Getting the RV in Top Shape Again…

After spending time here at the farm in the Shenandoah Valley the past several weeks we have slowly but surely brought a lot of the contents from the RV into our basement apartment. Over time we always seemed to need something else from the RV and as a result the RV is nearly empty. Because of this we have taken advantage of the situation by deep cleaning of all the cabinets and drawers. Sifting through the contents we are also getting rid of unwanted or unneeded items that have tagged along with us on our journeys.

We have also been ticking off items from our to do list, mostly minor repairs on the RV. For example, I replaced a few drawer/closet latches that were faulty and repaired a piece of trim near the entry door which would snag our socks with its sharp corner. I also took everything out of our closet and put new zipties on the shelving to better secure it as a few of them had broken over time.

I then took the time to take on a few major projects as well. The biggest one being to repair our sleep number bed. Sharon’s side of the bed had a slow leak so I wanted to see if it was repairable. This required taking the bed frame completely apart. Before that however, I had to take the sleep number bed apart as well.

Since we are staying in such a large space I reassembled the pump and the two air chambers over in our basement apartment. Then I inflated both the air chambers to 100 then waited a few days to see if one was losing air and sure enough one was. The next thing I did was to switch the inflating hoses between the two air chambers. This would tell me whether or not the problem was with the inflating pump or hoses or with the sir chamber itself.

A few days later the same air chamber lost air telling me there was indeed a small leak in the air chamber itself. After scouring the web to see how to discover where exactly the leak was I found a video that suggested using a Clorox cleaner to spray the bed down and look for tiny bubbles to find the leak. Well of course due to the pandemic finding anything Clorox became a challenge.

Another website suggested a recipe of one ounce of Clorox and a squirt of laundry soap  along with water to make my own solution. I tried this and after spraying the whole bottle I was unable to find the leak. Then I found a Walmart knockoff of the Clorox cleaning solution to try and was actually able to detect a small air leak on a corner seam.

Another video suggested using brown gorilla glue with a canvas patch as a repair. My first attempt failed as the patch slid while it was drying so I took it off and tried again. My second attempt seemed to work and now we have no more slow leak saving a few hundred dollars by not having to purchase a replacement air chamber.

We certainly couldn’t have done this repair without access to an alternate living space and so we grateful for our apartment where we were finally able to get the bed repaired. It will be so nice not having to re-inflate the air chamber every other night…

NOTE: We are currently in the Shenandoah Valley near Woodstock Virginia until who knows when…