Messages

Matt:

That is a bummer. It doesn't matter that you are many miles from a dealer. They can't fix it themselves anyway. Get a good local aluminum welder to do it. Have him check the other welds. LL will pay. This is a huge quality PR problem for LL and they will want to make you happy. Just like United Airlines and Dr. Dao ;-).

David

Mitch:

Do all Dometic refrigerator models that are found on LL's use 1/2 amp DC for their controls? Seems like a lot. I haven't measured it, but I guess I can believe 1/2 amp when the LPG solenoid is on and the burner is lit, but can it use that much long term on average? My fridge cycles  less than 50% on after it has cooled down.

I too have a single 70 AH battery and although I have only camped in one place for two days, it seems like my battery was less than 1/2 discharged (SG measurement) which leads me to believe that my average daily AH usage was about 15. If 12 of that was the fridge, that doesn't leave me much for everything else.

I will measure the fridge current draw with and without the burner lit in several weeks when we break out our camper from storage and post the results.

David

Not sure exactly what you are asking. Receiver height is dependent on the tow vehicle and its suspension. Heavy duty pickups have a high receiver height and small SUVs have lower heights.

You then buy a ball mount in various drops to get the correct ball height for your trailer.

What I suspect you want to know is the height of the ball when the trailer is level. For my dual axle 16TBS that is 18-1/2" from the ground to the top of the ball.

The single axle 16TBS will be different.

David

Let me try to answer some of your questions and hopefully ease your mind a bit.

A lot has beens said on this forum, the old forum and the other forum about post delivery quality and warranty problems. But I believe that the majority of LL trailers get delivered to the customer and nothing more needs to be done. Mine was that way. Many others have minor problems and if you are a decent DIYer you can easily fix them yourself at home.

But if you do have significant problems, your first source should be the dealer you bought it from. But not all of us have a dealer close to home. Any RV repair facility anywhere in North America can do the repair and LL will reimburse them. You need to first get LL's authorization to do the repair. Camping World for example has dozens of service facilities throughout the country.

If you are worried about failures on the road then Good Sams (a division of Camping World I think) has a service program similar to AAA. They will find a local repair facility and even arrange towing if necessary to get it repaired. In general this is for post warranty things.

Some RV repair facilities are good and some are bad, just like cars. I can't speak for dealing with LL in a non dealer repair situation, but I suspect that they are probably decent to work with.

Camplite's have R9 (approximately) insulation in the walls, which helps with the condensation problem. But if it is really cold outside and you are cooking inside then you may get condensation on the walls. But since the walls are either aluminum or synthetic, no worries.

Some have complained about the cosmetics of the new rubber roof sealing but not the water tightness of them.

The water and holding tanks are not insulated. It takes quite a bit of extra doing to insulate the tanks and get hot air to them from the furnace. You find these 4 season trailers on larger more permanent living size trailers. A Camplite is not a 4 season trailer that you can set up in a ski area parking lot for several days and have no freezing worries.

CharlieM and others have discussed winter camping issues extensively on the old forum. There are several things you can do: For moderate freezing temps, put a skirt around the trailer to keep the heat inside. That probably will be ok down to 20 deg if the inside trailer is heated with the furnace, even lower if you put an electric heater underneath. Charlie installed a water circulating system that used the hot water heater to keep the plumbing (but not the tanks) from freezing. I suspect that his system was also good to 20 deg. Below that you need to insulate the tanks and provide heat from the furnace which is not something a casual camper needs.

So, I hope that I have given you a fair assessment of quality issues on LL campers.

David

From your trials and tribulations it sounds like the vent may be mounted backwards. The opening should face aft and the hinge should be forward. I leave mine open at least an 1" or so on the road and have never had a problem.

David

You can go back and forth with LL or you can buy your own bolts for a couple of bucks at the hardware store. That is what I would do. CharlieM was one of the original LL owners whose coupler bent. He posted a description of his fix and the size of the bolts over on the old LL forum. The aluminiumcamperforum has a link to the archives that you can search.

David

As I have said so many times thatI sound like a broken record, golf cart batteries are built specifically to be discharged multiple times (about 1000) to 50% discharged and hold up unlike almost all others which do not hold up well if deeply discharged. And Trojan makes some of the best.

Great installation. Can you tell us about your solar panels?

David

I thnk that Dan Miller, or someone who knows, told us that LL simply purchases (or is given) the Zamp plug and it is wired to the DC system at the converter. You can buy a Zamp pigtail on Amazon or eBay, wire your own solar panel to it and plug it in. You will have to install a controller preferably near the plug. Maybe the plug is mounted so that its inside terminals are in a cabinet that is accessible. In that case you just wire the controller between the plug and the existing wire.

You can rig your own solar panel this way for 1/3 the cost of a Zamp system using readily available components from Amazon or eBay.

David

We did not roof mount our solar panel. We park the camper in the shade and use the 40' of wire to put the panel out in the sun. If you mount to the roof you will need to hit the frame when screw the brackets in. My recommendation is not to put screws in your roof and just put the panel out on the ground.

+1!!

We rarely spot our camper in the sun. Even 40' of cable often won't find sun for long. That is the big problem with solar unless you camp in the desert a lot.

Another approach is to carry along a second battery and place it and the panel in the sun wherever you can find it. Then swap it out with the one on your trailer when fully charged. A rig like that is also easy to move to follow the sun during the day.

David

It totally depends on how the unit was winterized. If it was drained down and blown dry, then you don't need to do anything. Just fill up the tank and turn on the water faucets until all of the air blows out and you are ready to go.

If you flushed with RV antifreeze, then there are two procedures depending on how you did it:

If you bypassed the water heater and drained it down and then flushed with antifreeze, make sure the bypass valves are set to normal, fill the water tank and open each hot and cold water faucet until the antifreeze is pushed through and you get clear water out. It may take a few minutes of flushing each faucet to get there.

If you didn't (and I hope that you did) use the bypass so that you filled the water heater with antifreeze, then you have a bigger chore. First remove the drain plug and drain out all of the antifreeze. Replace the plug. Fill the water tank and open one of the hot water faucets and let run for a minute or so to make sure that the hot water tank is full. Shut off the faucet and the water pump and drain the hot water heater again. Then repeat the hot water flush. It will probably smell and taste ok after the second fill and flush. Then do the cold water as above.

Electrical depends again on what was done in the fall. If the battery was removed and put on a trickle charger (the best way) then reinstall. If the battery was left installed with shore power connected then it is ready to go. If the battery was just left in place, then there is some chance it ran down and froze. If so replace it.

Good luck. And while you are dewinterizing, think about how you will winterize it again in the fall.

David

A little heat- propane torch will soften up even the permanent locktite and let you remove the fitting. Too late, I know ;-).

David

John:

My personal rule of thumb (and I think it matches some state's laws) is that if the trailer weighs 1/2 or less of the TV then you will be ok without trailer brakes. So if your Jeep is a Cherokee then you were pretty close. But I agree with you, install a brake controller.

Your sales person was a total jerk!!!

They are pretty easy to install yourself. All plug and play. All new trucks and SUVs have a trailer brake cable and connector, usually just to the left of the steering wheel underneath the dash. Unwind it and pull it out and plug it in to the controller. Drill a couple of holes low on the dash to mount the controller and you should be done. I would use a Tekonsha Prodigy P3. eTrailer or Amazon has them for about $120.

So you say that you smashed the 7 pin cable. I assume that was while backing to hitch up so that your TV wasn't hooked up as yet.  This is how I think that the wiring is done: From the trailer's connector the main power from the TV goes to the battery and than aft to the converter. There is no fuse (not good) at the battery but maybe there is one at the converter. So you probably didn't blow the non existent fuse. The other wires are for lights and brakes and are powered by the TV and if it wasn't hooked up there would have been no current flow so no problems. If your TV was hooked up then it may have blown the fuse that supplies charging power to the battery.

But all in all you should be ok. If you DIY, just buy a 7 pin connector and cable and disconnect each wire in the junction box mounted on the frame and wire the new cable to it, keeping the colors the same.

David

You might be surprised at how good the underlying aluminum is. I just finished repainting the window frame on my boat that looked about the same. After I scraped off all of the old paint and corrosion, it was pretty smooth. Smooth enough that spray on aluminum etchant primer filled it in smoothly.

But it would be very, very labor intensive and I agree that new painted panels (with proper surface preparation) is probably a better solution.

David

Rob:

Assuming that you have removable caps on your battery, checking the specific gravity of the electrolyte with a $5-10 gauge will give you a pretty good indication of the state of charge. If you don't have caps then you almost certainly don't have a deep cycle battery and it will fail prematurely in this service.

If you don't have caps, a very rough indication of state of charge is battery voltage. Sometime during the day when you haven't used any DC appliances for an hour or so, measure the voltage at the battery terminals with a good multimeter. 12.0 volts indicates approximately 50% discharged which is as far as you routinely want to go. Google state of charge vs voltage for further details.

But don't restrict yourself to campsites with electrical hookups. US Forest Service campgrounds, most National Parks and State Parks don't have hookups but are in scenic areas and have much better spacing between campsites than RV parks with hookups.

David

Doug and Alan:

That corrosion is exactly like what you see on boats that use painted aluminum window frames, but ony after many years in salt water. Aluminum requires special surface preparation for paint to adhere and avoid this type of corrosion. I suspect that there is no easy fix. Patches will cover it up temporarily but if the original surface prep wasn't done right, it will come back.

I suspect that the only permanent fix is to remove all of the paint down to bare metal and start over.

David