 I live full time in my RV so it really stinks when I have to go to a service shop. I've spent over 120 days in different shops since I hit the road in 2017. I've learned a lot along the way and so I'm going to tell you guys what I learned about understanding how dealerships get paid through your warranty, which is key, how to hire a mobile guy and how to get things done yourself so you never have to go to the shop in the first place. Hey guys it's Robin with Creativity RV and today I'm going to talk to you about what I've learned from my warranty and the research that I did after my work was done that I wish I had known beforehand. This is the video I wish I had seen before I spent over 120 days in six shops in five states in two years. Now somebody said to me once that you need two things to have an RV. You need a sense of humor and a toolbox and let me say that that is really true. I expected things to break in my RV. We all should, especially the people that are about to go out on the road that watch this channel. You know it's like little earthquakes are hitting your rig while you're going down the road and things come loose, things break, components get out of whack. That's to be expected. Totally run-of-the-mill stuff. Now I did have some of that stuff but I also had major major stuff go wrong in here and this is actually I think the fifth time I film this because I'm trying to keep it succinct for you guys. So I'm going to do two other videos later look out for those ones going to be things I love and hate about my leisure travel van because some of the problems were specific to that so look out for that if you're looking for a leisure and I'm also going to tell you how in my first year I got paid for loss of use for time in the shop with my leisure travel van that I proved I didn't need to be there. So those are coming up but first of all let me give you a little rundown of what's gone wrong in my RV and then I'm going to tell you what I learned from that and then in my subsequent research which is a game changer. I actually had to get a list because it's that much stuff. Look at this. Okay so little stuff you know that the freezer froze shut it wouldn't open the lighter on the stove broke the awning came loose and the chair the reclining chair kept coming up bolted and falling over the same thing happened with the bed. My LP monitor had to be replaced two times I actually had to go and cut the cords inside of that because the alarm kept going off at 3 o'clock in the morning always at 3 o'clock in the morning I couldn't even keep the windows shut as soon as it got stuffy in the RV the alarm would go off and if you guys haven't heard an LP alarm yet it's like it'll peel your skin off your body. Oh and then like you know little things like the latch on the screen door broke off and so I couldn't shut my screen. Little things right but I also had major things. I had stabilizing jacks put on my leisure travel van from the dealership from whom I purchased it before I hit the road and you guys later I found out that that probably voided my sprinter warranty on the Mercedes chassis so look out for that if you've got that work done but the hydraulic hoses inside of the jacks there's four of them that make the legs go up and down had all either burst or were close to bursting all of them all four of them two different times I had to have all the hoses replaced those leveling jack systems have a really heavy metal legs and it's dangerous for that to happen so right out of the gate when I left the first dealership and then I had two major floods in my leisure travel van I'll talk more about this in the things I love and hate about the leisure but there is a design flaw per them on an outside bin that's vertical so rain water gets into it and it had rained really hard and I come back into my RV and there was an inch of standing water that had been there for about a day and took a while to figure out what it was I finally found that the water was coming from the outside bin which was you know that deep in water and it had come over the bin under my wardrobe drawers and into the RV I have an insurance background so quick I cleaned it up and you know tried to dry it out and mitigate it but after that I was always concerned about water damage and mold and then it happened again because I took it into the shop and they put a new thicker rubber seal around it but it wasn't enough and it did it again and so it had to be replaced a second time no more floods after that the biggest thing that happened with my leisure travel van which it led to the loss of use was I had some major electrical problems you know while they were fixing some of the other stuff in here I said you know I've got this little GFI plug over here and it's hard to plug things in and it was one of my only inverted plugs I needed it and I couldn't get things back out of it and like with my foot on the wall you know and then when I did get it out there would be a spark so I thought it was a little manufacturing air in the plastic and I said hey just can you swap out that plug note to self when it's little things do it yourself because that led to an odyssey of 53 days in the shop that I didn't need to be there I got different stories from people on what happened one shop blamed it on the other shops wiring the other shop blamed it on leisure travel van sending the wrong part I don't know what it was but I had a serious fire hazard in my RV and there was crackling in the walls and the lights would dim and flash my phone caught on fire while it was on the charger in my leisure travel van which they tried to blame on the phone but I had the phone taken apart and the source was the cord not the phone so from those things that first list I just gave you I spent I think 86 days in the shop 53 of which were completely unnecessary and I'll tell you about that later then you know I'm chugging along things are good I have learned my RV up and down that was the positive part I read the manual front and back several times I got online I looked at videos I went into forums I really didn't have any other problems except that you guys may have seen I stated in RV park in the go clubbing video because I used to passport America to stay there that I had to stay there because my batteries weren't keeping in charge I didn't know why this happened I pulled out the batteries to check the water many times the water was fall and then one day it was a little low so I filled it up and I pushed it back in I went to a shop in Colorado and actually you guys this was one of my biggest mistakes I went to the same shop that I had gone to before that had all the problems because leisure travel van requires that you go through an authorized dealer or somebody that is qualified but they get to decide who that is and that's their authorized dealers so there's not that many dealers to go to they had totally changed their staff they told me it was all new people they were super qualified and I took my rig and I was thrilled that I had a leisure travel van place to go in Colorado because I was going home for the holidays so I took the RV up there they couldn't have been nicer I gave them a list of stuff that needed to be done the batteries was one thing and really what I wanted to have done was just annual service like I wanted them to check the seals on the roof check the generator stuff like that now when I look back on it they didn't know what was included in the annual service they didn't give it to me in writing and they didn't want to give my warranty work to me in writing and I'll explain why I think that was in a minute that that was a big red flag I should have seen it ended up that they needed to order a part for my generator and that was going to take a couple of weeks like it always does so I thought to myself well if the RV is sitting there I might as well have them give me a bid on putting in a hose for my composting toilet now you guys know that I put it in I didn't put the hose in I had other friends that did this and it wasn't a big deal but if you have the fan and that goes into the hose it can help keep the moisture levels right and maybe keep bugs out and stuff like that so I thought well you know it's sitting there I'll get a bid if it's a hundred bucks hundred and fifty bucks I'll go ahead and do it it can't be that hard well I talked to the guy and he said well I've never done that red flag and so I sent him two YouTube videos and a schematic from nature's head and you know an email about you know I thought it should probably go through an end cap you know which is like a burlap part of the wall and that that's where other people had put it but let's discuss you know when you give me the bid and he called me back and he said yeah let's discuss and then you know a week went by and I hadn't heard from anybody so I call and nobody answers the phone and it doesn't go to voicemail I sent an email nobody responds but there's no bounce back we drive by the door is shut there's no sign on the door in the middle of the day and I literally thought they had gone out of business with all the rigs locked in the back of the dealership so I'm not going to name check anybody here but you can see there's only one leisure travel van dealer in Colorado so if you're looking for service don't recommend them but finally I just blew them up I mean I called like every three hours until finally I got somebody that was just there doing some work of the sales manager and I said what is going on I had to go to the RTR to give the opening seminar called be a nomad change your life you know based on the book that I just wrote of the same title and I can't fly out to court site and do a talk on be a nomad change of life I needed my RV and he said oh sorry we close from the 18th of December to the 2nd of January every year but they didn't tell their customers they didn't put an email a voicemail sign on the door nothing and I said well look I have to get my rig you know what's the deal it's okay if the hose you know isn't done because the guy never called me no big deal I don't need it anyway well he gets on the phone with his service manager and he goes oh no we did the house and it's done she can go pick it up so Doug and I drive 90 minutes on the 1st of January to meet the sales manager who's just there to let us in the first thing I say to him is where's my work order where's my service order he's flipping through papers he can't find it he goes I don't know where they put these things you know it's a big company it's owned by a company that is in several other states and you would think that they would have had that together at this point you know I'm like this is not good so the guy is leaving and Doug and I go out to the RV and I open up the door and there's just stuff all over the floor the toilet is on the ground the hose is on the ground there's screws everywhere cabinet doors were open my stuff had been shuffled around and so I yelled back at the guy he was walking to his car and I said hey come back this isn't done and I go into the bathroom you guys and without asking me and without my permission they drilled a hole through the side of the metal in the bathroom next to the toilet to the outside that was open it was four degrees and snowing in December in Colorado Springs and I certainly never would have approved them drilling a hole not a screw hole either I don't even have security cameras on my rig because I don't want screw holes through the metal and they put a hole you know like I think it was two inches big through the side so the sales manager grabbed some painters tape some blue painters tape and puts it over the hole and he calls the service guy and he goes oh yeah that's not done we were waiting for a vent cover I didn't know anything about event cover I don't know what they ordered and then it sounded like maybe they didn't really order it and so I said look I need this RV I looked around there were clearly a lot of things wrong inside but we were supposed to leave then that afternoon or the next morning to get to court set in time and so I said look I need the RV I pretty much demanded that they fix the RV and they said yes we're gonna put everybody on at first thing in the morning when they get here and we're going to deliver it to you the next morning I get a call from the corporate office it's great they said you're gonna hear from them in an hour I didn't I call and did not have a pleasant conversation with the service manager there I'll say he actually said to me we can't have rig sitting here taking up room that aren't being worked on and I you guys I lost my mind I may have been very unladylike at that moment I said the only reason it's been sitting here is because the work isn't done and you were waiting for a part that was never ordered so they delivered it now remember I went in because I need a batteries and an annual service they told me that they checked the batteries and that there was a loose cable that I probably did when I was pulling it out to change the water I asked them three times did you test it did you test it did you test it yes they said it was totally fine as soon as the guy left and we started packing up the RV I started to see other things like I said the cabinets were open all of the stuff inside my cabinets you know which everything's in there like a Tetris game were displaced like people were looking around maybe they were looking for a part I don't know I have a composting toilet and somebody peed in the toilet and it had dried and like congealed if you guys have a composting toilet you know it turns into like this red sludge and my TV didn't pop up at all anymore and when it did pop up the cables that go to the DVR were different I only use that TV as a work monitor and it started to make me think somebody was squatting in there but more to the point that hose from the composting toilet I didn't see this right away but they had just glued it into the wall there was no cover there was nothing to make it look better and when I started going down the road it was jiggling and sunlight was coming through it and by the way the vent never came they stole one off of a pleasure way that was on the lot and put it on mine and painted it to be the same color well Doug and I just hit the road I think I'm gonna make the best of it I'm gonna fix you know whatever I can after we leave and we go to the RTR and I give my talk and I really wanted to enjoy this time with Doug I was sick of fighting with dealerships well we get on the road the rig is winterized and after four days we get to court site and we are dying to take a shower so we fill up the tank and I go to take a shower and there's a rumbling noise in the water pump in the bathroom now remember nothing was broken with the water pump in the bathroom or anything else turns out that it really was the water pump I had to call a mobile service guy and I'll talk to you about that in a second in court site to come out it was $45 which was super reasonable he troubleshooted I watched and I also troubleshooted it and some other people did before he got there and it was the pump somehow magically coincidentally my water pump just broke while it was in the service shop so he swapped out my pump and went on his way and I'm so excited to take a shower and there's no hot water there's no hot water in the shower there is in the other two sinks but not in the shower so Doug comes back in the rig and he goes how was your shower and I said refreshing and that was the morning I gave my talk of the RTR I took an ice cold shower and so did Doug well all of Doug's stuff and a bunch of my stuff that we had just put in the rig when we left that we had not unpacked because you know with two people it's a little harder to figure out where things go all of our stuff was in the shower you know standing up in there which you could all out to take the showers we put it all back in we get back from the meet and greet and we're exhausted and then we see that there was a flood another one in the shower we couldn't figure out what happened we thought maybe the luggage bumped the on switch but that wasn't it later we figured out after we dried everything out and it was a mess you guys all of it I had cardboard boxes in there with paper and boxes of stuff it was all soaked all of his clothes and shoes were soaked and we figured out that when the water pump was on water was pouring out of the head of the shower not dripping pouring and so it was coming out all over the stuff I called the mobile guy and he couldn't do that because the part from leisure travel van was made in Germany and there was no way to find what he needed so I drove three hours to La Mesa RV in Phoenix where they went to Home Depot and got a new shower face to put on which is what was needed that took all day and one thing that I don't understand about service shops is first they think it's a seal a little rubber seal they don't have a rubber seal in stock so they have to send their minion to go out to Home Depot and buy one he comes back they put it all together and it's not the seal so then they say I need a new face they put the face on it goes in they get out of there just before five o'clock everybody's happy I leave I go all the way back to Ehrenberg to meet friends within two days the face of the shower had fallen off also it didn't have hot water you guys you can't make this up it turns out that the guy forgot to turn the lever that's inside the face that allows it to have hot water and there's a gauge in there and the screws that they used to put the face on were too short so it fell off so LaMesa lets me go to their pop up place that they have to sell RVs in court site for six weeks a year and needless to say I was not their priority and for nine hours my RV sat there while my cat was in a carrier and they were not nice I tried to go back to let the cat out and got yelled at a couple times and I'm like look dude I see you're eating lunch you know let the cat have some lunch and pee right oh and let me tell you this the batteries also still didn't keep a charge when I went to LaMesa RV in Phoenix they put in new batteries which cost money the shower cost money because none of this was covered under warranty anyway and let me recap that I didn't have any problems with the water pump or the shower or the heat when I took my RV in to the shop in Colorado who was just supposed to be doing annual service like I said everybody's gonna have problems and if you're on the road you have problems and I'm sure that I'll keep having problems you have to have a sense of humor and a toolbox but beyond that let me help you understand your warranty or service shops in some of the research that I did and a lot of it I did for you guys after the fact and I wish I had seen this video before I hit the road the first thing is don't believe your sales guy the sales guy will tell you oh yeah every plug in here is inverted and you know yeah this thing has four points stabilizing jacks or whatever you know they're gonna say oh yeah everybody loves their Thor, Lisa Travel Van, Coachman, whatever they never have any complaints wrong and usually they don't have as much knowledge as a service guy they're just trying to make the sale I was at a dealership with a friend who bought an RV in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago and she'd already bought the RV and we walked back in to have some little service work done on it before she took it and she said you know it's so weird here it's like they're your best friend and you know everybody comes up and says hey they're your buddy and they hug you and now that we walk in it's like step for wives it's like children of the corn it's like they have heard their eyes it's like they don't know who you are anymore and it's really true that they will talk to you and can't talk to enough and will return your phone calls until they have your money and once they have your money you're not quite as important anymore so just keep that in mind don't believe your sales guy of course do your routine maintenance which I talked about in my book and in other videos and read your manual but let's get to the real stuff let's get to the nitty gritty first of all be prepared to troubleshoot everything you can yourself watch YouTube videos you can learn a lot and call the manufacture of the components this is something I learned after my first year that I wish I had done before because I was under warranty I was calling the dealership instead of calling the manufacturer when I do the how I got paid for loss of use video I'll tell you that it ended up being an inverter problem and all I had to do was call the manufacturer of the inverter thanks to a mobile guy that I hired so a mobile guy doesn't have a dog in the fight what I was finding is the dealership was arguing with the shop and they both have incentives to do stuff in a certain way which I'll tell you about the mobile guy has incentive to fix the problem because that's how he got paid so mobile guys are great call the actual manufacturer of the components troubleshoot what you can yourself so you don't have to go into the shop in the first place then if you do have a warranty understand how RV warranties work they are not like cars the same lemon laws they can apply to cars do not apply to RVs there are some nuanced laws depending on what state you bought your rig in but for full-timers they don't really work because they say things like you have to have a continuing problem for four months or something like that we don't have four months to be off the road and usually it's more than one problem and what is important to know about RVs is leisure travel van made my RV but their two-year warranty was a structural warranty only the Mercedes chassis was a different warranty and all the components inside the major components like the generator in the refrigerator and stuff like that also have different warranties so you have to understand that when you're going to get your service it's super important to look at reviews for shops and do not look at the sales reviews people love their sales guy what you want to find our reviews on the service center and I did find some interesting research that said that customer reviews are more positive in rural areas because reputation matters more so keep that in mind now let's talk about the important part and that is understanding how the service shops or the dealerships get paid when they do work on your rig if you are not under warranty and you just take it in they have a pay table that they can reference that tells them how long a job should take that's what they used to give you an estimate okay so they might say it takes two hours to fix a water pump and we charge 90 to $120 an hour but when you have a warranty they also go off of something called a pay authorization table that the manufacturer gives them so let's say the water pump in my leisure travel van breaks they're gonna look at the pay authorization table for a leisure travel van and they get paid less from leisure travel van or manufacturers in general think about like you know when you have health insurance those companies pay less than you would if you paid cash same kind of thing they negotiate a lower rate so they'll say you have an hour and a half to work on this in the auto industry that's called a flag and flags are how mechanics get paid at the service shops this is totally important to understand I went into forums for the actual mechanics and what happens is they make minimum wage maybe but most of them work a hundred percent on commission and they get paid based on how many basically billable hours they can stack into a day and those are called flags so let's say that pay authorization table tells them that they can have an hour and a half to change a water pump their goal is to change it in 20 minutes because it doesn't matter if it takes 20 minutes they still get paid for the hour and a half conversely if it takes three hours to fix it they still only get paid for an hour and a half and this is what blew my mind they do not generally get paid to diagnose a problem and that's where the hassle comes in for us because when I took in my rig I thought you know I have an idea of what's wrong but they're gonna get in there and they're gonna undo things and they're gonna check it out and they're gonna figure out what the problem is and they're gonna come back to me and say this is the problem and this is how we fix it that is not what happened and that's not generally what happens they get paid for the work itself so take my GFI for example I say you know the GFI is bad and they swap out the part that caused a major problem but they weren't trying to fix the problem because that's not how they get paid they get paid for replacing a part so I kept going through this circle jostle where they were just trying to swap the part swap the part swap the part and nobody was trying to figure out what the actual problem was now the dealerships are generally fine with this because they get a cut of the flags right I thought about this like hairdressers how they can rent a booth and then you know the owner of the salon gets a cut of it I see it's something like that if they're working on a hundred percent commission you know they've got like some guy said in a comment recently knuckleheads working there people without a lot of experience they're just trying to get the flags done get the work done and get the rigs out of there the people that have a lot of experience that make more money don't generally work in service shops like that now of course the manufacturer has these pay authorization tables so they don't get ripped off but it's not uncommon for people at the service shops to have 80 hours of flag work in a 40-hour work week and that's not to say they're dishonest they're just you know it's the system they're in and they're trying to make a living and there are great people out there and there are not great people in the service shop industry but I will say this you know good people will do bad things when they need to make money and so sometimes you'll take your rig in and they'll say it's one thing or they'll add in two more things I've heard people say that they had different dates on their work orders as if they were trying to put in different things so just know that that's how they get paid and the dealerships are okay with it like I said because they get a cut and in the forums I was in people said the dealerships aren't really that concerned if they have a few unhappy customers because they make their money off of volume and especially for full-timers they know we're just going to come and go and so they're not as worried about keeping us happy so it kind of stinks that the incentive for the service guys is not to diagnose the problem it's to bill a flag if you have a warranty to the manufacturer to get you in and out as fast as possible so the more informed you can be before you go in the better now let's help each other here's a call to action for everybody that's watching this video let's help each other find good shops if you can down in the comments if you've had a good shop experience a bad shop experience or an experience with a mobile guy please put it in the comments and at the top of your comment please put like in caps the geography so if it's Arizona California Missouri whatever and then put the name of the people and if your experience was good or bad and that way people can scroll through the comments and they can see where other people have had a good or bad experience I hope this has helped you guys I do not want any of you to go through what I've gone through in my warranty experience it's all good now it's been fixed so I'll tell you more about that in the weeks to come look out for an interview that I did with Patricia on my blog today at creativity RV calm and subscribe if you haven't already I wish you all happy travels out there and be free