Chapter 13- What Rhoda Found

Rhoda Tessendorf arrived at eight in the morning with a stepladder, a moisture meter, a thermal camera, a set of sample bottles and a folding table, and she was still there at half past three.

Theo had booked her nine days earlier. She is a certified recreational vehicle inspector, which is a category of professional he had not known existed until Katie Bryant mentioned it on a phone call in the first week.

What that actually is

Inspectors of this kind train and certify through a national association, work to a published standard of practice and a code of ethics, and are independent of the transaction. The code of ethics matters more than it sounds: an inspector who has examined a vehicle is generally barred from performing repairs on it for a defined period afterwards, which removes the obvious conflict.

A full inspection on a motorhome covers well over a hundred and fifty points across chassis, roof, sidewalls, seals, suspension, tyres, electrical, plumbing, heating, cooling, propane, appliances, safety equipment and structure, and produces a report running to dozens of pages with photographs.

Published costs vary widely by vehicle type and size. For a twenty one foot camper van Theo was quoted a figure in the middle hundreds, plus fluid analysis at roughly eighty to a hundred dollars per sample.

He took four samples. Engine oil, transmission fluid, coolant and brake fluid. The total came to a little over eleven hundred dollars.

The thing a scanner cannot do

Rhoda explained fluid analysis while she was drawing the first sample, and it is the clearest description of the limits of diagnostics anybody gave Theo in eight weeks.

A control unit reports what a sensor measured. Engine oil, sent to a laboratory, reports what is physically in the oil: wear metals, contamination, coolant intrusion, fuel dilution, and the condition of the additive package.

"Your tool reads what the computer noticed," she said. "This reads what is actually happening inside a thing nobody can open."

Theo has quoted that sentence in every conversation about scanners he has had since.

The report

Seventy one pages arrived by email the following afternoon, with a hundred and four photographs.

Most of it was sound, which is what a good vehicle looks like in a report and which is considerably less exciting than people expect.

The monitor items were things with a remaining life rather than a fault: sealant that would want redoing within about two years, a water heater anode approaching the end of its service, a tyre set with three years of age remaining on it, and a house battery bank measurably down on capacity but working.

The needs-work items were four, and this is where the money went.

What none of it came from

Not one item on that list appeared on any diagnostic screen at any point in six weeks.

There is no code for brake material below a service limit. There is no live value for a seized bypass valve. A refrigerator that cools slowly on propane reports to nothing. An expired carbon monoxide alarm has no output at all, which is precisely the problem with it.

Theo wrote the summary that evening and it is the most honest paragraph in this book.

Across eight weeks and twelve vehicles the scanner produced two findings. Everything that determined whether a vehicle was sound was produced by a hand on a floor, a ladder, a date code, a weight label, a phone call about parts, an insurance quote, and eleven hundred dollars of somebody else's expertise.

What Delphine did

Theo sent her the report. All seventy one pages, unedited, which Mia thought was generous and Sarah thought was tactically foolish and Theo did anyway.

Delphine rang the next morning and said she had not known about the brakes, was upset about the refrigerator because her husband had mentioned it once and she had forgotten, and had already booked the detectors to be done because that one frightened her.

Then she said she would take the brakes and the water heater off the price, which came to seven hundred and twenty, and that she was doing the detectors herself regardless of whether he bought it.

Agreed at forty two thousand two hundred and eighty, subject to the work.

Which is where the arithmetic starts, and where this book stops being about vehicles.

What They Learned

Certified inspectors work to a published standard and a code of ethics that keeps them independent of the repair. That independence is what you are paying for.

Fluid analysis reports what is physically inside components nobody can open. It is the single clearest thing a scan tool cannot do at any price.

A good vehicle produces a boring report. Most items sound, a handful to monitor, a few to fix, and no drama anywhere.

Not one finding in this inspection appeared on any diagnostic screen. Brakes, valves, appliances and expired detectors report to nothing.

Send the seller the whole report. It costs you a negotiating advantage and it buys something worth more, and in this case the seller fixed the safety item regardless of the sale.

This curated preview is provided for personal reading. Copyright remains with Nobo Astoria.