Читать книгу RVs & Campers For Dummies - Christopher Hodapp - Страница 64

The RV industry has gone slide bonkers, with not just one or two in a unit, but sometimes four or five of them. The single full-wall slide is also fairly common now — at the push of a button, one entire side of your motorhome expands, like Moses parting the Red Sea. It’s darn near miraculous.

The advantage of slides is, obviously, the added indoor space. The disadvantages are, to be honest, numerous. First, slides add a whole lot of weight — as much as 1,550 pounds apiece — which affects your gas mileage, tires, and more. Second, you don’t have to be an engineer to understand that a slide is a major compromise to the structural integrity of an RV, and there are consequences to installing one. Many common maintenance issues in an RV are an easy fix, but when something goes wrong with a slide, it can have far more devastating consequences. And where slides are concerned, the fact is that, sooner or later, something is going to go wrong. Here are just some of the possibilities:

 Water leaks: Leaks caused by slides can be insidious and can go on for some time before they’re detected. If you find that the floor around the slide is soft, don’t shrug it off — it probably means that water is coming in and damaging your subfloor.

 Drafts: Along with water, slides also allow in drafts, and this affects your air-conditioning and your heating. People who cold-weather camp complain of the slide-related drafts.

 Debris in the mechanism: To prevent this, many slides now have slide toppers (clever awnings that roll out automatically with the slide, to keep debris from falling in and causing problems). But doing your lubricant treatments, which are necessary to keep your seals in good condition, can be a bit more difficult if you have a slide topper. Give your floor a quick sweep before you engage your slide, for the same reason, possible debris.

 Pests: Pests of all sorts will have easier access to your RV interior. Enough said.

If you’re caring for them properly, the slide problem you face may be an easy fix, but they’re usually on the expensive side. Just be sure to check the warranty of any RV you’re considering, and ask specifically about slides. (More on warranties in Chapter 6.)

If you decide to get an RV with a slide, you’ll need to take more care making and breaking camp. You truly need to inspect your space before you go pushing that button —one tree branch you didn’t notice can cause serious damage.

A big RV with lots of slides can also cause an etiquette problem at your campsite. You pull in the size of a school bus, pop the hydraulic switch, and blow up to the size of a 747. Don’t be surprised if your neighbor is a bit grumpy over it. Always try to be polite and smooth things over. (RVers are, in general, the nicest people on earth, so it shouldn’t be a huge problem.) Always ask for a large pull-through space, one that’s designed for a rig of your length and width (most campgrounds only ask about length). The older the park, the narrower the spaces, so just keep that in mind when deciding where to stay.

Speaking very generally, people who spend a lot of time parked in an RV love slides for the added living space, while people who enjoy being constantly on the move find them an annoyance and often not worth the bother or added expense.

At an RV show, you’ll nearly always find the slides already open when you step inside. Never, ever be embarrassed to ask a salesperson to close those slides, so you can see what the unit looks like without them. You’ll also get a chance to see if they operate smoothly or if they shudder and sound like a couple of bricks thrown into a clothes dryer.

Can you still function in a trailer without opening the slides? The answer: No, you probably can’t. In fact, in the first trailer we looked at, as the slides slowly closed, we had to step away, toward the door. And after they were shut, the dinette was snugged up against the kitchen cabinets, and there was no access whatsoever to the bedroom or bathroom. The smiling salesperson informed us that this was the reason they’d put in a second entrance door in the new models, so you could still reach the bedroom when they were shut.

Worse, whenever we asked if they had anything without a slide, salespeople tended to look at us as though we’d slipped a cog. In the end, this was one of the many reasons we chose Airstream, because its trailers are slide-free. (Airstream only uses slides in its Atlas touring coach.) We decided that slides were against the laws of physics, and just weren’t for us.