Battery Monitor In the May/June 2022 issue of Escapees magazine, I reviewed an inexpensive battery state-of-charge (SoC) meter, the HENGSHAN AiLi Battery Monitor. It has proven to be amazingly dependable and accurate. Available online for under $80, I think it’s the best value out there, and mine has survived in...
Here is a great little gadget for you motorhome owners: It’s called the Trik-L-Start. Simply put, it maintains your engine starting battery by borrowing power from your RV house battery bank. Many motorhome owners assume that their battery charging system also maintains their engine (or chassis) battery or batteries. In...
I’ve always wanted to be able to monitor my RV’s house batteries and know their state of charge (SoC). While you can estimate SoC by reading the battery voltage, it’s not accurate. There have been battery monitoring devices available for years, but the high cost, usually several hundred dollars, has...
I often find myself venturing off the pavement in search of boondocking. My RV is definitely not an all-terrain vehicle, and after experiencing a pretty good “stuck” on a beach in Baja, I started looking at vehicle recovery devices. These are essentially high-strength plastic traction boards designed to help get...
Does your RV vibrate and shudder going down the road? Do your tires show uneven wear patterns? If so, you might have tires that are out of balance. That usually means you’ll be taking the RV to a tire store to have the wheels balanced. Since tires tend to change...
We recently had the opportunity to test a couple of TireMinder’s tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS). I took the TireMinder i10 RV TPMS for a several-thousand-mile ride this summer, and Jim Koca, our Boot Camp director, tested the A1AS. For those of you unfamiliar with RV TPMS, it’s a device...
As a weighmaster for the Escapees SmartWeigh program, I’ve had the opportunity to handle and evaluate a lot of tire pressure gauges over the last 10 years. The program owns several cali-brated air sources, and we test RVers’ gauges at rallies and events. More than half that we test are...
RVs are exposed to the extremes of weather. Our rigs hang out at the beach, bake in the sun and endure the rain and snow. Rust and corrosion are commonplace, and we want our RV to last a long time—right? I’ve been using a product for many years that is...
Let’s talk about the universal plate repair kit. No, it’s not for dinner plates, or upper dental plates, but rather for plates where gas spring door hardware attaches. Many RVs have gas springs on their outer compartment and bay doors, and, all too often, a strong gust of wind (or...
It seems like we RVers are constantly dealing with leaks of some sort as we travel around the country. In the past, I have shared a couple of my favorite leak repair products: WoundSeal and EternaBond. Well, I have just discovered another sealer worthy of gadget status: Home Armor Flexible...
