The electrical bay in our coach includes a Surge Guard power protection transfer switch, which manages switching the electricity between “shore” power (i.e. plugged in to a campground) and the generator. It also serves to protect the coach systems from power spikes and other issues:

However, it’s good practice to have a separate surge protector, since the act of protecting the coach can damage the device. An external one that plugs in to the power pedistal at a campsite is a much cheaper thing to replace if necessary.

One of the most popular ones is the Hughes Autoformers Power Watchdog, so that’s what I got. Here’s its box:

Not only does it protect against power surges and other electrical issues, it also has a replaceable surge module, so just part of it can be replaced if needed, instead of having to replace the whole thing. It also has an app that displays the current power usage.

Here’s the Power Watchdog plugged in at a campground. The dog face glows white if all is well, or turns red if an issue occurs (and the display below shows the error code):

Here’s a screenshot of the app:

At another campground at night; the dog face is fairly bright:

One of the known issues with our coach when we bought it was a few of the vanity lights were not working. We asked Poulsbo RV to replace them when they did some work on the coach. They did replace a few, but missed others that were not working or intermittently flashing rather annoyingly.

So I replaced the remaining ones myself.

Firstly I looked at one they replaced, to check the polarity of the wires, since the replacement lights just have unmarked white wires… and I believe polarity matters with DC wiring. In this picture of a couple of vanity lights in the rear bathroom, the left light is an original broken one, and the right is one they replaced:

I then replaced that left one above, plus four under-cabinet lights in the kitchen. Here are a couple of the kitchen lights before replacement:

Replaced lights:

All better:

Replaced lights on the left side:

Re-attached, without the covers:

Works:

All done, with covers in place:

Electrical stuff is new to me, but being able to do it myself saves time and money. It’s good to learn new skills.

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:

Our coach has a media cupboard in the bedroom, below the TV there, that manages the various inputs and outputs of the TVs.

Here’s what the media cupboard looked like before we bought the coach, with a Winegard Trav’ler satellite dish controller, a Dish TV box (that the previous owner removed), and a 3D Blu-ray player:

Our coach has a foldable satellite dish plus a TV antenna, as you can see in my aerial photos post, though we won’t use either, since we’re “cord cutters”; we don’t watch broadcast TV.

An expanded view, showing the compartment to the left with HDMI switch boxes, plus how we had it after moving in, with Jenn’s PS5 instead of the Dish box:

The two HDMI splitters take the outputs of two devices (formerly Dish and Blu-ray) and squirts them via CAT6 cable to the four TVs of the coach:

The four TVs are in the bedroom, the main one in the living room, another one above the cockpit (which we’re unlikely to use much), and one outside. Each TV can choose to show either input (or cable/antenna TV), so multiple TVs can show the same thing, or different things.

There are a bunch of component cables for additional inputs, but we’re not using those:

Here’s what the media cupboard looked like after setting things up, with an Apple TV plus the PS5 and its hard disk on the top shelf, and a Pepwave modem, Nintendo Switch dock, and the Blu-ray player on the bottom shelf. (We probably won’t use the Blu-ray player, but doesn’t hurt to leave it. And I since moved the Pepwave out of the cupboard, as it interfered with the signal strength.) There’s also a HDMI switch to change between the PS5, Switch, and Blu-ray, going to one of the splitters, with the other splitter dedicated to the Apple TV:

Of course, we had to test it by firing up Jenn’s current favorite game, Red Dead Redemption II, on the PS5; here it is on the main TV:

As I said, any of the devices can be displayed on any of the four TVs, so she can play on any of them; in nicer weather, she’ll be able to play outside. Or we’ll be able to watch TV anywhere. Quite nice.

An issue with our coach that I caused: back in the homestead we had a sturdy gas cooktop, so I’d bang a spoon on a pot to dislodge stuck food. Well, it turns out that glass induction cooktops are a bit more sensitive than I’m used to; the very first time I used it, and banged as usual, it stopped working. Who knew? Oops!

So, I purchased a replacement cooktop (the same kind, albeit new), and yesterday I swapped them out.

Here’s the old cooktop after being pried out (with the DishDrawer dishwasher visible below):

The new cooktop:

The bottom; it just plugs in to an outlet under the kitchen counter:

The new cooktop installed:

The cover restored and label removed; all done:

I’ll try to remember not to bang on this one!

I previously mentioned that we removed the couches from our coach so we could use our recliners and add a desk. Well, while at Olde Stone Village RV park one of our first projects was to assemble a desk.

The desk is for Jenn to do her work, and includes drawers and a keyboard tray, plus an external screen and laptop. Those are mounted on arms, so they can be swung aside when we want to watch TV, as the main TV is on a “televator”, i.e. it raises out of the shelf behind the desk. (We haven’t gotten around to setting up the TVs yet; another project for this week.)

To the left of her desk is a top-access litter box and litter bin for our cat Paladin, who is currently being boarded; we’ll pick him up on Sunday. Hopefully he’ll accept that new box!

A peek behind the screen and laptop support arms, mounted to the desk:

Update — the drawers slid open while driving, which isn’t ideal, so I added some roller catches that should hold them closed:

While the coach was at Mom’s place, we spent some time organizing things, plus doing some minor modifications.

One tweak was to mount a towel holder under the kitchen cabinets, so it didn’t take up counter space:

We also removed the towel rails from inside the shower (a crazy place for it, having to remove the towels when using the shower), and installed new towel rails outside (I didn’t get a picture of that, though, and the coach is currently at a dealer getting serviced, so I can’t get a pic).

We left the ends of the towel rail in the shower, but rotated them to act as hooks. And added wall-mounted liquid dispensers:

For Jenn’s necklaces, we added a couple of wall-mounted racks by the vanity:

In the living room, you may recall that we removed the couches so we could use our chairs:

Since the front edge of the chair base hangs over the edge of the slide carpet, we added some higher feet using rubber doorstops, to make the chairs more level and stable:

We also added some extra shelving in several cupboards, and other tweaks. I’m sure we’ll make more over time, to customize the coach to be more comfortable.

To explore local areas, get groceries, etc, we drive our 2016 Chevy Colorado pickup truck. But driving that as well as the coach isn’t ideal, so we got a tow bar installed on the coach, plus modifications to the truck, to enable the coach to tow the truck. When the truck is towed by the coach, it is colloquially called a “toad”, for obvious reasons.

We lucked out in that the truck we already had is one of the few models that can be towed “four down” aka “dingy towed”, i.e. with all four wheels rolling on the ground, instead of having to put it on a trailer or dolly. Four-down towing is much easier than dealing with a trailer.

Here’s the tow bar on our coach during installation:

It has several components, including (left-to-right) an electrical cable for lights, a safety brake cable (to apply the brakes on the truck if it becomes disconnected), two safety cables, the bar itself (with a drop hitch to make it more level), and an air hose for the brake controller:

The air hose is interesting; the coach has air brakes, and the air hose lets the coach braking be shared with the truck (see below):

On the truck side, two tow bar mount points were installed, with a bar connection and a safety cable on each side:

Under the truck license plate was installed the safety brake connection (that will stop the truck if the pin is pulled out), the electrical connection (for the lights), and the air hose connection (for the brakes):

Here’s the whole tow bar setup. The Roadmaster tow bar is top-of-the-line, with non-binding arms, and LED lights on the side, for safety:

Inside the truck is a button to disconnect the battery, which is one of the steps required to be towed (it also needs to change the transfer case to neutral, and other steps).

Actually, here’s the relevant page of the truck manual, detailing the steps to flat tow:

Also inside is an air-powered brake controller that presses the brake pedal exactly like if someone were sitting in the truck, proportional to the pedal in the coach being pressed:

That brake controller is quickly disconnected when the truck isn’t being towed.

And when the tow bar isn’t in use while camping, it can be covered tidily: