All of those fun times that comes with camping in an RV depends on keeping the engine that hauls your RV in good working order. And it doesn’t matter what kind of RV you own. Somewhere there has to be an engine that gets your RV where you want to go. But how do you avoid expensive RV engine repairs?

Well interestingly, you don’t have to know much about the mechanics of an engine at all. And yet you can have a pretty good idea about how mechanically sound your engine is. And this kind of knowledge is possible because today we can do something called engine fluid analysis. It can tell us a lot of what we need to know about our engine’s health.

Table of Contents

• How does engine fluid analysis help avoid expensive RV engine repairs?
• The canary in the coal mine
• How you can do it yourself
• Avoiding RV expensive engine repairs – final thoughts

How does engine fluid analysis help avoid expensive RV engine repairs?

Let me explain how this works. When you get a physical checkup from your doctor, usually he will take a blood sample. Then he runs a battery of tests on your blood. Those tests will give him a lot of reliable information about how the organs in your body are functioning. It can also tell him whether some kind of health problem is beginning to develop. That way you can avoid issues that could become serious if something isn’t done about it.

Well, engine fluid analysis does essentially the same thing. All that is required is to just take a sample of your engine oil and send it to a high quality analysis center. They will put that engine oil through a battery of tests. And those tests will provide a lot of information about what is going on inside your engine.

The canary in the coal mine

This is because long before engine parts totally fail, there is often some kind of chemical or metal residue that is produced and then found in the engine oil. This residue is kind of like the canary in the coal mine. It can alert you to possible major problems ahead if you don’t address the issue right away.
And when it comes to these modern big RV engines, you want to be sure to keep on top of what is going on inside of them. That way you can try to avert big problems before they become really expensive RV engine repairs.

Now a lot of NRVIA RV inspectors will offer an engine oil analysis as part of their RV inspection process. This is often the case when someone is considering the purchase of a motorized RV. And if they offer this service, you would be smart to let them do it. This is because that information is critical to having a complete picture of your RV’s mechanical health at the time of your purchase.

How you can do it yourself

But what about those of you who already have the RV you want? Well, the good news is that you can get your engine oil analyzed anytime you want. And you can even do it yourself!

Here is what you do – just order an engine oil analysis kit from a reputable analysis center. Here is a link to the one that I use.

And here is what you will receive from the fluid analysis company – you will get a long plastic tube that you use to insert into your engine oil when the engine is not running. You also get a hand pump to draw the oil into a small plastic bottle. Once the bottle is filled about 2/3 of the way, you just put the cap on it and fill out some pertinent information about your engine. Then you place the cap and the information form into a mailer and send it off to be analyzed. About a week or so later you will get a thorough report about what those engine oil tests revealed about that engine.

Avoiding RV expensive engine repairs – final thoughts

All of this is very simple to do. And the analysis company has some great videos that will guide you on how to perform all the steps of this process in very clear terms.

Now if you regularly perform this kind of engine oil analysis it can not only alert you to possible major rv engine repairs, but it can also save you money too. This is because the oil analysis will also tell you if the oil is still lubricating the engine well enough to be continue to be used at oil change time or whether you should change it. Some RV owners have extended the life of their engine oil significantly by doing this kind of exact and scientific analysis. It takes all the guesswork out of engine oil changes.