Is the Extra Room Worth it? A Balanced Look at RV Slide Outs.

If you’re thinking about ringing in the New Year with a brand new RV, you may be considering purchasing a model with a roomy slide out.  Before you get hooked on a particular model, here are a few things the professionals at DuraFlap thought you should know about RV slide outs.

The Advantage to RV Slide Outs

There’s really one, enormous and obvious advantage to having slide outs….extra room!  It’s amazing how much difference a few inches or a few feet can make it an RV.  An RV with one or more slide-out rooms feels more like an efficient apartment than a motorhome.  A good slide-out can provide additional walking room between the sitting area and the kitchen, or it can give you more space to have a larger bed or additional storage.

The slide outs in today’s RVs are typically easy to maneuver.  The slides can be extended or retracted by the simple push of a button.  The most difficult part can be making sure you’re parked in an area with enough free space outside to accommodate the slide-out rooms.

What You’ll Want to Consider Carefully

Before selecting the RV with the biggest slide-out rooms, carefully consider the challenges to slide outs, like these three:

1. They are heavy. The average weight of a slide-out is between 800 and 1500 pounds.  That’s a significant amount of weight to be moving on either an electric or hydraulic system and will require regular maintenance.  All that weight translates into extra fuel needs as well. The more slide outs you have, the more you’ll be paying for gas to go on that family road trip.
2. You can’t use the slide-outs everywhere. Campgrounds don’t always accommodate slide-outs, particularly older campsites.  This means if you’re at a non-slide out campground, you’ll have to maneuver around your RV with rooms that now feel extraordinarily cramped.
3. Depending on how the slide-out and RV are manufactured, some slide-outs have been found to compromise the structural integrity of the vehicle. While it doesn’t matter much while the RV is parked at camp, the additional weight and how it’s connected to the frame of the vehicle can be disastrous in the event of an accident while traveling on the freeway.

If you’re in the market for an RV, make sure you do your research to learn more about the pros and cons of RV slide outs.  But whatever type of RV you choose, you’ll want to increase the vehicle’s safety on the road with quality RV Mudflaps from DuraFlap.

DuraFlaps’s custom-designed RV Mudflaps give your motorhome extra strength and protection against road hazards and may be used as a drag lip when traveling steep inclines.

DuraFlap has several pre-designed RV Mudflaps for popular motorhome makes such as Beaver, Entegra, and Travel Supreme.

Want a custom-designed RV Mudflap?  We do that, too!  Just contact us at [email protected] for more information!