One of the most important parts of camp setup is leveling the rig. I feel like I’m drunk when I walk around an out-of-level room! Plus there are some level sensitive systems on board like the refrigerator. We have an LCI Level-Up system with a front landing jack pair and 2 other pairs, one in front of and one behind the three axles.
When we first took delivery of the vehicle, we would hear popping sounds in the early morning and late afternoon. They were loud enough to wake us up, and many times the trailer moved a lot! I thought it was going to topple over! After some research, we found this LCI technical article concerning the noise. It had us replace a quart of hydraulic fluid with some anti-stiction supplement. We used the CAT supplement and also started using WD40 Silicone Spray on the jacks when we retract them to depart. That seems to work well. We also spray and retract/relevel every week or so when we’re somewhere that long. If we don’t spray and cycle the jacks, we start to hear minor popping in around 5 days, plus or minus depending on the weather.
I would estimate that since delivery, the Level-Up has successfully leveled the unit about 30% of the time. When it works, it was very close to level when we start. When it fails, it’s because it tried to raise the wrong side and just kept going until one of the jacks reached its travel limit. I always end up using manual mode in these cases. I called Lippert and got a return call very quickly. I talked with one of the techs and eventually discovered that the RV Factory had installed the rear remote sensor backwards. Makes sense – the sensor was reporting the wrong side was low and the Level-Up was doing it’s best with the info it had. Here is the sensor the way I found it (lower left of the pic is toward the rear of the unit):
And here it is after I turned it around:
After I turned the sensor around on the manually leveled frame, the control panel reported I was at 8.4 degrees left side low. I ended up resetting the zero point on the control panel and it showed 0 front to back and 0 side to side. Since that fix, we have successfully leveled at every location since, some of which would never have leveled the way it was.
We’re glad to have that headache of leveling behind us. We may even replace another quart with anti-stiction fluid. Maybe that would extend the time between silicone sprayings…
