The List--the Nicities

Slip stop Use slip stop to line your cupboards and you'll find that your dishes will slide around less. I also place it under my printer, coffee pot and other items on the desk top and counter that I want to remain in place.

Tension Rods Tension rods are helpful in your pantry and even as extra support in your refrigerator while traveling from campground to campground. Even with the best suspension you'll find that bumps in the road will jar items off your shelves that will be ready to attack once you open that cupboard door.

Hughes Autoformer The Hughes Autoformer boosts the voltage at your site when the voltage drops below 117 volts. In layman's terms, it evens out the power, reducing the possibility of spikes and brown outs, thereby reducing the possibility of damage to your electrical system. We like ours and believe in it but this past winter we have discovered two different campgrounds that have banned their use.

Sewer Solution This is Denny's favorite. It replaces the 3 inch floppy sewer hose. The Sewer Solution has no moving parts, but uses a water jet to break up waste and paper material from your black water tank and flushes it into the much smaller 1/2 inch hose. Denny has modified ours by eliminating the green hose and instead stores several different lengths of PVC pipe. He can brace these with blocks of wood or the hooked spikes he has created to allow for the proper slant for a proper flow of water. We have owned ours since 1995 and it still works as well as the day we received it.

GPS navigation system There are a variety of types of GPS systems for vehicles now. We have used a laptop, Street Atlas software and a GPS receiver to navigate in unfamiliar areas until the advent of the dashboard model of GPS systems. Since then we have had Magellan units and current use the Garmin unit made for truck routing since standard automobile routing sometimes takes you through the middle of towns that are hard to navigate with a thirty-eight foot long trailer. It's not perfect, to be sure and sometimes takes us a few miles out of the way to drive on “truck routes” rather than the more expedient route. I preplan our trips on the computer but there have been times that we have been rerouted on detours and it is very nice to have a mapping system that shows alternate routes or how to get back on track with the new GPS systems.

Tire pressure monitoring system This is an automatic system that involves a wireless monitor that you place on your dashboard and special air pressure monitors that are attached to your valve stems. After a year, we have had no air leakage with these and the system did prevent major damage when we had a blowout and the system's alarm went off immediately so Denny could slow down and get off the interstate. You can purchase extra sensors for as many tires as you have on your vehicle and RV or simply put them on your RV only. I should actually have placed these under the “necessities” category, especially for people with fifth wheels or trailers because it is harder to hear/see a blown tire when your RV is behind you.

Tire pressure monitoring valve caps Until we are ready to invest in an automatic tire pressure monitoring system, we are using these valve cap tire pressure monitors. They are sold in packages of 4 normally and are available for different PSI tire ratings. A quick glance at the color of the cap tells us if we've lost pressure in a tire. Edited 6/24/2007. We have removed our set of tire pressure monitoring valve caps due to the fact they were causing a slow leak in a couple of the tires.

Jack Stabilizers We purchased a set of JT Strong Arm Jack Stabilizers because we thought the mechanics of the idea were sound and it would eliminate having to carry around a king pin stabilizer. Denny thinks the stabilizers work fine, I'm not a fan. I believe the problem stems from the fact that our washer and dryer are installed in the nose of our fifth wheel, all the way to the front ahead of the jacks and that the movement from the spin action of the washer throws off the balance of the trailer enough that the jack legs and stabilizers move a bit which allows for more movement of the trailer itself after a few days. The installers admitted to us that they had to modify the way our set of stabilizers were installed due to the way our trailer chassis/frame was built so that could have something to do with the amount of movement that we still get while using these stabilizers also.