Black Streaks Or How Not To Let Them Drive You Mad

Ah yes, black streaks on your RV... they will drive you crazy... they drove me crazy.

Black streaks? What am I talking about?

Black streaks are the result of the runoff from the RV roof of rain and the collected crud on the roof that comes with it. This mixture bathes the sides leaving behind a residue that seems to embed itself into the paint or other surface material. This residue is worst at the top of the sides but if allowed to continue without maintenance, they will extend down the whole side of the RV. Once on, these streaks are seemingly impossible to remove.

There are many remedies out there that all claim to be the ultimate solution to the nasty black material that embeds itself into the sidewalls of your shiny RV. Nothing I have found except the strongest (and undesirable) of chemicals seems to do the job.

Today I was reading a post from an RV forum I regularly read from a (gone crazy from the black streaks like me?) poster asking for a solution. The post reminded me that indeed there was at least a partial solution, one that brought me back to sanity and another RV Thing That Works for me.

I have owned several different RVs and like most other RVers, finding the solution to the black streak dilemma haunted me on all my them... There was nothing I tried that worked with the exception Castrol Super Clean. From my personal experience, you DO NOT want to use this stuff on your RV. Though it works, it is tough on decals, paint and most anything it comes in contact with. Super Clean is a good product but I do not recommend it for this use.

In searches on the Internet I found a different way to attack the problem. The key it seems is to avoid getting the streaks in the first place. Let me explain.

The idea is to keep the runoff away from the vertical surfaces on your rig. There are two products that I found at two different price points and they both have merits, but I have to say that, for the sidewalls, there is only one product that merits an RV Things That Work mention. First I tried a product that added a small flexible gutter to the side of the RV but I found that this gutter was not large enough to catch and carry away the amount of water that comes off the roof. On my rig, the material was not wide enough to catch a lot of the water coming off the roof. I did find the this small gutter was helpful over the windshield RV as gutter at the top of my windshield, kind of an eyebrow gutter.

The battle continued.

I was willing to try anything at this point and I took a gamble on RainKap, a product that guaranteed success. I think they all promise magic, don't they??

Most RVs have a approximately one inch wide aluminum trim piece with a vinyl insert that trims of the roof material to the sidewall. The way that RainKap works is that it gets inserted in place of the original vinyl insert. RainKap is an about 2 inch, downward angled, stiff rubber material that sends the water coming off the roof away from the RV side. I was skeptical, but to that point I was losing the battle against the dreaded black streaks.

Not all RVs have this type of molding at the top so this solution will not work on all rigs. Also it is not a perfect solution. You cannot install RainKap where there is something blocking the molding that it would mount to such as an awning. That means that where the RainKap ends at this obstruction, there will still be some black streaking. But overall RainKap seems to do what the company says it will do... it mostly keeps black streaks from happening at all.

Though in my view it is a little pricey, it is very much worth the price you pay. I have yet to find a better way for dealing with the maddening black streaks and for that reason it is another of my RV Things That Work and I am a saner man for it!

Internet on the road...

This is the beginning of a few of my observations on RV Things That Work for me. I will relate these as I have experienced them with hopefully no bias other than that of my personal positive reactions. I hope you will enjoy these posts. Please feel free to comment.

For my first post I want to talk about a recent addition to my tech-minded arsenal while on the road.

Internet has become one of those things that is critical to comfortable RV travel, whether for keeping in touch with friends and family, for researching an area or even getting the 'lay of the land' on Google Maps. Sharing pictures is wonderfully simple using some of the many picture sharing websites out on the Internet, Picasa being my favorite since it ties in with everything else Google.

For a couple of years my preferred way to connect to the Internet was using a Hughesnet (previously Direcway) satellite Internet system, or where I could find it, a free WiFi connection. Hughesnet mostly worked well with the only drawback being the half hour to forty five minute setup time for the satellite antenna... I am not wealthy enough to convince myself to buy one of those fancy, automated, roof mounted antennas that set up in minutes. I used my Hughesnet system for three years.

Last winter I decided I did not want to pay the $60 monthly fee for the Hughesnet service and decided to give Internet by cell phone a try. If I connected through my cellphone, my monthly charges with Alltel, my cell phone provider, would drop to $30 a month for 'unlimited' Internet access and I can turn the service on and off at will as I need it. For cellular Internet unlimited usually means about 5 gigabytes of data transfer a month... good enough for general web surfing and email and perhaps the transfer of some pictures and downloading some music. Don't count on it for doing a lot of video... even an old black and white 90 minute movie download would use ten to twenty percent or more of that monthly allotment.

Getting back to my first experiment with Internet by cell phone (also known as tethering), one of the issues I ran into was sharing my Internet connection to my wife's computer. I used the Internet connection sharing feature built into the operating system on my computer. Sharing my connection in this way worked fairly well but not as well as it had with the satellite dish and a wireless router. There might be a better way.....

After getting back from my winter sojourn this year I decided to look into a device I had recently read about that connects to the cell phone (similar to how I had connected my computer to my cell phone) and creates a WiFi hot spot. I had some extra cash burning a hole in my pocket (well actually credit card rebate $$$$$, or as I call it funny money) and decided to purchase a Cradlepoint CTR350 through one of the Amazon.com partner vendors for $129.00 (Amazon will be the subject of a future RV Things That Work post.)

I promptly received the item and was amazed at its diminutive size. The picture on the Cradlepoint website did not really represent the size of the thing. I mean, to me, it is tiny!

I had some concerns because my cellphone, a Motorola E-815, was not on Cradlepoint's list of known and tested compatible cell phones. I had done some research (on the Internet of course) and found some posts on some cellular forums that the E-815 should work with the CTR350, so I took a gamble that this information was accurate.

You may be wondering why I would just not get an approved phone. Unfortunately, there are very few phones available that allow you to connect an external antenna. The E-815 was one of the last cell phones sold that has an external antenna port and was sold by Alltel. I say 'was' because the E-815 is no longer being manufactured. It is still available on eBay.

Though having an external antenna connection has become less of an issue, we do travel to a few places where an external antenna is helpful. For example, last weekend when we went to a Corps of Engineers park along the Mississippi River. The cellular signal was quite weak in the park but with the outside antenna things were much better.

An appropriate cell phone (or a USB data card) connects to the CTR350 via the USB port and an appropriate cable. Once you have connected the cell phone and router you access the router wirelessly via a WiFi connection and log in to it with your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) by going to an IP address supplied in the enclosed documentation. There are more potential settings to this router than most routers I have seen. Most settings the average user does not have to touch... In fact I found that I really did not have to set anything in my case... the only thing I set was how the connection to the Internet was invoked; that being allowing the router to automatically connect when the router saw activity (on demand) or to connect to the Internet manually, the method I prefer. I also set security that limits the access to the router to those users that I want to give an access password.

Before I knew it, I was hooked up and online. The CTR350 had connected without much effort or input from me. I was expecting getting the CTR350 and my phone connected, configured and online to be harder than it was!

This little box is very powerful and has some capabilities that I find amazing for the price. It has an Ethernet port which will allow you to make a wired connection to a computer as well as allowing for some other advanced uses, features that I will never take advantage of.

Cradlepoint appears to be keeping their products current as they seem to make regular upgrades available to the software in the unit.

Cradlepoint makes several units with additional features. For example, the CTR350 does not have an external WiFI antenna, something that may be desirable if you were trying to have longer range with your WiFi signal. The CTR500 has external antenna capability as well as some additional features.

I found that the CTR350s WiFi range to be quite good, considering that it does not have an external antenna. I tested it between my RV and a friends last weekend and got an adequate signal though we were more than 100 feet apart.

There is one thing that I might improve if I were Cradlepoint. For security reasons, the router software logs you out from its web page automatically after a short period of time. As I mentioned, I like starting a connection manually. I prefer this method because a lot of programs and web pages these days keep using the Internet, whether to check for updates or to refresh the content of the page. I don't want to unnecessarily use my available 5 gigabytes of bandwidth.

That means that I have to log in to the router to effect a connection and I have to login again to disconnect. It might be nice to be able to access a page solely for the purpose of completing a connection or a disconnection, one that does not require a login.

This is one amazing unit... the first of my RV Things That Work!

Update 7/29/09: It looks like the price has decreased on the CTR350... I see Amazon partners now have this for $99, freight included!