Complaint Review: Camping World of Kingston New York - Kingston, New York

 On July 10, we went to the Camping World in Kingston, NY, as  we were having electrical issues with the passenger side of our 2004 Fleetwood Expedition motorhome.  They determined that the problem was the four house batteries were bad.   After talking to the service manager, at his suggestion, we went to Sam's and bought 4 golf cart batteries and then took them back to the Camping World to have the batteries installed.  We paid $226.84 on Friday for the installation of the batteries.  We left Camping World with the electric working correctly and were very happy.  Two hours after getting back to our campground, the power on the passenger side of the coach went off again.  We were really upset.  We had just spent all that money and we did not have our full electric service.  We called Camping World, and they told us they were too busy to check our unit on  Saturday, so we were back early on Monday morning.  After checking out the batteries, we were told that they must have been incorrect that the golf cart batteries would work, and suggested we use the batteries sold by Camping World, as they were "stronger" and would solve the problem.  The Golf Cart batteries were taken out, and while we took them back to Sam's, the service department installed four of the Camping World batteries.  After paying an additional $660.92 for batteries, we left with the electricity working.  Our next stop on our trip was Wells. Maine, and early Tuesday morning, we were on the road again.

  For our first three days in Wells, we had full electric in our coach.  On day four, everything on the passenger side of the coach went out again.  We decided that it had to be an electrical problem in our coach and would live with electric in half our coach.  The refrigerator runs on propane gas, and we arranged other things to run off power on the driver side of the coach.  We continued our travels in Maine, Massachusetts, and back to upstate New York to Niagara Falls. All this time, we are managing without electricity in half our coach, in spite of being plugged into 50 amp shore power at every campground. 

On August 20, while we were at Golden Hill State Park, on Lake Ontario with our frustration over this whole electric problem mounting, myhusband called Fleetwood Motorhomes Customer Service for help with the problem.  He worked for two days with a service tech, checking the invertor lights to make sure that the problem with not with the convertor.  It was determined that the convertor was ok.  The techwas at a loss as to what the problem was.  After my husband got off the phone with the tech, he was out looking at the battery bay, just kind of scratching his head, trying to determine what could be wrong.  Our neighbor came over and asked what the problem was.  Don explained the problem and the history, including two sets of new batteries. 

To our delight, the neighbor,  was a retired electrical engineer.  He got his voltage tester out and they began checking the batteries.  All of them were fully charged.  However, he noticed that the terminals were all loose and many had corrosion on them.  My husband called the service tech at Fleetwood he had been talking to and it was determined the dirty connections and the loose connections were most likely our problem. The two guys spent the whole morning cleaning the connections and tightening them down.  The invertor circuit breaker, inside the motorhome had been tripped.  Both the service tech and neighbor agreed that the most likely cause was the loose wires bouncing around and touching one another during the drive most likely shorted the invertor  circuit  causing more problems.  The circuit was reset and amazingly enough, the power came on in the whole coach. 

I cannot begin to tell you how pissed-off we were when we realized that all of this could have been prevented if the techs at the Camping World in Kingston had done their job right.  The corrosion on the connectors was obvious, they we green with it.  They installed two sets of batteries; you would think they would have noticed it at least once.  Then to not tighten the bolts to holding the connectors to the battery terminals, this is totally inexcusable, shoddy workmanship.  

We contacted them for a refund on the battery installation fee and have been ignored.  You would think that someone would have noticed the connections were green with corrosion and been responsible enough to tighten down them correctly.