Month: January 2016 (Page 2 of 2)

After an exciting morning purchasing and picking up our new RV, we arrived home. The batteries? Yeah, still dead. Despite driving home and charging them with the engine generator, once we arrived home and turned off the engine, the battery light on the disconnect switch dimmed and went out. So we dutifully plugged it in to power and went to bed for the night. Unrelated to this, but that night we emailed our salesman to thank him again for his help, to say that, yes, he was right, the ride was smooth, and that we would be mailing him the remote controls for the TV and DVD player that we had forgotten to leave in our Ranger which we had traded in. I could have saved that $6 postage had I known that I would be back to the dealer soon.

The next morning, we went out to the van to check on the batteries and found them again, dead. Charging all night had not yielded any power. We called our salesman to verify that the charging procedure we were following was correct – not complicated, just really make sure you turn on the battery disconnect switch to allow power to flow to the batteries. He verified we were doing everything correctly, but despite that, we still could not get the batteries to charge using either the engine generator or plugging it in to shore power. I attempted to call Roadtrek directly, to double check that I was doing everything correctly. I had to leave a message which to this day, has never been returned.

Batteries at only 3%

While looking around in the van, I also noticed that the solar controller was blinking. It’s a gray box in a cabinet with a few lights on it, and one of the lights had been blinking since our tour with our salesman. That seemed odd because upon inspection, it seemed that that light was a ‘Battery Overvoltage’ indicator, which made no sense because our batteries didn’t seem to be getting ANY voltage. While waiting for the vehicle to hopefully charge, I found the manual for the solar controller online. According to the manual, the settings on the controller were incorrect. The CS Adventurous eTrek package includes 8 AGM batteries, but the solar controller had been set to ‘Flooded Batteries’ which AGM batteries are not. The manual also ominously warned never to set the battery type incorrectly.

It was clear something was amiss – as nice as the Mercedes Benz van portion was, without power in the living quarters, it was useless as an RV. After 5 days of leaving the RV plugged in to power and praying for a sign of life in those batteries, I knew we were getting nowhere. On day 6, the service manager responded with an email offering to walk me through how to charge the vehicle. Not believing in miracles, (at least with this van) exactly one week after picking it up, I brought the RV back to the dealer for service on October 20th. The service technician saw immediately that the solar controller was programmed incorrectly, and the settings on the inverter which should have been handling charging my batteries was incorrect as well. I could have waited forever and those batteries were never going to charge. He adjusted those items, and did some quick tests on the batteries and determined that I was ‘missing a part’ and they would have to order a battery equalizer and install that once it arrived. This sounded familiar because I had previously read about another Roadtrek owner’s (LONG) problem with their eTrek system and an equalizer had been part of their solution.

I rented a car and headed home, figuring ‘how long could this take, a week?’

Yeah, no.

I arrived to the dealership on my scheduled purchase date on October 13th, 2015, and was met by my friendly salesman who was ready to give me a tour of the vehicle to explain the new features and how to use the various new systems.

The RV was opened up and ready for the tour, and it was plugged into power, which made sense as they were prepping it for me to pick it up. As the tour got underway, everything seemed fine, and we were excited by the prospects of all the new capabilities that our Ranger had lacked. In fact, the title picture in the header of this site is the panorama shot of our soon-to-be traded in Ranger and our come-see-me-I’ll-be-yours-soon new CS Adventurous.

Roadtrek parked at the dealership

But during our tour, there were issues with the power. Lights were flickering – the LEDs that lit the cabin area were flickering when the power sofa in the rear was reclined. Huh, that’s odd, I thought. The salesman’s explanation was simply that someone who had prepped the vehicle likely left something running which had drained the batteries. At the time, it sounded perfectly reasonable, though in hindsight, I’m not sure why there should have been power issues while it was plugged in to shore power. He told me that it would charge on my drive home (using that fancy engine generator) and I would need to plug it in at home to charge for possibly a few days as these batteries needed an extended charging time when they were deeply discharged. Again, that sounded reasonable. Hey, we’ve all left things running accidentally, right?

Figuring everything was OK, after the tour we all went in to the dealership to sign the papers and make it official.

If you get nothing else from this blog, PLEASE remember. When buying an RV especially, NEVER SIGN THE SALES PAPERWORK BEFORE CONFIRMING THAT THE RV IS WORKING!

I know that the buyer should always do his due diligence. But not being 100% familiar with the new battery system, it sounded completely reasonable that hey, they were just empty and by the time we got home and gave it some juice, we’d be A-OK.

WRONG.

We packed up and set off from the dealer with our brand new CS Adventurous. If ‘Someone’ had told us at that point, ‘hey, that’s a nice new RV you have…you know, you won’t be able to use it until at least next year’ we would have called them crazy and laughed. Unfortunately for us, ‘Someone’ never did try to warn us like that before we left to drive the 2 hours home.

Sometimes you get an itch. In my case, the itch was to trade in my Roadtrek Ranger RT Class B RV for a brand new Roadtrek CS Adventurous. I had only owned the Ranger for under a year, but as my first foray into the RV lifestyle, what a year it was.
I had never owned an RV so it was a learning experience to be sure. But motoring around from the cold winter through the hot summer, I took in more local flavor (and surrounding states’ flavor) than I had in many years. The decision to make RVing and boondocking in particular a more regular and frequent activity happened to coincide with the RV Show in Hershey Pennsylvania this summer. It was there, after touring more RVs than I could count, that I decided to pursue an upgrade.

Figuring the Roadtrek brand had been kind to me so far with my Roadtrek Ranger, I felt compelled to stay in the family, and was taken by the promise of what 8 batteries and a solar panel could do for me. As much as I loved the Ranger, as someone who traveled frequently with a Jack Russell Terrier as a companion, leaving the air conditioning on in the coach for the dog while we saw the sites that weren’t so dog-friendly required running the gas generator. As much as I loved it, I didn’t love the loud noise of a generator, and the promise of generator-free air conditioning in Roadtrek’s higher end models was alluring.

Following the RV show, I continued researching availability, and found a new 2015 CS Adventurous at a dealer nearby – well, nearby being almost 2 hours away, but there aren’t too many Roadtrek dealers. It had the options I was looking for, including the eTrek package which provided the aforementioned 8 batteries. It also came outfitted with the solar package which added a solar panel for trickle charging, an engine generator (really a 2nd alternator, but no more loud gas generator), and radiant heating which included heated floors! I corresponded back and forth with the salesman at the dealership, we settled on a price to include trading in my Ranger, and I made an appointment to come pick it up at the earliest date they could provide – October 13th. Little did I know what troubles were ahead.

Goodbye old friend…you are missed

I am publishing this blog to share my experience with Roadtrek when purchasing a new CS Adventurous. Read my story before you decide a Roadtrek is right for you.

Click here to go to the beginning…