The wheel rims on our coach were looking rather untidy, so based on some recommendations on Facebook, I purchased the Purple Metal Polish and Aluminum Deoxidizer:

Super easy to apply; just wipe on some deoxidizer, followed by the polish, and wipe off.

Here’s a rear wheel before polishing:

And after:

A front wheel before:

And after:

I also treated the tires with 303 Protectant for UV protection:

The polish worked on the headlights too; before:

And after:

Much better!

Our coach has a black tank flush, where it can rinse out the toilet tank, but doesn’t have a similar mechanism for the gray tank. It generally gets cleaned out by filling it up with soapy water from showers, laundry, and sink usage, but occasionally an extra rinse is beneficial.

To do that, one could just close the gray dump valve and let it fill up with regular usage, or one could fill it via the dump valve.

To do the latter, I have a Camco Dual Flush Pro Holding Tank Rinser, which connects in the sewer pipe and includes a gate valve and hose connection, and a knob to direct the water towards the tank or towards the outlet:

By closing the gate valve, opening the gray valve in the wet bay, and turning on the water, it backs up into the gray tank.

To avoid over-filling the tank, I watch the level indicator in the wet bay, and also a water flow meter connected to the hose:

Here’s the whole setup, including the wet bay:

For best results, this can be combined with Liquified Tank & Sensor Cleaner, to give a deep clean of the tank.

I previously replaced the cover on the light under the sink, but it got knocked off again, so I decided to replace the whole light fixture this time, figuring that the clips that hold the cover on may be weak.

The light is available from Tiffin’s online parts store, part number 5032143 “Light Wardrobe Brown LED”:

Rather than using the wires that came with the light, I simply unplugged the existing wires from the old light, and plugged in to the new one. But the light didn’t work; it turned out that I needed to reverse the wires; so I guess the original was hooked up differently:

But all good now:

An easy fix.

Our front and mid AC units were having issues for some time — mostly not getting cold, and sometimes refusing to come on at all. We got a few techs to look at them, without any conclusive results or solutions.

While staying at Thousand Trails Orlando, we got Charles Sutton of CS Mobile RV Repair LLC to take a look, and he determined that the compressors on both were shot, and we needed to replace them. An unpleasantly large expense, but he handled it very professionally.

Here he is lugging the very heavy AC unit up to the roof (and I appreciate the padding on the ladder to protect our paint):

The offending part:

Inside the old AC unit, partially disassembled:

It is nice to have reliably working AC units now.

Back in 2022 a truck clipped the driver-side mirror on our motorhome, smashing the mirror glass. I replaced the mirror glass, which made the mirror usable again, but unfortunately the motor that allows adjusting the position would only work three of the four directions, so I’d have to manually push the mirror if it drifted out of position (which seemed to happen regularly).

We were going to get it replaced when doing the annual service, but the pandemic supply chain issues made the part unavailable at the time.

It wasn’t a super urgent issue, so we put it on the back burner, but it continued to annoy us. Eventually after much research I determined that one could buy a replacement head for the mirror, which (in theory) could be easily plug-and-play replaced. The part is manufactured by Valvac, and the part number is 719853, “Euromax-XL Replacement Head w/Camera, Lighted, Left Side, Chrome”.

I purchased this part:

The new mirror head:

It looked like an easy job, but we were about to be in Red Bay, so I got a mobile tech to look at replacing it for me. Good thing I didn’t try it myself, as it was too hard for that tech; he couldn’t fish the wires out of the mirror arm.

So later while at Thousand Trails Orlando I got a local RV tech, Charles Sutton of CS Mobile RV Repair LLC, to have a go at it. He also had lots of difficulty with it, but eventually managed it (and was very generous in not charging extra for it, too; I’d highly recommend him for any RV services!).

Here’s the old head removed:

He had to remove a bunch of excess insulation in the generator compartment to access the wires to get enough slack to reach the plugs:

Finally able to reach the plugs:

The replaced mirror head:

So nice to have that working again. And if we ever need to replace it again, it should be a much easier job next time.