-
WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE DON’T KNOW
There isn’t a week that goes by that we don’t see a post from someone that asks a question about their coach that makes us wonder why the person posting does not know the answer. To be honest every single one of us has asked questions that make it clear we did not do a complete job of getting trained or inspecting the coach prior to the purchase.
My own best example is I had my coach for a few months and during that period we had used it a lot. It was our first coach with electric shades and they worked perfectly. One day while working on the coach doing something inside it, I tried to lower one of the shades. It didn’t work. I tried another shade. It also did not work. In fact none of them worked. So I started to try to find out what circuit controlled the shades so I could replace the fuse or reset the breaker. I could not find a single circuit dedicated to the shades. I finally called Liberty and learned the shades are on the same electrical circuit as the forward outlets. It was a circuit I had turned off.
My point is simple. I did not know enough when purchasing the coach to even ask about what circuit the shades were on. I was a 15 year coach owner at that time and felt reasonably sure I could figure out the details I did not know after learning the coach. Not true.
Our first coach was simple compared to the next coach and our second coach was simple compared to our current coach. With each succeeding year coaches have gotten more and more complex because they have more and more features. With my first coach everything was electro-mechanical and if I had access to a WW Grainger store I could fix almost anything that broke. That is no longer the case, and despite 22 years of ownership when I bought the current coach I got two days of training by Liberty, and I still was overwhelmed.
New owners or buyers should take heed and understand when buying a coach it might take several days just to get comfortable with the basics. I would bet an inexperienced person could not even turn on my Cruiseairs without knowing what buttons or switches to push, and where they are located. And that is just one example of a critical bit of knowledge a buyer needs to know. What buyer would even think there are at least three circuits that have to be energized at three different places just to get one Cruiseair to work?
If you are a new owner and your brain is in overload mode do not hesitate to get help by asking questions here on PC. Nobody who bought their first (or even subsequent) Prevost conversion without feeling like they were drinking from a fire hose. There is so much to learn and the information comes at you so fast it is impossible to even anticipate what to ask or learn. Do the best you can with pre-purchase inspection and training, and then use all the available resources to fill in the blanks, including this forum.
And don’t worry that someone will think you asked a stupid question, or that it might suggest you didn’t do an adequate pre-purchase inspection. To use an aviation analogy a first time buyer of a Prevost can be compared to a non-pilot stepping into a 737 for the first time and being expected to get a few hours of instruction and being turned loose into the wild blue yonder.
-
10 Replies
-
Even worse? Wondering why none of the outlets in the forward/mid section work, getting out the manuals, checking the circuits, breakers, etc.. and then after about 30 minutes having the bright idea to check the GFI breaker in the kitchen. Yep, that fixed it.
These coaches are very complicated systems and when you start throwing in the fact that each and every convertor does things a little (or sometimes a lot) different. It’s hard to know everything and to understand how some fixes one coach may not help on another coach.
Jeff looked at me like I had been dropped on my head when I asked him about installing check valves on the Liberty. Guess they are not as needed due to their air system design as say a Marathon. Wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t asked and shown my ignorance, which Jeff took in stride and diplomatically answered 🙂
-
Is Jon’s post directed at me, or am I just paranoid?
OK, so I admitted that while at Bella Terra, I couldn’t tell Rudy where my Webasto unit was mounted in my coach.
Then, Tom was kind enough to visit my site and give me a tutorial on my auxiliary air system. He told me that the aux air tank was probably located behind the front bumper. I vaguely remembered something about this from my :”walk through” when I took delivery. I also vaguely remembered being shown how to open the front bumper.
So, I opened the bay door below the driver’s seat and told Tom that I remembered that there was some type of latch or handle that you had to pull to drop the front bumper. I looked and looked, all the while telling Tom that I knew there was some latch, somewhere, that would release the front bumper. Eventually, I had my head way inside the bay, exploring the innards of the coach, when someone (I’m not sure if it was Tom or that smartass Andre, because my head was way up in the bay) who said, “There it is!”
I extracted myself from the bay and said “Where?”
And that someone pointed to a rather large latch, plainly visible at the top of the bay, right below a rather large, quite prominent sticker that read: “PULL TO RELEASE BUMPER.”
For a brief moment, I was able to read minds. I looked Tom in the eye, and although he made a valiant effort to be a gentleman, avoid blurting out an insult, and conceal his true feelings, I knew then exactly what he was thinking.
-
Been there and done that, and I am sure I will ask a stupid question again, That is what is great about this site! You have almost 2,000 members and a lot of people want to ask questions, and are not afraid of being ridiculed by others, not so on some other sites, Gary
-
I have a large bruised spot right between my eyes from this post………
Geez………I thought just buying a Prevost made me ‘appear’ to be smarter than…..
OK………OK……….I’ll still be asking things like ‘where the heck is my generator battery’ and………..
Reality, thy name is ‘Ol’Ben’…………….
(my wife still loves me……..at least she says……….)
-
Colt, and anybody else that thinks my post was about them………..That post was about every single one of us.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, can own one of these and not realize from the start how little they know. And Colt, if Tom did not pick on you it was because he knows what we all have gone through.
Now that is not to say we are going to pass up opportunities to break someone’s chops. Sometimes the occasion is just too good to pass up. A perfect example is when a member apologizes for his wife or significant other in advance of a rally. Or when someone claims to have his last bus, or when someone claims he will never have slides.
-
Or, when someone claims that they use their rotary dial flip phone.
-
Colt couldn’t have been more fun, at least until I asked him what looked good on a Lawyer? What he says, and I said, a Doberman. Who cares, we wanted to spend time with Melissa anyway.:)
-
I’ve always heard it said, “There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers.” So don’t be afraid to ask the question and see how many dumb answers you get in return.
In the vain of not having gotten, or remembered, the walk through on my “Classic” coach, we were in Boone, NC relaxing at 8:00 PM or so, and the most gosh awful vibration rocked the galley sink area. I went out and worked at locating the source but could not find one. So on to the internet, to Jon and Tom, to ask the question what’s up with this …
Some problems have a simple fix IF you have the knowledge necessary to fix it. Turned out my Aux Air Compressor was now running constantly having suffered a malfunction. I want to give credit where it is due but so many miles have rolled by I don’t have that knowledge. Suffice it to say that within 10-15 minutes I had responses from both Jon and Tom. The suggestion was to shut down the Aux Air to see if the noise and vibration stopped. UH, OK how do I do that? Answer, open the lower electrical door driver’s side and flip the toggle switch to off. I didn’t even know there was such a toggle switch but it worked.
In this case neither the question or the answer was dumb, only the owner who had not taken the time to get more closely related to his new to him coach. Life is good so enjoy the ride, get to know your coach as well as you know your bride.
-
Will is taking blame for something not his fault.
I won’t say it is impossible, but it approaches impossible when we attempt to learn the coach when being trained by the owner or dealer. To use Will’s example of the aux air compressor, I would dare say few if any of us when buying our first Prevost would know there was such a thing, or even think about one. Fewer still would understand why we might have one and even fewer would know things about check valves and the limitations of the system.
That is why a new owner or potential buyer should ask questions. What the person asking the questions does not realize is on a forum like this the number of people willing to post and ask questions is but a small fraction of the total membership. So asking a question likely helps those thinking the same thing, but did not post the question. The question also helps those who are long time owners because far too often even more experienced owners will not realize something about their coach until they read it on this forum. The best recent example is how many Marathon owners actually knew their aux air system for the house could be isolated from the chassis accessory air or even why and how it is done?
-
We were actually helping Carole to help Will.:)
Log in to reply.