A very welcome upgrade that we recently did to our coach was to replace the main control panel in the bedroom hallway.

The old control panel that came with the coach was fine, but the mode buttons on the sides required a very firm press, and the grayscale screen looked a bit dated, and was hard to read in bright light:

Fortunately the manufacturer, Spyder Controls, now offers an updated panel for several Tiffin models, including ours.

It was an easy operation to replace it. I removed the old panel, unplugged its network cable, attached the new panel’s mount, plugged in the new panel, and snapped it in place. Here’s the new mount and the data cable:

The upgraded control panel installed; so much nicer:

A tour of the various screens of the panel, starting with the home screen, which shows the fresh, grey, and black water tank levels, the house and chassis battery levels, buttons to turn on or off the water pump, all lights, diesel or electric water heating, panel lights, and the backlight, plus mode buttons along the bottom:

Main lights screen, to turn on or off various lights in the living area, plus the lights master, that turns them all off or on (returning them to the state when last on):

Exterior lights screen:

Rear lights screen, for the bedroom, mid bath, rear bath, and bedroom ceiling fan:

Slides screen, for the bedroom slides; the front slides are controlled by switches on the driver and passenger chairs (it’s nice that it shows the floor plan, too):

Climate screen, with under-floor heating in the front and rear, plus the Aqua-Hot water heater, that can run off diesel for continuous hot water, electric for a smaller amount of hot water, and engine pre-heat for really cold days:

Locks screen, to lock or unlock the front door or basement doors:

Power screen, for the water pump, engine preheat, and generator:

Fans screen, to start or stop the ceiling fans and open or close their lids:

Shades and lifts screen, to open or close all of the living room shades, and raise or lower the living room TV and bed:

Individual shades screen, with separate controls for each of the living room shades:

Settings screen:

Screen settings screen:

Color scheme screen:

Diagnostics screen:

Hi there. For the past week we were staying at a state park without Wi-Fi, using our cellular modem. So I took a break from doing blog posts to preserve bandwidth, since it was a new service, and we didn’t know how fast we’d go through it. It turned out that we used about half of the capacity if we were using it full-time, and most of the time we expect to have campground Wi-Fi, so we don’t need to be so careful with it. Which is good.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of topics and pictures to share, so you can look forward to daily posts for a while.

As you might expect, tires are rather important with an RV. So to help keep an eye on them, we purchased a tire pressure monitoring system, or TPMS. It has sensors on each valve stem, plus a signal repeater, and a display in the cockpit.

Here’s a flow-through tire pressure sensor for a front tire; flow-through means it has a normal cap for filling, and the air can go through the sensor, making it more convenient:

Another sensor, for an inner rear tire; the number “5” is a sticker to identify the placement:

A sensor for an outer rear tire:

Part of the system is that it can monitor the truck tires too. Our truck has its own built-in TPMS, but we can’t see that when towing the truck behind the coach, and it’s important to watch them too, since our coach could drag the truck with flat tires without noticing. The pressure sensors for the truck are cap style, i.e. they replace the valve cap, and have to be removed to top up the air:

Since our coach and truck totals 60 feet front to back, the TPMS comes with a repeater unit, to help the sensor signals from the truck tires reach the front of the coach:

They recommended mounting the repeater in the chassis bay at the back of the coach:

So I hooked it up to 12V connectors there; the thin red and black wires:

The repeater is mounted to a wall in the bay:

Here’s the display unit in the cockpit; it cycles through each of the tires, blinking each in turn, and showing the current temperature and pressure of each tire. If one gets too hot, or the pressure drops, it sounds an alarm:

I have it on the dash where I can see it:

While at Poulsbo RV, we took the opportunity to replace the flooded cell batteries with maintenance-free AGM batteries.

AGM stands for Absorbed Glass Mat, which just describes the way the batteries are formulated. They’re similar in performance to the basic flooded cell ones, with one key difference: they don’t need to have the water checked and topped up frequently. One less thing to worry about.

Here are the flooded cell batteries that came with the coach; six 6V batteries in series and parallel, for 12V:

And our new AGM batteries: