Pete’s RV-TV YouTube Channel Resident RV Expert Randy Murray provides step-by-step instruction for leveling a camper. For his demonstration, Randy uses a Keystone Cougar Xlite 28RBS travel trailer. Proper techniques include slideroom out first and then leveling left to right, using an arm’s length to gauge enough space for slideout to open, and putting down stabilizer jacks after the camper is successfully leveled.

Video Transcript for “How to Level Your Camper”

Randy: Hey, folks. Randy here with Pete’s RV TV today. We’re in the gravel pit, behind the Pete’s RV, the South Burlington Vermont dealership. And I’m gonna give you a couple tips on, the best way to put your new camper, on your campsite and get it leveled up so you guys can enjoy your, your camping weekend with your new RV.

    Today we’re here and we got a brand new, Cougar X-lite, 28RBS that we’re gonna be using for our test model. And so I’m just gonna give you a couple tips and, here we go.  All right so here we are, backing them to our campsite. So all you wanna do is just kinda line up and pick your spot that you want the camper to be on the campsite and then, go ahead and back ride up, onto the site.

    That looks pretty good right there. All right, so now that we’ve backed on, our desired spot on, our campsite at, at a local campground or wherever we might be camping this weekend. Good judges. I know we don’t have any trees right here in, in the gravel pit, but most campsites do have some trees. So how I judge the distance to my slide, for trees that may be in the area is I … I simply put my back against the camper and put my arm out.

    Now, the end of my fingers represents, a slide that’s fully out. So if there’s any trees close by, this is, a great way to kinda measure it with, all the stuff that you have available on you all times. So make sure there’s no trees in the way, end of the fingers is a good judge. Okay, here we are on our next step.  As you can see, I still have the trailer hooked to the truck and I’ve gone inside and I’ve actually run my slide out out.

    Now when we put a slide out out, that’s gonna shift the way on the trailer and actually make it lean to the slide outside a little bit. So we need to compensate for that when get to slide that out and we get on the slide to make this thing level. Now, on this camper here, I’ve installed a couple levels on the side that we can purchase, in the Pete’s RV Store, or Pete’s RV online. This just really helps level on the camper easy spots to see as we’re doing it on the driver’s side of the vehicle.

    So, I’m looking at my level here and it looks like we’re leaning a little bit to the slides, as I mentioned we may be. So what I’m going to do is, mark where my wheels are and I’m going to, pull the truck ahead a little bit and make some adjustments onto the wheels so we level this camper out. All right, so here we are in the back of our trailer. Now, I’ve marked my wheels and I’ve pulled the truck ahead just a hair because I’m gonna back up onto this block here to help level the camper out.

    Now a lot of people think that they can level a camper with a stabilization jacks. That’s not really the case. These guys are just more meant to stabilize the camper you know, give a stability once we are leveled. They’re not meant to lift the weight of the camper to compensate for the weight to slide the, transverses onto the side. So what a misconception there, but if you do it this way, you’re gonna be right and you’re not gonna hurt your jacks.

    So what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna get back in the truck and I’m gonna back up onto this block here which will lift this side of the camper and hare, give us a nice level floor inside. All right, so as you can see, I backed the truck up now, with the trailer and we’ve backed it onto our tri-leveler and I’ve checked the levels in the front. So we’ve got our left to right level now. We’ve compensated for putting the slide out out.

    So what I wanna do at this point is go ahead and put my wheel chock in front of this wheel here so the trailer can’t low, roll forward once I unhook the chock. And once I unhook the chock, we can get our front to back level and then we’re gonna be camping. So as you can see here we’ve backed up on the tri-leveler and I have installed the wheel chock in front of the wheel. So when we unhook the trailer from the truck, we won’t roll forward.

    All right, so as you can see I’ve unhooked the truck from the camper and at this point, we’ve already got our left to right level as we saw a little bit earlier in the video. Now we wanna get our front to back level. So again the truck unhook from the camper. I’m gonna look at the level on the side right here and I’m seeing I’m sitting a little bit high in the front from unhooking from the truck. So I wanna go ahead and, use my tongue jack to lower the camper this works really easy than electric tongue jack as well. (Turns the tongue jack).

    So that looks pretty good right there. So now, we’ve got our left to right level, we’ve got our front to back level. We can go ahead and, put down the stabilization jacks. Okay, so here we are at the stabilization jacks if your camper has electric, stabilizes on it, you go ahead and run them down. This particular one here has the manual operation. I like to use, my screw gun with the appropriate size sucking on it. Run the jack to the ground and snag it up.

    So to finish up by running around to the other three jacks on the camper, I went ahead and put those down. So we’re a level after right, front to back, all the stabilizer down. We’re gonna be ready to start camping. Hope these tips helped you on getting a new unit onto your site and thanks for picking Pete’s RV and happy camping.

Pete’s RV Center is an exceptional dealership group serving the United States and Canada since 1952. With multiple locations, Pete’s RV provides sales, service, parts, accessories, and education to our community of RVers all across North America.