Drew Callahan Drew Callahan · April 23, 2026
I was camped outside Sedona in mid-April when my 2015 North Point started showing a wet spot on the bedroom mattress—not soaking, but enough to know something upstairs was leaking. Water heater, furnace, roof seal, or slide-out gasket; take your pick. Jayco builds solid rigs, but after three of them over eight years, I’ve learned … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 23, 2026
Walk into an RV dealer service department and ask about a dead air conditioner, and you’ll hear talk of compressor replacement, control board failures, and refrigerant issues—the expensive stuff. Log onto an RV forum the same afternoon and someone will tell you it’s probably just a capacitor or fan motor, maybe a thermostat that’s gone … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 23, 2026
Pull back the cabinet panel on a Forest River Sunseeker, Solera, or Berkshire and you’ll spot the Suburban water heater sitting in that cramped utility bay — and nine times out of ten, the anode rod inside has already surrendered to corrosion. Forest River handles dozens of chassis and floor plans under its umbrella, each … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 22, 2026
What Winnebago’s service department won’t tell you upfront is that their rigs fail in patterns — predictable, repeatable patterns that cluster by model year and design generation. I’ve rebuilt enough of them to spot the difference: a View’s roof seals deteriorate on a schedule entirely different from a Brave’s, the Sightseer’s plumbing layout creates failure … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 22, 2026
It was mid-January, and I was parked outside of Flagstaff when the furnace stopped throwing heat. Not gradually—it just quit. I remember the exact moment: standing in the galley, hand on the thermostat dial, and instead of the familiar whoosh of ignition, I got clicking. A rapid, mechanical clicking, like a tiny relay working overtime … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 21, 2026
Most RV owners believe their air conditioner either works or it doesn’t—that it’s binary, simple, all-or-nothing. What they don’t realize is that the system can look like it’s running while the cooling half has already given up, and by the time they figure out what’s actually broken, a $30 component failure has cascaded into a … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 21, 2026
I’ve got my workbench set up in the bay right now with a Thor Challenger frame spread across it—slideout seal in one hand, a heat gun warming up on the side table, and three inches of gap staring back at me where there shouldn’t be any. This is the kind of thing that doesn’t wait … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 20, 2026
Let your Arctic Wolf’s AC capacitor fail and ignore it, and you won’t just lose cold air—you’ll fry the compressor and fan motor running starved and unbalanced until they seize completely. By then, you’re looking at a $1,200–$1,800 unit replacement instead of a $20 part swap. I’ve seen this movie play out dozens of times: … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 20, 2026
I’ve got a capacitor sitting on my workbench right now—pulled it from a 2019 Jayco North Point that quit cooling somewhere outside Yuma in late July. The thing’s visibly swollen at the top, the aluminum casing bulging outward in a way that tells you everything you need to know about what happens when 120-volt AC … Read more
Drew Callahan · April 20, 2026
“Drew, my Montana’s AC stopped blowing cold last week. The fan spins when I flip the switch, but the compressor won’t engage — I can hear it trying, but nothing happens. What am I looking at?” That’s the text I got from a full-timer in Arizona, and it’s the exact same symptom I’ve debugged a … Read more
