10 RV Camping Tips That Separate Pros from Rookies

Level your rig before you do anything else. That’s the first thing. Everything after that is what I’ve learned from 15 years of backcountry guiding, three years of extended RV travel, and watching first-timers make the same expensive, sleep-ruining mistakes at campgrounds from the Boundary Waters to the Sonoran Desert.

1. Level Your Rig Before You Do Anything Else

Don’t crack a beer. Don’t start dinner. Level first. An unlevel RV means your refrigerator’s cooling unit works against gravity, your propane appliances burn inefficiently, and you’ll slide toward one side of your mattress all night like a marble in a bowl.

Side-to-side level is non-negotiable for absorption fridges — more than 3 degrees off and you risk damaging the cooling unit permanently. Front-to-back matters for sleep quality and proper drainage. Keep a bubble level on your dash. The Camco 25543 Leveling Blocks are what I carry — interlocking design, rated to 40,000 lbs, they pack flat. Don’t improvise with wood scraps from a campsite. I’ve seen that go wrong.

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2. Understand Your Water System Before You’re Thirsty

Most beginners treat their RV water system like a hotel tap. It’s not. You’ve got three separate systems: fresh water, gray water (sinks and shower), and black water (toilet). Confuse them or mismanage them and your trip ends early and smells terrible.

Fresh tank capacity on a typical Class C runs 30–50 gallons. At normal usage — cooking, drinking, quick showers — that’s 2–3 days for two people. Hook up to campground water when it’s available, but use a dedicated drinking-water hose. Never a green garden hose — they leach chemicals into your water supply. Always run an inline water filter between the spigot and your rig. Campground water pressure spikes to 100+ PSI regularly and blows lines — a $12 pressure regulator prevents a $400 repair.

For black tank management: use plenty of water with every flush, add a tank treatment enzyme on day one, and dump every 3–4 days. I won’t describe what happens when you don’t. You’ll find out once and never skip it again.

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3. Your Shore Power Setup Will Make or Break Your Comfort

Most campgrounds offer 30-amp or 50-amp hookups. Know which your rig needs before you pull in — it’s on your RV’s spec sheet. A 30-amp service runs about 3,600 watts. That sounds like plenty until you’re running your AC (1,500W), microwave (1,000W), and coffee maker (900W) simultaneously and you trip the breaker at 7 a.m.

Get a surge protector rated for your amperage and leave it plugged in permanently. I’ve run the Progressive Industries EMS-PT30X for three years straight. It monitors voltage, amperage, and frequency, and disconnects automatically if campground power goes bad. Bad campground power is more common than you’d think — it fries inverters, TVs, and refrigerator control boards without warning. A $150 protector is cheap insurance against a $1,200 repair bill.

When you’re dry camping, you’re running on battery. A standard RV ships with one or two Group 27 lead-acid batteries — maybe 100Ah usable. That covers LED lights and phone charging, not much else. If you plan to boondock more than one night, upgrade to a 100Ah lithium like the Battle Born BB10012. It’s 31 lbs, delivers full power down to 20% charge, and handles 3,000+ charge cycles. Around $950. It’s the single best upgrade I’ve made to any rig I’ve owned.

4. Campground Selection Is a Skill

The difference between a $28 site and a $55 site isn’t always what you think. I use three apps: Campendium for honest user reviews with photos, The Dyrt for breadth of listings, and Freecampsites.net when I want to get off the grid entirely.

When I’m booking, I check four things in order: site length (measure your rig plus tow vehicle — most Class A coaches need 45+ feet), hookup type, cell signal (Campendium reviews are specific about this), and tree coverage. Full afternoon sun on a black-roofed RV in July means your AC runs constantly and you’re still sweating. A shaded site in the same campground drops interior temps by 15 degrees. I’ve measured it.

Call ahead for big rigs. Campground websites lie about “big rig friendly.” I’ve pulled into sites listed as 40-foot capable and had to back out over a low-hanging branch. One phone call saves an hour of misery.

5. Master the Hookup Sequence — Every Time

There’s a right order for connecting and disconnecting utilities, and skipping steps causes damage. Here’s the sequence I run every single time:

• Arriving: Level first → stabilizer jacks down → connect shore power (with surge protector) → connect water with filter and pressure regulator → connect sewer if full hookup site
• Departing: Disconnect sewer first → retract slides → disconnect water → disconnect shore power → raise stabilizer jacks → full walk-around

The walk-around before departure is where rookies cut corners. I’ve watched people drive off with sewer hoses still connected, water hoses dragging, and — once, memorably — a camp chair still set up under the rig. Build the habit on your first trip and it becomes automatic by your third.

6. Cook Smart, Not Just Outdoors

Your propane range works fine, but cooking inside in summer heat adds 10 degrees to your interior and runs your AC harder. Get outside when conditions allow.

I keep a Camp Chef Everest 2X outside for most cooking. It puts out 20,000 BTUs per burner, handles a 12-inch cast iron without complaint, and folds down to a reasonable footprint. For quick meals, a Jetboil Flash boils water in 100 seconds and burns almost no fuel — I’ve made coffee, oatmeal, and ramen on a single 100g canister over a long weekend.

Beginners always underestimate propane usage. Your fridge, water heater, furnace, and range all pull from the same tanks. A 20 lb tank holds about 4.7 gallons — enough for roughly 25 hours of cooking, but if your furnace runs all night in cold weather, you burn through a tank in 2–3 days. Carry a second tank and a propane gauge so you’re never surprised at 11 p.m. in 30-degree weather.

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7. Manage Your Power Like You’re Paying Per Watt

Even on shore power, conservation habits matter — because you won’t always have hookups. The biggest draws in an RV are the AC unit, the electric water heater, and the microwave. Run them sequentially, not simultaneously, and you’ll stay under your 30-amp limit without thinking about it.

Switch your water heater to propane mode when you’re off hookups. It heats faster anyway — 6 gallons in about 20 minutes on propane versus 35 minutes on electric. Turn it on 30 minutes before you need a shower and off immediately after. There’s no reason to keep 6 gallons of water hot all day.

LED lighting is standard on newer rigs, but if yours has incandescent bulbs, swap them out immediately. A typical RV with incandescent fixtures draws 150–200W just from interior lighting. LED replacements cut that to under 30W and last 10x longer. It’s a two-hour job and costs about $40 in bulbs.

8. Stabilize Your Rig Properly — Leveling Jacks Aren’t Stabilizers

This is the mistake that ruins sleep for most first-timers. Leveling jacks level your RV. Stabilizer jacks stabilize it. They’re not interchangeable and they don’t do each other’s jobs.

In a travel trailer or fifth wheel, you need corner stabilizers under all four corners once you’re level. Scissor jacks are standard equipment but they flex. I replaced mine with X-Chock wheel stabilizers for the tires and Lippert Stabilizer Jacks for the corners — that combination eliminates almost all the rocking that makes every footstep feel like a 4.0 earthquake inside.

In a Class A or C motorhome, deploy your leveling jacks fully and then drop your stabilizers. Don’t use the leveling jacks to chase the last inch of stability — they’re not designed for that load cycle and you’ll wear out the hydraulic seals before you hit 50,000 miles.

9. Build a Campsite Kit and Keep It Packed

I keep a dedicated campsite bin in my basement storage that never gets fully unpacked between trips. It contains:

• 30-foot and 50-foot drinking water hoses
• Pressure regulator (rated to 40–50 PSI)
• Inline water filter
• 20-foot sewer hose with fittings and a clear elbow (so you can see when the tank is actually clear)
• Power adapter dongles (30M to 50F and 50M to 30F)
• Surge protector
• Chocks and leveling blocks
• Rubber gloves for sewer work — non-negotiable
• Basic toolkit: adjustable wrench, pliers, duct tape, Teflon tape for water fittings

This bin costs about $200 to assemble. It’s saved me from improvising in a campground parking lot more times than I can count. Buy it once, keep it stocked, and you’re never the person asking your neighbor for a hose fitting at 9 p.m.

10. Do a Shakedown Trip Before You Commit to Anything Long

Every RV has something wrong with it that you won’t find until you’re actually using it. A leaky faucet fitting. A slide that sticks in humidity. A refrigerator that takes 6 hours to get cold. A furnace igniter that works fine on the lot and fails at 35 degrees.

Your first trip should be one or two nights, close to home, at a full-hookup campground. Run every system. Fill the fresh tank and use it. Run the AC and the furnace. Cook on the range. Flush the toilet 20 times. Take a shower. Watch TV. Charge your devices. You’re stress-testing the rig in a low-stakes environment where a problem means a short drive home, not a 200-mile tow.

Keep a Klein Tools MM400 multimeter and a non-contact voltage tester in your toolkit. Campground electrical pedestals have wiring faults more often than you’d expect — reversed polarity, open grounds — that your surge protector catches but that you should understand yourself. Testing a pedestal before you plug in takes 10 minutes to learn and has saved my rig’s electrical system at least twice that I know of.

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The learning curve on RV camping is real but it compresses fast. By your third trip you’ll handle hookups without thinking. Get the fundamentals right on the first one and you won’t spend your second trip fixing what you broke.

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