Quote:
Originally Posted by usjetjock
You have my sympathy. I bought a 2021 SV34, and am trading it this weekend after 4 weeks ownership. I'll lose at lease $35,000. Like you said the Ford F-550 Truck is awesome. In my opinion, the rest is sub-par. Outside "looks" rate a 9, but inside construction and overall quality (in my opinion) is a 2 or 3. The factory was unresponsive to my many complaints about design issues. Consider the fact that the cab-over has no insulation, and it makes a great solar-oven. Closing the slide doesn't help, since the slide isn't insulated and its painted black. My coach would not cool below 82 degrees in the Florida sun. I paid the dealer almost $1000 to exchange the forward A/C unit from a 13.5 kbtu to a 15. That helped very little. When the water heater started leaking, I found there was NO WAY to assess all the plumbing and electrical under the kitchen cabinet. I had to take out the trash can, and use my fist to knock out the thin paneling behind the compartment so I could access the cut off valves. That's absurd, and dangerous. The ride up front in the Ford is great, but the house whistles, creaks and rattles on the highway. I found it impossible to take a nap when someone else was driving. I'm ashamed I didn't read these threads before I purchased. I'll never buy another Thor product.
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I'm sorry to hear about your dissatisfaction. What will you buying now?
I do have a few things that won't help you now but might help others.
1) Cooling - I live in FL but spend the hot months in PA so I do understand FL heat and humidity. That being said we had several string of 90's over the pas couple weeks. We camped last week in the 90's. Now we did have some shade but here is what I have done to help with cooling:
- You are right that you can feel the heat in the cab-over area. We close the curtain of the cab-over and it does help keep the heat in the cab-over and not radiating into the coach. Keeping the curtain closed does help more than you would think.
- There is a thread on here about about how to improve A/C performance. This is a challenge with most coaches because they are not insulated well and the A/C units are far from efficient. I climbed on the roof and I insulated the evaporator box on both the units. I also made sure the divider between the exhaust and intake was properly centered and sealed. The front A/C unit was ok but the bedroom A/C unit was not centered so cold air was getting sucking into the return. I used duct tape to seal up the divider on both units. This did help improve the performance a bit.
- I purchased WeatherTech window shades for the cab. With their reflectivity ability it makes a huge difference keeping the sun from coming into the cab and it helps greatly. It also makes things very dark at night.
- I also recently purchased Camco vent insulators for the three vents to help seal them up from roof heat and air loss.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...0?ie=UTF8&th=1
After all of that I was able to keep the coach in the mid to upper 70's with the blinds down. During the day the air coming out of the A/C was in the 50's and at night in the upper 40's.
Just be careful with your expectations. I don't know how much time you spend camping in the south in the summer time but there are dozens of posts on here about people trying to came in 90 - 105 degree temps and not being able to keep their coaches cool.
This is why we try to camp in the north in the summer months and then in the south in the cooler months.
2) Water Heater Access - My last coach (a 2018 Outlaw 29H) had the same design. You probably didn't have to break the paneling behind the garbage can.There are a few screws that hold in the shelf and paneling that hold the garbage can in place. I had to remove that area to change the water filter on the Outlaw. I have not had to access the back of my hot water tank but I would bet the house the Magnitude is the exact same way just by looking at it.
- There is a vented access panel under the stove at the floor. It is held on by 4 screws but I removed the screws and installed hinges so i can easily access that area. Not sure why they didn't do that at the factory because the solid access panel next to it to get to the back of the furnace has hinges.
- While they could do better, accessing all of the plumbing and electrical is difficult with most coaches.
3) Noise - It is tough in general to have the house portion totally quiet when traveling with any coach; especially when you factor in dishes, glasses, etc. I would give ours a 7 out of 10 for being quiet. Although my rear suspension just developed a loud squeak recently when moving around the coach without the leveler s down after it had been very quiet. I have been looking for it to see if I can lubricate what is causing the noise.
We looked at several other Super C's including Entegra, Renegade, Jayco and Dynamax. We settled on Thor because we felt like it gave us the most bang for the buck. My wife wanted an outdoor kitchen and surprisingly the Magnitude was the only Super C we looked at that had one. The floor plan works very well for us and we like the way it looks and drives.
That being said.... if I was going to make a switch, I would go with the Dynamax Force HD 34KD. Out of all the Super C's we looked at we felt the quality, fit and finish and components used were the best out of all the other Super C's we looked at last year.
We went through a bunch of Super C's at North Trail RV in Fort Myers. Funny thing is they also sold Thor but no longer sold Thor Super C's because they had so many problems with them that they felt Thor was not addressing. Maybe I should have taken that comment more seriously but again... the Dynamax was going to be another $65 - $85K more than what we ended up spending on the Magnitude.
Let us know what you go with..... and better luck with the new one!
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