Having caravand all our lives with the rot boxes
And having issues with water ingress on all of them which was always brought to our attention on the annual rip off service . Is it necessary to have our 9 year old eriba 540 serviced every year or are they as robust as we've been led to believe. As you may guess we are virgin eriba owners in our middle sixties and are sick and tired of british caravans and caravan engineers coming to our house every year wanting £200 to service our pride and joy and giving us bad news I'm sorry sir you've got a bad damp reading here and there it is soul destroying so as you can see we've joined the eriba family hopefully with not the same issues we've had with the white boxes.

Hi Phil
You sound to have had some bad experiences with your vans and damp. I can only respond to you from our experience. We have a 540 that is 8 years old. We had it serviced by a main Eriba Dealer to meet the demands of the Hymer 6 year water ingress guarantee before moving our service to an independent service engineer locally as it was about £100 cheaper. In all this time we have had no problems with damp despite it being stored outside on the drive.

I don't think this is unusual because of how the Eriba Touring are built in the first place. However you will read some views on the Forum about the vans not being as well built as they once were. Things do go wrong with Eribas but in our experience they tend to be little things. A biggy is taking care to ensure that you taps don't get damaged by frost in winter, which happened to us once & is quite expensive to repair - there's lots of advice on the Forum about how to prevent this.

Other than that some screws inside have come loose and needed tightening, some light bulbs have blown, and one of the brackets on our door broke and was replaced under warranty. We have the multi function bed and one of supports that holds the bed up when you want to get into storage area underneath has now gone a bit dodgy but the replacement bracket has to be ordered from Hymer and is a bit pricey so we are living with it.

Lets hope that your 540 works out similar for you. I intend keeping up with an annual service as I am now in my 70s and have less & less enthusiasm for fettling things myself.

Oh something else has just come to me. The pump in the Thetford toilet seized up with black gunk after one winter. Thankfully I found a video on the Forum on how to fix it. However as I have big hands it was a killer on my skin and it took a week to heal. The key to prevent this is not to use the Thetford Pink stuff in your top flush tank as it encourages the growth of the black stuff....

Enjoy your Troll
MikeT

hi Randa

Just wondering if the net covered air vents in the Poptop help to keep damp at bay & encourage the sweet smell.

We have ours open most of the time to get fresh air blowing in at head height. They're an extra blessing in warm weather

MikeT

Thanks for the encouragement