Campsite rental, and
fuel if you move much. Maintenance is almost insignificant, at lest on a towed one.
True the MPG may not be much different, but your going ten times as fast, and burning fuel at a prodigious rate.
Gas will kill you, just like a boat if your going to do serious “Cruising” in an RV, you want Diesel, even if a fifth
wheel.
Having owned a gas class A and a fifth
wheel pulled by a C3500 Duramax dually, in my opinion the fifth wheel gave you far more room for less
money, and was easier to drive and park, and the ride quality and ease of driving in high winds etc was much, much better.
Plus you have your tow vehicle to ride around in when you get there.
We lived in our fifth wheel for I think just short of two years with our two
kids and a cat while the house was being rebuilt, in those two years I replaced the fridge, and that was about it, and it was like $1,000 or so, for the best one with an ice maker.
Pressurized
water came from the source, only run a
pump when your boon
docking and the
toilet is a gravity feed thing, ours was porcelain and flushed exactly like a house
toilet, I’m pretty sure it was, the sink was a porcelain house sink, with house fixtures, so if needed easily replaced with Home Depot stuff.
Water
heater was both
electric and
propane, and you could run them both at the same time, so even if it was only 10 gls, you couldn’t run the thing out of hot water in the
shower, it heated water as fast as you used it. Heat was of course
Propane, a fifth wheel you can take the
tanks in to be filled, a Motorhome, your driving the vehicle to be refilled, and quite a few places won’t fill a Motorhome, just
tanks, but most campsite places have propane too.
AC’s don’t have water pumps and strainer and hoses etc. most only come with one, you’ll want two, usually very easy to install the second in the vent hole in the bedroom.
As Sailor Chic alluded to, a roof leak is death to an RV, by the time you know you have one, there is significant damage.
Oh, and I washed the Motorhome and waxed it, once. Never again.
You want a smooth sided
fiberglass one and not a corrugated metal one too. And slides can’t be understated, they make a fifth wheel HUGE.
The whole underside is called the basement and there is a lot of
storage there, and of course there is no reason to stock months of
food either.
Most have very min.
Battery storage, mine had two 12V
batteries, I added two more. There was an onboard
battery charger that provided DC
power and most lights had two bulbs, 12v and 120v, some were only one or the other. The battery
charger was not three stage, just a simple charger, maybe new ones are three stage. All DC lights were actually trailer light bulbs and were real
cheap at Walmart, Walmart will have 99% of the stuff you will need believe it or not.
There are no fancy chart plotters, autopilots, watermakers,
Radar,
Ais,
VHF,
SSB, on and on, so that saves a bunch of
money, no anchors, no
windlass, no winches, but you will have leveling jacks, mine were simple mechanical ones, except the landing legs that were electric.
Trailer tires will
rot before they wear out, and wheel bearing are simple things too.
Just if you have a gas
engine class A, you really can burn through $250 in fuel in one day, a long day, but it’s still $250 of fuel.