Methodology
Evidence standards
RV advice online is mostly unattributed assertion, copied between sites until repetition starts to look like consensus. Following the wrong line costs a part, a weekend, or worse. So every technical statement here carries a tier, and where we do not have a source we say so rather than fill the gap.
The four tiers
- Verified manufacturer fact
- Stated in a manufacturer service manual, owner’s manual, service bulletin, or recall notice.
- Industry consensus
- Standard practice across the RV service trade. Not specific to one manufacturer or model.
- Professional judgment
- A reasoned inference drawn from the evidence above. An informed opinion, not an established fact.
- Owner-reported symptom
- What RV owners report experiencing. Useful signal for a technician — not a diagnosis.
What we refuse to publish
- A remote diagnosis. We never state what is broken on your RV. We state what you observed and what a technician checks, in what order.
- An unsourced error-code meaning. We publish a code meaning only with the manufacturer’s own fault table on file. We currently hold 0 sourced meanings across 13 manufacturer/system families.
- A self-repair walkthrough for a gated system. Propane appliances, 120V AC faults, and anything holding the coach’s weight route to a technician. We do not publish a procedure that ends with an owner under a jack.
- Coverage, partners, or results we do not have. The site reports its real state, including when that state is zero.
Why triage asks what it asks
Every triage question asks for something you can see, hear, smell, or measure. An observation is checkable and stays true when it reaches the technician. An owner’s theory about the cause — however reasonable — anchors the technician to the wrong path and gets billed for at an hourly rate.
Safety questions run first and can stop the flow outright. If you report propane odour, smoke, a shock, or a carbon-monoxide alarm, we stop asking questions immediately rather than walking you through further troubleshooting.
Where these standards show up
These are not abstract commitments — each one is visible in a specific place. The error-code lookup withholds a code’s meaning unless the manufacturer’s fault table is on file. Every line of a service brief carries the tier it was written at, so a technician can tell an owner’s report from a manual’s. And triage refuses to ask you to work on a safety-gated system at all.
Challenge anything here
If a statement on this site is wrong, unsourced, or misleading in the field, tell us the page and the line. Send a correction. Corrections from working technicians take priority over everything else in our queue.
This is structured triage, not a diagnosis. Nothing here replaces hands-on inspection by a qualified RV technician. Any work involving propane, 120V AC wiring, or the chassis should be performed by a licensed professional.