Our coach has fabric awnings over the slide-outs, commonly called slide toppers. These are a feature of premium RVs to prevent debris and water from coming inside when bringing in the slides, among other benefits.

But one downside of slide toppers is that they can be noisy in strong winds, as wind gusts cause them to flap up and down. And in very strong winds one can get concerned that they could get damaged.

One solution for flapping slide toppers is to bring in the slides, perhaps only on the windward side. But that reduces the living space, so is a hassle. And we can’t sleep in our bed with all of the slides in, as the bed has to be raised up in this situation.

Another solution is to brace the slide toppers. There are a few ways to do that, but the easiest is to use a rope and bungees across the middle of the toppers.

While in Corpus Christi we had a forecast of nearly 50 MPH gusts, which is a bit more than I’m comfortable with, so I decided to try bracing the slide toppers.

I ordered some mini bungees and paracord for that purpose; I got crimson cord to match our coach:

To get the paracord over the top of the slides, I used the window awning pole:

I tied a loop in the end of the cord, then temporarily taped it to the hook on the end of the pole:

I attached the cord to the hydraulic beams underneath the slide via bungees, which let me adjust the tension as needed; it doesn’t need to be very tight, just enough to stop it flapping so much in the wind:

(In the future I think I’ll get some tent rope tensioners to make that even more flexible.)

You can see the cord over the slide topper:

For the rear slides, which don’t have the hydraulic beams, the bungee is just hooked onto the bottom of the slide track:

This worked really well. The slide toppers still flapped a little when that wind arrived, but nowhere near as much as they would have without the bracing. I’ll definitely do this again for future high winds.