store of horror stories! Ours include:
1. Don’t leave things perched/hooked on the bike rack – we’ve driven quite a way with a bucket hooked on it, as well as candles daintily balanced on the rack.
2. Check before you enter a supermarket petrol station that the exit is as wide as the entrance..otherwise you’re in a bit of a tight squeeze…we more or less closed one petrol station for about 20 minutes whilst we inched our way out of the serpentine exit…
Don’t get stuck in mud!! I haven’t (yet) but saw someone bog himself down on our first trip in our motorhome. This was on grass at a farm site, looked like they’d just started using a new field which was soft ground. He had mats made from an old bread tray (I checked the problem out, and this is common kit to use), but managed to bury one. Even my Milenco mats wouldn’t help by there, and he eventually was towed out by tractor. Since then we always check sites first.