Conducting a Pre-Departure RV Checklist

Before you take off on any trip it's important to do a walk around to the car. Make sure you don't have the TV antenna up or compartments unlocked flying out down the road. So a good pre-trip checklist is important to have available. Write it out, type it out. We've developed this one here, get it laminated and go buy it just point by point, rather than try to go from memory. So I typically like to start in the front. First thing I look for then is the windshield and make sure I don't have any cracks. You know, maybe even in any small little chips or bulls eyes that are going to take off. When I go down the road, I also want to make sure that my windshield wipers aren't stuck to the windshield and that they're nice. And, and don't have a lot of pits in them because the last thing I want is to hit a rainstorm hit those windshield wipers and have just something that smears a windshield. I'm also gonna look to make sure that they're connected here, that I've got, you know windshield washer fluid. That's going to come up with through then I'm going to look inside here. I want to make sure, first of all this model has a circuit panel board. All the circuit breakers are outside here. And I want to make sure this panels on the top here nice and snug because if it's not I'm going to need a lot of wind cold air on the inside here. I'm going to check for engine oil. Right here, check the transmission fluid. I want to check my coolant as well, and I'm not going to do it from here. Excuse me. This right here. I'm not going to do it on the actual radiator itself. I'm doing it on the reservoir. That's down below here as well as the windshield washer fluid and brake fluid. And then also, while I'm down here, I want to make sure there's no leaves, debris, nothing blocking this radiator. Nothing that's jarred inside there, no nests or anything. If it's been in storage for a while, otherwise those could get really hot with the manifold and actually catch on fire. Then I wanna make sure I shut this and get it locked. Nice and tight. Don't want that flying down the road. When I take off, there we go. Okay, And I'm going to check all the lights functions those as well. And I've got Steve inside. So let's start with the headlights first. And to go bright. Okay, I noticed too. I've got all my clearance lights, my front marker lights. My side lights are both on and working well hazards, my hazards are working. Turn signal, horn. All right, everything's working fine. So now we go through our checklist. We're going to go around to the side. So as we get off to the side here, the first thing I want to look at is if I have an awning, now this one doesn't happen to have one, but any of the awnings they all need to be retracted, stored and locked. I don't want those arms flapping out and have the tendency of the arm awning to fly out and rip that fabric off the top of it. Make sure all my windows are shut and I don't have anything sliding open tip out. Any of that stuff. Open compartment, doors, all locked. I see you have one here. That's in one that's not, so that the clips are there. Now. I don't typically lock my actual lock when I'm going down the road, because I'm just stopping. Occasionally. If I'm going to go sightseeing for a while then I might lock it or leave it out in storage. Now also then what I want to make sure is that my step here is on and we can see that it is on. So when I shut the door It's off, I guess the reason that step was retracted is when Steve turned the ignition on, it does have an override for the ignition to pull that in. It doesn't always work. So I make sure that this light is on and I can see the light or the switches on. I can see the light is on underneath here. So when I come in, those steps are going to retract and I don't have to worry about them going down the road. Entrance, light, that's off. Propane now here's another compartment that we have open. You need to make sure both of those are shut, nothing there. Okay, this is solid snug. I've lost a couple of these over time. So I make sure that that's nice and snug. Now here's my propane. I like to travel with the propane off. And that is off. And the reason is, is if I go, I've got lines Run right along the side here, right along the side of my cabinet tree to go to my refrigerator and to my stove. If I side swipe a sign, somebody hits me. If one of those fittings works loose. I don't want to have propane open propane being able to flow inside. Plus I don't want to have an open flame, especially if I go into any kind of filling station I'm going to have to stop and make sure those flames are off. So I'm going to also shut all the open flames off when I traveled down the road and we'll do that when we go inside. So we got another KIPP here. That's gotta be secured. One of the things that we did not do in the front and I'm going to have to go back up and do it here. I just noticed it on my sheet. Here is I'm going to check every one of the tires before I go. I want to visually look at the tires for weather checking. I want to make sure I don't have any tread issues going on and check the pressure both outside and inside duels. You can't tell the difference between 10 PSI less in a tire just by glancing at it. And we'll show you that in the front here as we go around we've got a backdoor here again. I typically like to make sure this one is locked when I'm going down the road. Cause I'm not really using that one. I've got another door here Shut and locked. Everything here is secure. So now as we come around the back of the unit I want to test the lights back here. So I give Steve a visual signal on the inside. There we go. We've got our running lights are working. Let's try our left or right side left side. Excuse me, turn signal. Right side turn signal. And I have a turn light out. So that's good to know. Let's try the brakes. Same thing. We got a brake light out. So we've got a bulb there that needs to be replaced before we go in, let's put the unit in reverse. We've got our reverse lights work fine. And the last thing is hazards. And again, our one light is out in that corner. So that needs to be fixed. Let's turn on the headlights just so we can see the running lights. Okay. Our running lights. We do have one running light out up there. So those need to be fixed before we take off and go down the road. Now the last thing in the back of that I'm going to do here. I'm going to set this down. I want to just get up and visually check on the roof. I'm gonna climb up this ladder and I'm gonna look at a couple of different things. I want to make sure that the antennas down verify that I want to make sure that my air conditioning shrouds are intact that the bolts are on top and I don't have to get up there and go through everything. But I'm just going to do a quick visual inspection. Make sure there's nothing that looks out of the ordinary. Any vents that may be open that I have to do my air conditioners look good. Nothing out of the ordinary refrigerator vent is on. You see a lot of air conditioning strides out on the highway and that's because people aren't visually inspecting them. So coming around the side here the next thing I want to do is play that up there. I'm going to check my generator compartment And I'm doing that because a lot of the generators have a cover over them. That just basically snaps on in, in some grommets. And if I don't have that in that could go flying out down the road and take off. It's not uncommon for somebody to come out and do a little generator work. Especially if it wasn't running, they might've come out in a and prepped it a little bit. So this one doesn't have one but that's on my list just to check and make sure everything's good in there. So again, we look at the winds, windows are all shut here. First thing I noticed here is my city water fill. I did not put my cap back in, so I want to make sure that's in, in snug. I don't want any dust debris stuff coming in. It's it's not critical, but it's just good good maintenance. Check my tires down here. I want the proper PSI on the tires. Now I get to the service center. I want to make sure that my hose is unhooked from the dump station, that my water's unhooked my electrical's unhooked. So I have all that on my service center. Dump valve shut, hose cleaned and stored covers connected. I want these all connected in here too. I don't want any, especially if I get into a rainy situation and I don't want any water shooting up from the road inside. If I got a cable TV connection in here make sure that's disconnected. Everything's back in place and the water is disconnected. So everything's stored in its place. Not going to bounce around too much shut latched, and again, if you want to lock it here, one more deal. Steve, if you could go back inside I want to check my clearance lights on the side which I did not do earlier. I have a clearance light. That's working up there and I have one that's not working here. So I'm going to have to replace this bulb before I go out in the road again, door shut here. If I have any slide rooms, I want to make sure they're all shut. I do have a window open here. So I inside I'm going to go in and make sure that's shut about the slide rooms. Have to be in. If I have braces inside, I need to put those on too but this one doesn't have any slide rooms, but I got it on my list here. And the last thing then is leveling jacks. Now a lot of models will have a driver's door right here and my leveling jacks controls are here. So I want to just do a quick visual inspect. I have no leveling jacks down, so don't have to worry about those. Now. Here's where I'm going to show you tire pressure, this tire right here Is running right at 100 PSI. Let's go over to the other side and take a look. What that tire pressure is. We'll just go around the corner here. And we see right here, we're at about 85. So we've got quite a difference in that. But looking at the two tires, just glancing at them or taking the trucker's mallet and hitting him. You can't tell that, make sure you check your air pressure. This has got to be go up to a hundred PSI before I take off. Now, something else that I like to visually inspect and you can see it on this unit here is I'm not gonna take and pull the tires off the rims off and check the brakes all the time. But I see quite a bit of brown dust in here, that's brake dust. That's telling me I'm starting to get some in there. So the more I get, the more buildup I see of this the more I'm going to kind of see how my brakes are. And periodically I'm going to have a service center probably take that off because that's a that's a pretty good indicator that these brakes are starting to have a little bit of wear maybe nothing to be critical about. So now let's take our list and let's go inside. So continuing inside the coach we're going to start up in the front. And the first thing I want to do is I want to make sure my TV is secure. I've got a strap in here. So I'm going to have that buckled up. I definitely want these secure that's glass. And that starts to bang around as we go down the road that could break that glass and and we'd really have some issues there. We've got our windows are shut, locked over on this side. We've got windows shut and locked and a map light up out of the way, tables retracted. One of the things that this one has a lot of people like to do it. They'll put a little reminder that tells you that check your TV antenna. And this is something you can either clip to the keys. So as, as the last thing you do is get in to turn the engine on. You notice that that's there. Some people will put a sock over the front of it. Now some of your newer units actually have a log digital log. That'll go through and tell you a certain items in those a Freightliner chassis, for example the manufacturers can put, check your antennas check various different things inside. Some of them will put just a dummy light. We call it has the antenna light that comes on but it doesn't, it isn't actually tied to the antenna. So it's doesn't mean it's necessarily on. It's just more of a reminder that, Hey, go check that check your steps so forth. So once we know for sure, when we come back here that our antenna is down and we verified that when we went up on the top of the look, but here we can see that I can't I can't put that down anymore. So I'm just going to hang this back up on my spot aside here. So anything I have inside, I want to make sure I get rid of it because it can become a projectile. I have something set it on the counter, on a table in here. I have a, a collision that's going to shoot forward. So I want to make sure that everything is secure coffee maker like this here. It's good and, and secure on the front of it. I want to make sure my furnace is off my refrigerator and my stove top everything that could have a pilot light needs to be off. And we turned our gas off earlier. So it's not going to light, but some of them will still try to spark. So I don't want that spark even coming because when I get into a fuel stop, I don't want to have any type of spark or open flame, you know, in case there's any fumes in the inside of it. So as we come back a little further, one of the things that I do when I take off too, is this has a tendency to be pretty loud as I go down the road. So I'm actually gonna just put this right there like that. So when I put this down, okay. That's nice and quiet and I don't have to worry about it. Make sure my refrigerator is off the door shut. And if it has a lock position, lock it that'll keep it cold in there but it also keep it from flying out. All the lights are off. A water pump is off water heaters off check the all the furniture is stowed. This one I like because it actually has a brace down to the bottom. So it's not going to fly up and down on me. But if you've got a chair a hook loop chair that you've moved somewhere make sure it's secured. If you've got any additional chairs, some of the freestanding dinette have a folding chairs that come out, get those down, stole them, get that on your list. Then it, and I make sure all the doors are secure. This is a pretty common thing as you're going down the road. If you don't have this door secure and you make a, you make a turn, it goes And that gets very annoying. So I want to make sure that that is snapped. All these are, are hooked. Again. Anything inside needs to be needs to be put away. So it's not going to go all over the place in the bathroom. I want to make sure there's nothing on the countertop. If I have something in the shower base in it needs to be fairly secure because if I got that bouncing around in the shower it's going to scratch it up really bad. If it's heavy, it could break my shower pan. So I want to put that in. And then the last thing on my list is I want to make sure I have my license my registration, and my insurance. Before I take off down the road. Now there's a couple things left out in the campground that we're going to do. So then just a few things left in the campground. I like to walk around the campground make sure all my garbage has been put away, thrown away. I didn't leave anything out, no food, my campfire. I want to make sure that's completely doused and there's no food or anything in that either because that could get rotten and you could animals attract animals and so forth. So I'm going to make sure that's all up. I also have then all chairs, equipment. So your list is going to change a little bit as you have different accessories things outside that that you want to make sure to put away. If you have pets, you know, that's you're going to make sure that not only you brought the pets but you also got the chains or any kind of enclosures that type of stuff that you didn't leave there. Now what we didn't cover in this that's typically on my checklist is trailer towing or dinghy towing, I should say. And since this unit didn't have it we didn't see that on the back. But if I have a dinghy that I hook up I'm going to check the hitch. I'm going to make sure that my pins for my bumper on the on the actual unit itself, the blocks are intact. I want the safety chains secure on. I want the electrical system. I'm gonna check all the blinkers and, and lights for that just like we did with this unit here and make sure everything's secure on that. So if you do some dinghy towing make sure you put that list together but take a little bit of time. Do the walk around, make sure you have a checklist. You're going to avoid some costly repairs in the future.