RV Water Damage: A Camper's Worst Nightmare | e139

Things are great on the road until they aren’t. Right now, we’re not doing great, but we’re at the best place we can be to help fix this mess of a camper. We’re going to take you along as we tear apart our 2018 Host Cascade truck camper to expose all of the problems and hopefully get everything fixed! 🤞🏻

Water is every camper’s nemesis. It doesn’t matter where you got the water – driving in the rain, being in large storms, or those wonderful nights with a light rain – it will eventually find it’s way inside.

Unfortunately for us, our problems started shortly after we got the camper but we didn’t realize until a year later.

Background

We purchased our camper in the spring of 2018 at a dealership in Wisconsin. There aren’t many dealerships in the Midwest, but there was at least this one. This camper had been taken to shows in the area and had a little bit of wear. Because of that, we were able to negotiate a reasonable price and ended up with our first camper a few weeks later.

Gary, in typical fashion, was all over that camper the first year – learning the different systems, figuring out maintenance needs, etc. Checking seals, caulk, the roof – you know the drill. He’s really good at this.

Investigation (2019)

So when we were camping in the fall of 2019 we noticed a little bit of moisture inside the camper, between the dinette table and the bed – next to the location of the jack mounts inside.

We immediately started to trace potential water intrusion areas and found a bit of a nightmare – the trim on the nose section was holding water, and once we started removing, we had TONS of water coming out of our camper.

After investigation, we found that all of the screws on the roof were not sealed during the assembly process. This allowed water to easily drip down into the wood of the nosecap.

We also found that at the bottom of the trim piece, the bottom screw had some seal on it, which prevented water from getting out of the trim piece. This essentially caused one large “pool” in our nose cap which built up quite a bit of water.

We called Host and got recommendations on how to try and address the issue. In hindsight, we should have taken the RV back to Wisconsin but we chose to try and fix it ourselves.

But after this, the damage had been done and delamination began to occur on the nose cap. We tried to mitigate as much as we could, and dried the areas out as best as possible without removing the fiberglass.

So we’re here now to see how bad the damage is, after waiting for another 3 years. On the plus side, we’re at Penpac RV in Redmond, OR. Dan Penington is the owner of this RV repair shop and he helped build the first Host Campers and worked for some time at Host before starting his repair business. He has a wealth of knowledge and we both have confidence that whatever happens here, we’ll leave with a much better rig.

Our Camping Locations⛺🗺️📌

We’re sharing our camping and other locations on iOverlander (boondocking, etc.) and Campendium (established campsites).

✅Penpac RV – not the typical place to stay overnight, but it’s saving us a TON of money. I started looking at long-term hotels and Air BnBs in the area and we’d be paying well into the thousands for the amount of time we’re likely to spend here. Not the prettiest of places, but the price is right! And hopefully we’ll get started on the camper shortly!

Our Journey Map⛺🥾🗺️📌

We also have a currently free map on Google with all of the places we’ve stayed along with the related video and links to more detailed reviews on iOverlander , Campendium and Google Maps.