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Transcripts
There is nothing worse than a faucet leaking water until it turns into a flood, then it becomes a nightmare. This is Eric Stark with the smart RV podcast, delivering the smarts. You need to enjoy the freedom of the RV lifestyle. Without the fear of breaking down. So I'm back on the saddle, you know, having COVID then it turning into COVID pneumonia was a very rough go.
You know, it's still with me. It's probably gonna be another couple months before I'm over it, according to the doctor, but I'm doing well enough to get back into doing podcasts. I'm at work for five hours a day now, which you know, is a great thing from sitting at home and not be able to do a thing for weeks.
Back into the game, the podcasting I missed, I missed doing the episodes. It's great doing these. And so I wanna continue. And the plan is to not have any more problems and be regular at this from here on out, unless something comes up again, like another sickness or something. And I understand a little more about COVID and what other people gone through when they've, you know, got COVID how bad it can be.
It sure is an eye opener. Not that I want to. Go through that again, to learn a little bit more about it, but it was a rough go here. I am. I'm doing the episodes again, and it's great to be back. And I also want to thank everybody that sent me emails and texts, you know, concerned about me and asking about me.
That was great. Very great. Makes you feel a lot better, you know, when you're sitting there in your own misery and there's people that care about you and it was also family and friends as well, who reached out to me, it was awesome. But here we are. We're back living the RV life. Fuel prices. Everybody knows fuel prices have gone up and we're not gonna get into the politics of it.
We're not gonna get into the, the war that's going on in Ukraine. We're just gonna talk about fuel prices looking at, from an RV standpoint. What I'm gonna do is I'm just quickly break this down. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it, but it's, to me it's pretty obvious the math explains what it costs to go on a trip.
And now this is just a trip. So any other expenses you have aren't included in here? So. If, you know, fuels become expensive for you to commute to, and from work, that's not part of this equation. I'm just breaking this down. Cuz what I hear is RVers or people in general, just have a tendency of grabbing a number out of the sky.
And it's just what we do. I mean, I do it sometimes as well. You know, you kinda, oh, it's gonna cost me a hundred bucks to go there. and in reality it might only cost $50. But we're not doing the math, you know, you just kind of budget out a hundred bucks and you're good with that. And if it's less great, you know, you probably don't even think about it after the, the trip or the, whatever it is.
You had to do run to town, you know, here run to towns, 50 miles away. So cost a couple bucks to do that, depending on what I'm driving. It's for simplicity here, or we're gonna go with a vehicle that gets 10 miles to the gallon. You're going on a hundred mile trip and gas is $4 a gallon. So you do the math gas will cost you 40 bucks.
Okay. 10 miles a gallon, a hundred mile trip, $4 a gallon. So gas will cost you $40. If you go on a, um, if gas goes up to $50 or excuse me, five $50 a gallon. Wouldn't that be crazy? Okay. Five, $5 a gallon. Now that trip will cost you F. $50. For some reason, I'm having a hard time with this math, even though it's so simple.
So it costs you $50. So that same trip going from $4, a gallon to $50 or $5 a gallon is now gonna cost you $10, more, $10. Okay. And so doing the math, sometimes you help realize that know it's not as expensive as you thought. So if you're going on, uh, that same a hundred mile trip and gas goes up to $7 a gallon.
So now it's gonna cost you $70. So that's $30 more than the original at $4 a gallon. And depending on where you're going, the length of the trip, the mileage you get, you know, those numbers are gonna change, but try to do that math. And the reason why is you might see that on a very long trip, it might cost $300 more that it did yesterday.
You know, let's say $4 a gallon. Now it's $6 a gallon. And $300 on a long trip can just be cutbacks, you know, maybe cutting back on some things before you go on the trip, when you're on the trip, you know, eating in the RV, maybe cutting out a couple little things that are gonna offset that $300. If it's a budgetary problem, if it's not, then you don't have to worry about it.
But do the math, when it comes to fuel prices, otherwise you might be short changing yourself and not using your RV when you could be. And of course everybody's budget is different. So it depends on your overall budget. What other things are going on your life. So keep that in mind, use the RV, enjoy the RV life.
Okay, so now there's a couple things that are coming up. And I talked about this in that short little podcast. I did, you know, 10 minutes a while back. Just let you know what was going on, where why I wasn't doing any podcasts on May 6th, as it stands right now, that'll be my 100th episode. And we started out as radio Arizona RV now hour, the smart RV year, but it'll be the 100th episode, episode of a podcast that I've done.
And so what I'm gonna do is do that live and it's probably gonna be on YouTube and I'll give more information out as it comes. And the episode is gonna be about the challenges it took to get to 100 episodes and believe it or not, it's been kind of a long road and not, not fraught with just, you know, Earthquakes and fires and floods, but just it's been a long road.
And another thing we're doing, and this is pretty cool, actually, both of 'em are cool, but this one I'm really looking forward to in July of this year, we're calling it come to Montana in July month, come to Montana in July. We are working on this tirelessly, coming up with all the places in Montana to go to what there is to do here, different parts of the state.
In fact, we came across one, this dinosaur trail, where you can go to all these dinosaur museums throughout Montana. It's actually really cool. Um, I was looking at it and I'm not into dinosaurs, but I thought this is pretty awesome. But we're gonna be working on this. And really what we want you to do is while you're in Montana, come by our store, come see us, see what we do, meet me in person.
I wanna meet you. And we're gonna have giveaways from our, some of our suppliers manufacturers we're working on all this. And if you need something unwire here that we do, we can certainly do that. So we're looking forward to that. So that's gonna be come to Montana and July and more. Information's gonna keep coming out.
It's gonna be on our website pretty soon. In the meantime, we're working on a map we're finding stuff to do in every county. So we're, you know, putting a lot of work into this. Montana is a cool state and there's a lot of things to do here. And during the summertime, it's an awesome place. The weather's perfect, especially in July.
That's why we picked July. So it's gonna be come to Montana and July. So put that on your calendar and it's anytime in July, whatever works for you and depending where you live, you know, it might be a journey in itself to get here. But man, that's what makes memories, the family will love it. If you have kids at home still, they'll love it.
It's a great place. Fishing. You know, you got the great outdoors. There's boating, there's hiking. There's a zillion things to do here. Bicycling. Just kicking back and enjoying the scenery. So that's Montana in July. And so there will be information on our website coming up soon and it's gonna just gradually get more and more bigger and bigger as time goes on.
So check the website out for that, not today, but maybe in a week or two we're, you know, still putting it together maybe and sick, really set things back. So, all right. So now staying on the road. And this is where we're gonna talk about that. Leaking faucet, that one, that turns into a flood when you least expect it.
And you know, this principle can apply to a toilet. It can apply to anything in the plumbing system. It's just a customer related to his experience about a leaking water for asset and what he did to solve his problem at first. And I'm gonna call this person camper X. I like that name, camper X, you know, it has a certain thing about it.
So I was talking with camper X on the phone and he related his leaking faucet experience with me. Now, camper X knew he had a leaking faucet. It was in the kitchen and he, and he just ignored it for a season, basically. I mean, the, this guy just did not want to deal with this faucet. And in some ways I don't blame him.
You know, sometimes I put off things that are. really not that difficult to do in my mind. I've made it harder or it's just, I'm lazy that day, week, month, or whatever it might be. So he has this leaking faucet and he just doesn't wanna fix it. It's leaking under the sink and he couldn't tell if it's the faucet or one of the water lines going to it.
You know, he really didn't put a whole bunch of time into it. You know, it could have been just a rubber seal of fitting, but he wasn't gonna do that. So what he does is he rigs up this small bucket. He puts a towel in it. So the towels in the bottom. So when the drips hit the bottom of the bucket, it doesn't make as much of a noise.
It hits the towel, softens the blow, right? So he puts the bucket underneath the leak. He turns on the faucet, makes sure the water's going into it. So now in his mind, he has solved the leaking faucet. Although he fixed the leaking faucet, did he, he just put a bucket underneath there, the leak still existed.
So he forgets about it. He goes on using his RV as usual and keep in mind, he did this at his home. This wasn't a emergency repair out in the wild where that's all he could do. He did this in his home. He methodically planned this and he executed his plan. And then, like I said, in his mind, he solved the leak that gets him by his temporary fix, gets him by for one season.
And in his mind, life is good, man. He's, he's done it. You know, this is so easy. So now season number two comes up, you know, he does, his usual gets the RV ready and he does a couple trips and he is out camping on, you know, trip number two, three, whatever it is, it was still earlier in the season. And he, he hears his leak.
You know, he here's this noise underneath the faucet now and the, the cabinet. Sounds a little bit different. So he opens up the cabinet and now the drip is a steady fr uh, stream and it would fill up the bucket in about five minutes, camper X, he's got a problem. He has to take action on this, cuz he can't keep putting a new bucket in every five minutes.
So he decides he's gonna turn off the water, you know, disconnect it from the RV and he's gonna dig into the problem. So he, he takes off the water lines, going to the faucet. And now this faucet is a it's a 10 or an eight inch center faucet. It's not a single leg. Evert has the knobs on each side and it's one of the less expensive faucets.
And now he didn't put it in. It came with the RV. So the entire faucet is plastic. Okay. Now just keep that in the back of your mind there. So he disconnects the water lines and he looks at the, the rubber seals and they looked okay to him. He didn't really see that they could be the cause of the leak. So now he decides to take the faucet apart.
He's gonna dig into this even more now. So he take aches, the faucet out and camper X uses his x-ray vision to inspect it. And immediately he sees a crack in the plastic housing, the stem and bonnet screw into. And if you've had a faucet apart, you understand what I mean, the stem and bonnet on the right and left hand side of the faucet.
That's what your hot and cold knobs are on. Then you have a plastic housing connecting them and the, then it's plastic, you know, where the water lines go up, the threaded portion. So it's all a plastic and they do crack. Sometimes it's from freezing, you know, not winterizing it. Sometimes they just crack.
So he sees this crack. And he goes, okay, awesome. I found the problem. So what he does is he kind of tweaks the, the housing sum and it just breaks all the way. Oops so now his faucet basically is in two pieces, so there's nothing he can do to fix that, you know, with the crack, he might have been able to get by, you know, with a temporary fix wrap, something around it, put a couple hose clamps on it, you know, to.
You know, like some, uh, fuel line or some heater hose, something that if he clamped on it with one or two clamps, it would probably hold it in place and probably stop that leak. So the leak, literally wasn't a water line. It was just going through the faucet and, and it just was going perfectly down through one of the holes where the.
The, um, threaded portion goes where the water line is connect and just running down the water line. It was kind of that little perfect thing that almost looked like a water line. He breaks it now. There's what, what's he, what can he do? He has to get a new faucet. There's no choice, but there's no store nearby that has a faucet.
So camper X he know, thinks about this. Well, what a, if I plug the water lines, well, there's no store around where he can get plugged to plug the waterline. So his trip definitely had a problem. He didn't really think about that when he put his bucket underneath there, what it could turn into down the road.
So that crack was small, then got a little bit bigger and then it became a steady stream, just one of those things and that thing doesn't and you know, that's not one of those problems that's gonna happen too often. Generally, it's just gonna leak and it's gonna be a mess, but this just, just kind of that per perfect little storm.
And, you know, when water leaks happen, sometimes it's just hard to want to dig into it. Just like Campex he didn't want to, you know, in his case he's like, Nope, but he should have done it the right way to begin with why he was in his RV, in his driveway, where he could get a new faucet, take care of business the right way, but he put it off and the repairs were not done right.
To be in with. This is where I come in. Water leaks happen. So when you have a water leak, you need to be prepared. Now doing a water, repairing a water leak at home is so much better than out on the road. And you know, sometimes when we check out our RV to go on a trip, we don't fully think about what we're doing or not.
I shouldn't say that we don't think we don't inspect the RV the way we should. And I do the same thing. And I've been hit with these little problems here and there, out using the RV. So the best thing to do is, you know, turn on the water. If you don't have city water to hook up to just turn on your water pump and let the system fill, turn on your faucets, make sure water's coming through them.
And inspect it for leak. You know, you don't have to spend hours doing this. You know, you can probably do it in 10 minutes, open up the cabinets where, you know, there's water lines going to the faucets. If you have one central area where a lot of water lines come together, depending on your RV, that might be the case.
Just inspect them, get a flashlight, look for drifts and flashlights help because it'll, it'll when you hit, if it hits the water, if there's a drop, it kind of reflects off it. So it makes it easier to see. Because sometimes you might not notice, or if it's a little tiny spray that's coming out. Recently, someone came with a pec tubing, had a little tiny pinhole in it.
You know, it was one of those holes that was so small that it's leaking, but it's very hard to see. So you wanna and look at for those things. And then if there's no leak, cause then you're good to go. But if there's a leak, fix it at home, do not wait. People come into my store who are traveling through here, you know, we're in a hot spot for winter or summer visitors, you know?
And so they come in, they got a water leak and they're up in the mountains at a campground, dry camping and panicked. And you know, sometimes they don't know what to do and they just come in with nothing. Other times they take out all sorts of bits and pieces of the water system, where the leak is and they bring it in making the situation harder to put back together.
They don't take a picture. They're not sure where things go always better to catch it at home. But if it does happen on the road, that's something where you just have to deal with that. But my point about that is if you know, If you, when you're out camping, sometimes panic sets in and you can make a simple problem.
A little bit worse. I think everybody's found themselves in a situation like that in their life. Maybe not related to an RV, but sometimes you just react real, real quick. Maybe it's on a computer. A popup comes up. You're not sure what it says and you just click a okay. and you just changed the setting on your computer and why it came up.
You don't know and why you clicked. Okay. You don't know, you just panicked. You wanted to get rid of it. You were doing something. And, and maybe it's not a huge thing, but there are times when it's huge thing. Sometimes we just overreact. And so when people do that, they come in and they got this mess and we, you know, we help, 'em sort it out.
We get 'em back on track and then they end up calling us from where they're at, or they have to drive down the road a few miles to call us, but we get 'em going again. You know, they didn't have anything with, they didn't have tubing, cutters, no tools. And that's the other point of this exercise with camper Xs.
He had the basics to get the faucet out, but he didn't really have enough. He didn't have fittings. He didn't have any water line, you know, doing the repairs at home is great. Cuz you can just run to the store. Even if you have a supply of fittings and water lines at home, you know, some spares, you know, if you use those for the, for the fix, go back to the store before your next trip and replace those.
So you have them unless you just have too many and you just wanted to use them up and that's fine. and I highly recommend keeping pecs tubing, you know, even if it's just, you know, three or four feet of three eights, half inch and three quarter inch pecs tubing. On hand three quarter inch is not that common.
It's not as common as three eights and half inch. So check your RV. And I've done a podcast on this before about having all the spares, but now, you know, we're just emphasizing what happens when you're out on the road. You know, camper X situation was bad, but you know, if you're gonna be gone for two, three weeks or a month, and maybe you're in places that are kind of remote, you're not gonna be in the big city or you're gonna pass through a city here and there.
but you don't really want to have to be doing with dealing with that. If you have to go three or four days without water, that's a hassle, especially when you're counting on it and your family's not gonna like it. You know, that, that just sucks, you know, especially for, you know, drinking, water, eating sanitary reasons.
And then there's different, um, fittings that will work with the pecs tubing. And, you know, I've been wanting to do this and I haven't got around to it. I think there's a list on one of my podcasts, but I'm gonna look into this a little bit more and I'm gonna get something put on our website. Not necessarily in this episode, I might have a link to it, but just a kit that you can buy or put together yourself.
You can buy it from me. I've been mean to do it. There's just so much going on all the time. It's just hard to get this stuff done some days. And being sick was a setback and I'm not using it as excuse. Um, we're trying to rework our website, Arizona RV part center. We're gonna rename it, redo it, but we just run into obstacles.
Um, time and just what it takes to do it. So, but be patient with me, you always gotta be patient with me. I'll get to it, keep those things in mind, you know, fix things at home. So like I said, you know, the, it doesn't have to be the faucet. It could be a toilet, it could be anything in the RV. Doesn't even have to be related to the water.
It could be an electrical issue. Don't let things go because sooner later it will fail and you know how it goes. It'll fail when you're on a trip. You know, like if you have an electrical issue and all of a sudden you don't have power in the RV, and then you're trying to diagnose and fix that out on the road, that can become an issue.
So take care of things at home on your terms. You know, I'm a firm believer in that do not put things to chance cuz things happen enough. I mean, you can be on a trip and do everything you possib we can. And next thing you know, you gotta blow out or two blowouts, you know, and that just adds to the. Stress of it.
You know, when you get home, you can laugh about it. And generally you do. Oh, that was kind of hilarious. Remember when this happened and that happened and. Try to avoid that it's better to not have that memory. It's better to have the good memories, the good pictures, you know, to replay it in your mind. Hey, that was a cool trip.
Everything went good. So work on that. That's uh, that's your assignment for today? Okay. Just kidding. This isn't school. All right. You're adults now. So you don't have to listen to me, but it certainly will make your, your trip better next up. So the Northern coast of Oregon is what we're gonna talk about the places to go there.
So again, this will be on our website and it's just in a kind of a general area. It goes from a, it includes haystack, rock seaside and the Fort Stevens ship wreck. So it's all in a, a small area. You can do, you know, if you were just gonna drive to 'em, you could do it in a couple hours. It's not that far, you know, so, but spending time there would make that obviously longer.
And one thing about Oregon, that's really nice. And also you can incorporate that part of your trip if you're coming to Montana from someplace and you know, you want to go to the Oregon coast, we're along the way. So the summer months in Oregon are dry, they're warm, but it also makes Oregon. That's their busy season during the summer.
And you know, when you go traveling in the summertime, the prices are higher, you know, but that's just the way it goes. Although you can go there September through October, those are great months as well. They're not as busy, but it's a little chillier and maybe a little bit of rain, but anytime you go to Oregon, you visit the coast, you know, bring layers of clothes, bring a rain jacket.
You know, cause the weather can change like so many other places along the coast, but Oregon is just a beautiful place to go. And it's an adventure. You won't forget, you know, you put this on your, you know, schedule today, a plan, a, a trip to Oregon. You don't have to pick the date, but just make it part of your.
Your RV destination, you know, the next place you're gonna go or the place after that. And I've been to Oregon several times and man, it's just really cool. And I've driven all over the state I've been in and out of every city. There's a lot to see there. It's very nice. And it changes you got to, oh, it's just awesome.
You got to see center of the state, you know, the central part of the state it's um, More deserty. If you will, compared to the rest of the state or the coast, then you have the Eastern portion of the state with the trees and you have, um, crater lake there. It's just an awesome place. So you gotta put that on your trip.
Okay. So that's the next stop now, RV envy, the coolest things you gotta have for your RV. Well now not that you got to have, but sometimes they're just nice. Sometimes you have to have 'em sometimes you don't, they're just sweet little upgrades. Now, one thing that I bought last summer was a Garin GPS. So it's a satellite GPS and I got the inReach model.
And the reason why I got it is because it has text messaging on it. And it has a sweet little SOS feature now here in Montana. And I'm, we're not a alone, but you can get on stretches a highway where there is no cell phone service whatsoever. And you don't see a lot of cars and you know, we're talking on some big highways and you know, it's even worse in the wintertime.
I mean, the summer is not so bad, but the wintertime, you know, you can go for an hour without seeing a car. So if there's no cell phone service, that means there's no communication, but the Garin satellite GPS in reach model has text messaging features. And what's cool about it is that, you know, it's a subscription, you know, they're not gonna give us that for free.
you can pay monthly, you can pay annually. But like in my case, I would just pick the months where I knew I was gonna be traveling and I would pay for that month. So you can pay one month at a time, two months at a time. So you're not locked into paying all year long for something you might not be using all year long, a GPS itself.
It's small, you know, it's a handheld model. So it doesn't have a big, giant screen. So it's not like looking at a big screen, you know, a seven inch screen or five inch screen that you might have in your vehicle, your RV, but it certainly is handy. And for me, it was mainly just if I can get my GPS coordinates, especially if I was off road and you know, sometimes in an RV you go up a dirt road, you know, you're gonna go here, gonna go.
For a campground, it's a little remote and maybe you get turned around just having the GPS coordinates. Um, you can find yourself on a map. You know, if you have a map book, one of those Topo map books, you know, you get your longitude and latitude and bam, you can find out exactly where you're at. It's not that hard, but the SOS feature is nice too, because.
Everything goes completely bad. There's no way out you hit SOS in the, in, you know, the, the cavalry's gonna come. They're gonna find you and rescue you and how that totally works at the end of the day. I don't know. I wanna press that feature unless I really needed it. Cuz you don't know what that's gonna cost and what they're gonna send out.
And you know, they're gonna communicate with you at some level, but you still have to be careful there. But the text messaging is nice, especially like if I'm in Montana, cuz most of the places I go, I could text one of my buddies and say, Hey, I'm over here. I just ran over something. I got two fly at tires or you know, this just happened and there's no stores around here.
Can you come help me? And. My friends will come help me. They'll do it just for the adventure, not to help me, but just for the adventure of it. So, you know, the, and again, that's the cavalry coming. So the Garin satellite GPS, the inReach model is pretty cool. So if you have concerns about, you know, communication while you're on the road, you know, those areas.
If you travel a lot or just travel a lot, maybe at, you know, a couple weeks at a time, you know, you can just sign up for that one month, but it's definitely a nice little item. So go to Garmin's website, check that out. It's not something I sell, you know, GPSes aren't in our catalog, but you might wanna look into it.
You don't to buy it, but it's a nice little handheld GPS. And if you go hiking and stuff like that as well, you can certainly take it with you. Another layer of protection there. So go to Garmin's website and check that out. It's the inReach model with text messaging capability. So that brings us to the end of this podcast.
And it's been great being back doing the podcast, and I appreciate everybody listening to it. And please. Let me know where you go on your trips. If you have questions about repairs, hearts, um, ideas for the show, you know, I've been getting some emails with some great ideas and I'll be start introducing those into future episodes, but go to the website to smart rv.com.
Use the contact us page there you, you can email me. You can text me, you can do a video message to me, and sometimes it takes me a while to get back. You know, cause I get so many or other things are happening, but I respond to every message I get. You know, there was one that I saw the other day that came in while I was sick and I didn't catch it, but I responded to it, you know?
So it's, it's, I'll get back to you and if you really earn a bind, just call me. That's probably the easiest way now don't go crazy. Everybody calling me. But you know, if you're in a bind, gimme a call. I have no problem talking to you. So this is Eric Stark with the smart RVR podcast. It has been great hanging out with you guys today.
If I don't see you on the road, less connect@thesmartrvr.com.
