Kirk W

It does sound like a loss of coolant problem, but there really isn't much here to go on. It would help us if we knew the make and model of refrigerator that you have? Have you checked inside the access panel on the outer wall of the RV? If not, you need to look for any sign of a yellow powder or mud like substance, any ammonia odor, even if faint, and see if the tubes from the boiler are hot and up at the top at least quite warm. Is there any cooling in the freezer compartment but not the chill box area? From the sound it would seem that you do not have a power problem.

Welcome to the Escapee forums and also to the USA! In order to license and insure an RV in the USA you must have an address in the chosen state to put on the title and the insurance. You do not need a US driver's license, but insurance will typically cost less if you get one. I strongly suggest that you consider joining the Escapees RV Club and then get an address through them. You can fly into Dallas fairly readily and there are several dealers there who are familiar with visitors buying and licensing through Escapees and probably the best known is PPL RV in Houston, which is near the Escapee offices in Livingston. You may also find it helpful to read this brief article about what you wish to do that was written by an Australian.

Here is a belated welcome to the Escapee open forums! We are happy that you came here and even more happy that our replies were helpful. Please continue to visit these forums and join in with comments or new thoughts.

Two possibilities come to mind. Since you ran out of propane before changing tanks, there may be air in the line that needs to be vented out before the furnace will light. Turn on the stove top burner and light it first to be sure all air is vented. It may take a bit of time before the air stops and propane begins, so that the burner lights. Once it is burning well try the furnace again. The second thought is that if you are not connected to shore power then you could also have low voltage from your batteries, which can cause that problem, but the more likely is the first.

From the service manual at Dometic RM2351 Diagnostic Service Manual

If the switch is typical, the light should turn on when the switch has 0 ohms and turn off when it goes to very high resistance. While you are working with it, check to see if there is 12V to the switch and if that 12V passes through the switch. It needs to pass the 12V when the door is closed. In most cases that would be with the button depressed.

If you are looking at the GVWR of a vehicle, that is the maximum weight that it should ever weight when fully loaded, so I see no reason why you would need to add weight. If you are looking that the dry weight, that really doesn't tell you anything useful because that is the weight with nothing at all in the RV and most people will add at least 100# per person for even a weekend and if fulltime or extended travel is planned, consider that you need more in the order of 1000 to 2000# per person and you don't want to exceed the GVWR, or gross vehicle weight rating. On the tow vehicle search, if you have a Car Max in your area, they are one of the easiest sellers to deal with because they do not play the games with price that dealers do. They give you a price that they will pay for your present vehicle and a price to buy the one you are considering and the two deals are completely separate as they should be.

Actually,the view that one could live at the Escapee address has nothing at all to do with the legality. The reason for it is that the state of Texas allow use of mail service addresses for all purposes. You should be able to just do an address change. Be sure to have your insurance and vehicle titles to that same address as well as voter registration.

If you can really do that, then you are probably right, but I highly doubt that you can finance a used RV for 6% and if you can, then you are probably right, assuming that your investments continue at the predicted rate. I strongly suggest that you shop loans first, both with the financial institution where you now do business and several others. If your credit is really as you say it should not matter what loan you do first unless you borrow too much for your ability to pay. But make sure what interest rate you can get before you choose to finance when you do not need to do so.

I agree! I have them on my travel trailer and am very pleased. They are one of the very few trailer tires that are American made.

I was not able to find specific information on the 2014 Jeep but it looks to be somewhere around 4000 to 5000 pounds. You can find specific information on it in the owner's manual and it should also be on a sticker in the driver's door frame. I highly doubt that you will find any travel trailers of 23' in length that weigh as little as 3800# when loaded. I have a 19' trailer that is an ultra lite and that is what it has for a GVWR. I would expect that a 23' trailer will be very close to 5000# or more. It is not generally that pleasant to drive if you tow at the maximum rated weight but you would be wiser to try and keep it at 80% or so of the maximum rating. You would probably be better served do go to something like the GM, Suburban or the Ford Explorer to tow with, but if you can find specific information on that Jeep it could possibly be used. What ever you do, don't go by advice of any salesperson.

That is true and from experience and from reading of the experiences of others, that is the reason that they often do have handling issues that require aftermarket equipment to resolve.

Welcome to the Escapee forums! I'm not sure how you have managed driverans in the past but I assume that you paid them. I would suggest that you try and find someone to partner with who can drive in return for you providing the RV. There are plenty of women around who are capable of driving your bus, if you prefer same sex travel partner. In fact, it hasn't been that long since there was a post by a lady who we looking for a companion with an RV. It seems to me that it would be much more cost efficient as well as removing the need to constantly find drivers for every move. There is also a SOLOs group within the Escapee RV Club where you may be able to find some help with this problem. If you are able to get there, the next annual gathering of Escapees, called Escapade, will be held in Rock Springs, WY next June.

I believe that the rule is to enable the to locate you, if they feel the need.

Welcome to the Escapee forums! We are happy to have you join us and we will do all that we can to help. As I look at the spec sheet for your truck that comes from Ram, I don't see how you came up with the towing weight of 10K#. It would seem to me that yours should be about 9,350# if we assume the truck is at it's gross rated weight, which is the safe thing to do. A better way would be to load the truck as you would to tow with it and then take that truck to a scale and get an actual weight. If you are thinking of a fifth wheel, then you need to have the trailer attached when weighing the truck to add in the pin weight. Most experienced truck owners will tell you that for comfortable driving as well as good truck performance and reliability, you should not tow more than 80% of the rated weight as a constant thing since that rating is a maximum ever safe weight and is not a recommended weight for everyday. If you go by the 80% suggestion you should them limit the trailer weight to 7,480#. I can tell you that I towed a trailer weighing 4000# with a vehicle rated to tow 5000# for a time, then changed tow vehicles to one rated for much more and the difference in handling and comfortable driving has been remarkable.

I won' try to match stories with you, even though I do know just a few things, having grown up on a Kansas farm with no indoor water but what was pumped from the well and carried into the house and part of my chores by the time that I was 6 or 7(as soon as I was big enough to work the pump). My first home with a flush toilet was a US Navy barracks. I milked cows by hand and camped with Boy Scouts in some surplus WWII Army tents. I learned to shoot a .22 rifle young enough that I really don't remember my first time. As to boondocking, I am not aware of any published dictionary that defines it, nor have I come across any source of rules about who is allowed to claim the term. I have tent camped with my family, have backpacked a tent miles from any roads, took my family into the roadless area more than 20 miles by horseback, as well as a wide range of camping in national forest campgrounds with only a pit toilet. Do I qualify? I am now 77 years old and while I have learned a great deal from my experiences, I am still doing my best to learn more and much of what I learned in the past has changed. There are lot of good people on these forums who have a very wide range of experiences and there are even some who are much younger than you or I who have had experiences that we will never have and who know things that we will never know. For all of this, I really don't know what it has to do with boondocking in an RV?

We share that experience. I joined Wells Fargo Advisors when my broker moved to that company since he had always done well by us. We began to bank with them because free checking is a part of the capital investment account that we have. That was back in 1999 when we first joined them and while I too have seen the news reports and even discussed them with my broker, because he continues to grow our accounts at a faster rate then the IRS required annual withdrawal (for us past the age of 71), we see no reason to change. It may be true that some employees of Wells Fargo were caught, does that somehow assure users of other facilities that their bank never does anything wrong, or might it that their bankers have not been caught so continue to do the shady activities?

I would take I-10 west to Quartzsite and then 95 north to Havasu.

Welcome to the Escapee forums! It is great having you with us and helping others is exactly what this forum is about. As you can see from the answers thus far, there are many workable ways to bank while on the road. If your present account has access to a debit card and electronic banking, there is really no need to change from what you have been doing. We went on the road fulltime in 2000 and lived that way for 12 years and now have been back to part-time again but still spend 2 to 5 months at a time in the RV traveling to different places each time. In all of that time, we have never seen any need to change from our original bank and that same bank account. There is value in having a long history with your financial institution so do not rush to change things. Speak with your present banker and discuss your plans with him and I suspect that you will find that there is no need to make changes. One suggestion that I do have is to consider the use of a credit card with a liberal rebate program for the majority of transactions and then pay that card electronically directly from your bank, thus taking advantage of the 1% or more rebate that better cards offer today and keeping your Debit card more secure from problems of electronic theft. I use a card with a 2% refund for the vast majority of what we spend and, like several others, get cash as needed when making a purchase at Walmart, or take my debit card to an ATM.

If you are serious about this I strongly suggest that you give much more specific information as well as some means of responding, other than by public post. There are many couples sharing an RV who are singles but unless you plan do share more than traveling it will require one of the larger RVs which can have more than one place to sleep.

What is best in an RV is mostly dependant upon the people using it, what they want to use it for, and their preferred lifestyle. We have owned 6 very different RVs, starting in 1972 and we considered each of them to have been right for us at the time.

Volunteering at Ft. Stephens state park near Astoria, OR.

Thank you! That is exactly what we needed.

Part of the difficulty in resolving the problems of homeless people is in realizing that there is no single solution because there are so many different reasons for the problem. It seems to me that most of us want to find one or two simple ways to resolve a problem that has many, many different causes. It is true that many of the homeless choose not to take advantage of resources available to them, but there is a very fine line between pressuring someone to do what is best for them and violating that person's civil rights. It used to be that those believed to have mental problems were locked away "for their own good" but we don't do that today. The same is true for poor people in general as there are no more "poor farms" to force those needing help onto. This country was founded on the principle of individual rights, which is the thing that makes us unique in the world. Making help available to those in need can only go so far until we choose to force those people to take advantage of that help.

Have you checked the door switch?