In mid-December I made an appointment at the Las Vegas Airstream dealer to get some work done on Wobbles, our Airstream, at the beginning of January. We knew we would be in Vegas since Sarah’s mom was visiting, and we were coming up on the 1-year anniversary of our Airstream purchase and wanted to get a last round of warranty work done before our warranty expired.

There wasn’t anything major wrong with our camper when I made the appointment. We had a few creaks and squeaks, and the the little flap that protects the keyhole of the main door lock wasn’t flapping closed anymore. Really minor.

However, in the time between making the appointment and the appointment day arriving we found a few other things that needed to be checked out.

First, the furnace fan had been making some clicking noises. I had assumed there was just a leaf or something stuck in there, but figured I’d ask about it.

Next, we had noticed a small puddle of water on the bathroom floor, and traced it back to a water pipe behind the bathroom cabinet that was leaking occasionally. We had actually noticed a puddle about a month before, but we thought that our bottle of hydrogen peroxide that we kept in that cabinet had leaked.

Leaking fitting under bathroom sink

When I arrived at the dealer, I gave the service manager our list of things to be checked. While he was entering them into his notes, I asked a random question about the propane:

“I’m sure this is perfectly normal, but I figured I’d ask. Is it normal to smell propane whenever I open the lid to the propane tank cover?”

It had always smelled a little like propane in there since it was new, so I just figured this was normal. The service manager informed me that this was not normal and that we had a propane leak. Whoops! I wonder what percentage of our propane has been just leaking out..

In the end, the list of things they fixed for us looked like:

  1. Fixed leak in bathroom: the PEX pipe had been cut at an angle, rather than straight, by the installer so it wasn’t sitting flush against the connector.
  2. Replaced furnace fan motor: there apparently weren’t any leaves in there, the motor was failing.
  3. Replaced propane pigtail connectors: the old ones had been cross threaded.
  4. Replaced door lock core: this meant we got new keys as well.
  5. Squeaky wheel: sometimes when we walked around the trailer, we would hear a subtle squeak coming from outside when the wheel moved slightly. The dealer lubed up that wheel and it’s been fine since.

There were a few other things we had them look at, but were not fixed:

  1. Creaky floor by entrance: there’s a spot of the floor that’s getting pretty creaky. It wouldn’t bother us so much if we didn’t have kids sleeping in our trailer … when we try to tip-toe around at night and CREEAK!! Unfortunately, to fix the creak they would have to take half the trailer apart in order to lift up the flooring, which we didn’t have time for and the idea made me pretty uncomfortable.
  2. DVD player composite video to HDMI converter: The DVD player in our Airstream is a JVC car stereo. This is nice because it’s small and runs on 12 volts. However, it only has a composite video output and the TV has only an HDMI input. To solve for this, Airstream stuck a composite to HDMI converter hidden away in the box behind the DVD player. This converter is powered all the time, and it seems to sometimes seize up. When this happens, the TV stops receiving a signal from the DVD player. To fix it, we simply have to flip the battery disconnect switch on our Airstream off for a few seconds and back on. Not a big deal, although it does mean that the clock and settings on the DVD player also reset each time. We didn’t have them fix this because we would have had to wait for them to order the part. However, I have a feeling that the replacement might do the same thing– these converters probably aren’t designed to be powered on all the time, especially in an enclosed box where the heat can’t escape. I may just install a switch so that I can turn the converter off when we’re not using it.

You know what’s funny? When we went to pick Wobbles up from the dealer after the work was done, they informed us that we actually have another year on our warranty. It’s apparently a 2-year warranty! Hah. Well, I’m sure by January 2020 we’ll have another list of things for them to look at.