Leveling Your RV
Leveling is an important task of setting up your RV, since trying to eat or sleep on an incline is not very comfortable. More important, however, is that older RV refrigerators were very persnickety in wanting to be almost dead level before they would cool properly. The newer RV refrigerators are not quite so finicky. Depending on your RV, you level your coach by using either wood blocks or hydraulic levelers.
I have seen a few enterprising RVers who have welded trailer scissors jacks onto the front and rear frame members of their RV—what I call poor-man levelers—but they do the job. This setup, however, is very common on travel trailers, but is used for stabilizing the trailer more than for leveling it.
Wood Blocks. If your coach does not have levelers, short pieces of 2x6 boards work very well. However, be advised that you need to support both dual wheels on the low side. Never just use one board and have one wheel hanging out in the air with no support.
For my lady's former 32-foot motorhome, I found that one 2x6 was just right when the
level was off by half a bubble, and two 2x6s stacked together worked great when the
level was off by a full bubble width.
A little experimenting soon will have you leveling your coach on the first try.
Hydraulic Levelers. If your coach has hydraulic levelers, then your leveling task is much simpler. However, if your coach is on uneven ground and the rear is lower than the front, a serious word of caution is in order.
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Never never, never raise the levelers to the point where the rear wheels are off the ground! |
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Remember that your parking brake and the Park position of your transmission both work off the driveshaft and rear wheels—you certainly don't want your coach to start sliding backward down the slope. In these situations, it is better to turn your RV around, so that the front wheels can be raised to level the RV.
It is always a good idea to chock at least one of your rear wheels, both front and back, so that your RV cannot move if the jacks should slip.
If you are in fairly soft earth, you may need to put jack pads (12"x12" square pieces of wood) beneath your leveler feet so that they don't sink so far into the soft soil.
Jack pads can also be a great help if you are camped on a very irregular slope. You can put one or two boards under the lowest leveler feet to provide more height capability with your levelers.
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