Motor home repairs and thoughts on an extended warranty

NOTE: We are about two weeks behind in posting our blogs. As things are changing quickly in our country because of the COVID-19 pandemic, please understand that some of our activities and decisions would be different if they happened on the day the blog was actually published.

During these last months while we waited for our RV repair appointment, we developed a very long list of things that need to be fixed. Because of the length of that list (and its sizable price tag), our warranty company sent an independent inspector out from Huntsville, Alabama, to verify that everything fit under the guidelines of our warranty. That took an extra two days of waiting in Red Bay, Alabama, but we thought the inspector was very thorough and very fair. One of our biggest dilemmas was our hydraulic slides that move our huge living room/kitchen slides. You can see one of those deep hydraulic slides in the picture below.

We estimated that 30% of the time, these slides refuse to move when we push the button for them to come in. That is a heart-stopping moment, because there is no good way to budge these big slides on our own. One of those slides holds our entire kitchen, including a residential sized refrigerator! There's no way we're going to be able to put that slide back into travel mode if the hydraulics refuse to work. We've always gotten them in eventually, by killing the diesel motor and restarting it (over and over). It's taken as many as five restarts, and that can't be good for our engine. Each time we are ready to leave a campground we worry, and pray that those hydraulic slides will work. It's gotten so tense that we prefer to live with the slides in, rather than risk them not retracting when it's time to leave.

The problem with getting this fixed, is that 70% of the time they work fine. Of course they worked the first time at the repair shop, when we needed to demonstrate how they didn't work to the repair tech. So when the inspector arrived, we REALLY hoped they wouldn't work. Here's a picture of the inspector now, waiting to see if those slides will go in this time.

Denisa told him that we usually prayed that they worked each time when we were getting ready to leave a campground. Well, this day she told him that she was praying that they didn't work . . .

Her prayers were answered! We even had our repair tech there to check the electrical circuits to verify where the problem was happening. Now we can get that big problem fixed under warranty and Denisa will like her big slides once again. Success!

Other items on our long list included: replacing the motor on our front window shade, fixing a leaking shower drain and valve, recaulking the front running lights that were causing a leak, replacing our CO2 alarm, replacing the tread on our entry steps, replacing the refrigerator damper-control module, replacing the broken slide floor covers, replacing the water-fill valve, reattaching the metal grills over the rear engine compartment, replacing the gray and black water flush valves, replacing an overhead cabinet latch, and gluing on the fresh water tank overflow cap.

Because our holding tanks had to be completely empty for some of those jobs, we had to make an early morning trip to the dump station in Red Bay. We actually made this trip twice. The first time was in the rain on the day we were scheduled to begin work (before we found out we had to wait for an inspector). The second trip was just as early, but thankfully it wasn't raining. It was dark when we left at 6:00 a.m., and the sun was starting to rise as we left the dump station in Red Bay.

We got to experience a brilliant sunrise as we headed back to the repair shop, where work begins promptly at 7 a.m.

The two-man staff at Custom RV zipped through that long list, just like the reviews we had read said they would. They know the Tiffin motor homes better than any other RV repair place, and we felt good to be getting all this work done here. An added bonus is that we can get any parts from the Tiffin factory in town. That saves us the shipping charges that we have to pay under our warranty.

We've had mixed emotions about the extended warranty that we purchased from Wholesale Warranty when we bought our motor home. It's the first time in our lives that we have purchased an extended warranty. It makes getting repairs more complicated, and some times it would just be easier for Mark to fix things rather than waiting to find a certified repair shop. Several times Mark has fixed things that would have been covered under warranty, but we couldn't wait. Now five-and-a-half years into our seven-year warranty, we have used it four different times. This repair bill will now bring the sum they have paid over the amount that we spent on the warranty. But during those four repairs, we have also had to pay for a deductible each time, plus any shipping charges, plus diagnostic fees that were surprisingly high this time. So repairs aren't free, even with a warranty.

There is one other aspect of having an extended warranty that is hard to define by a dollar value. During these seven years, we had the peace of mind that if we had a major repair, we would have help to pay for it. When you use a motor home as much as we do, that peace of mind is nice.

We only had a couple hiccups in our repairs. After we left Custom RV, Mark was studying the receipt and realized that one of the things on our list didn't get fixed. We also found that a new gasket was still leaking. Whoops! But Mark did some googling and tightened some screws, and it looks like we are leak-free now. After camping at the repair shop for a week, we are headed 18 miles down the road for some renovations. We're glad to know that those big slides will come in tomorrow morning, as we enjoy the last evening's sunset across our now-familiar field. Besides having an extended warranty, looking out over God's wonder of another sunset is good for our peace of mind as well.