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Wood rot puts fear in even the most seasoned travel trailer or motorhome owner. Like cancer, high blood pressure, or clogged arteries, you often won’t know you’ve got a problem on your hands until it’s far too late. To prevent water damage and save yourself thousands in repair costs, it’s important to check your RV for signs of water intrusion.
RELATED: How to Replace Rotted Wood Flooring in a Travel Trailer
Unlike a house that stays in one position, a travel trailer or motorhome flexes as it rolls down the road. Vibration and small bumps tear open seals, allowing rain water or condensation to find its way down to your RV’s wooden subfloor. Some symptoms of water damage include:
- spongy areas on the floor, especially near floor vents
- soft spots around ceiling fans and wall penetrations
- a musty smell inside your rig
- discolored or wrinkled wallpaper
- rust-colored stains under windows or moldings from rusted screws and nails inside the walls
- bubbling fiberglass on your RV’s exterior
If you don’t regularly inspect your RV for water intrusion, you could end up with a repair bill totaling over $10,000. In this video, Chuck Woodbury interviews Chris Nelson from Valley RV Supercenter in Kent, Washington about water damage repair in a Class C motorhome.
That sure looks like a major repair. If only the owners had taken the motorhome in for a quick annual checkup, they would have saved themselves a whole bunch of money.
Transcript:
So Chris tell me what we’ve got here.
Well, we’ve got a Class C motorhome that unfortunately the people didn’t do their maintenance. And what ended up happening is it rotted out their floor. So just by the lack of not doing their yearly maintenance, checking their slide out seals, sealing the roof, sealing the moldings, ended up where we got a situation where we’ve got an entire rotten floor.
We had to strip out interior walls, strip out the bathroom cabinets, peel up all the flooring, to then replace the decking in the actual coach.
So where did this leak originate?
This coach here we actually came back down here to the actual slide-out seal. It was not attached properly to the actual molding.
So if they would have maintained that seal?
Then they wouldn’t have this type of repair necessary.
So this repair is going to cost?
In the ballpark of about $13,000 dollars.
And if they would have done their annual maintenance it would have cost them?
I’d say probably in the ballpark of $200-$300 a year.
And they would have avoided all this?
They would have avoided all of this.
And how long will this take?
Ah, this right here is about a 50-60 hour repair. Removing the slide-outs , removing everything that entails to replace the decking. New carpet, new linoleum.
Show me a piece of the floor.
This is just some of the rotting floor that you can see here that we’ve had to strip out.
And so the owners of this did they notice the leaking, just let it go or what do you think happened?
It’s one of those things that they probably didn’t notice it initially, but over time they started to notice it, and that’s how we ended up with it.
So they sooner you get it in?
The sooner you get it in and get your yearly inspection, we’re looking for moisture on the floors, we’re looking for any staining on carpets, we also do what they call a seal-tech machine here as well to where we can actually pressurize up the unit and inspect for leaks as well.
There may be small errors in this transcript.
RELATED: How to Replace Rotted Wood Flooring in a Travel Trailer
