How to keep your RV from rusting

Parking your RV next to a beach (like the one shown in the picture) is a dream of a lot of RVers, but you have to think about what salt spray can do to your rig.

Here's what will happen to your RV if you spend much time close to the beach

The first picture below is the BBQ grill beside my picnic table here on Galveston Island. Someone told me that the campground installed it new three months ago. I think he was joking, but who knows?

If you don't want the frame and underside of your RV to look like this BBQ grill, you have a few options.

One thing you could do would be to not camp near the beach, but that wouldn't be any fun.

I took the picture below when I was camped next to the ocean in Florida a few years ago.

I didn't want to give up camping on the beach, and I sure didn't want the underside of my motorhome to look like the grill or vice grips in the above pictures.

I did some research and determined that spraying the underside of my RV with Fluid Film (shown below) was one of the best rust preventive options available. I bought a few cans on Amazon. (It's also available at Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes, and a lot of other places.)

(This is not an affiliate link. I don't make any money if you decide to buy this product.)

I took steps to keep my motorhome from rusting, but I did it the easy way since I'm lazy. There was an RV detailing guy in the campground. I found out that he used the same Fluid Film product that I had bought. (He buys it in 5-gallon pails and uses his own sprayer to apply it.)

I'll keep the spray cans I bought and use them to do touch-up work when I end up driving in the rain.

Before he did the rust preventive treatment, he pressure washed the underside of my RV to remove surface rust. I could have removed most of the surface rust with a wire brush, but that would have been a lot of work.

How long does the treatment last, and how much does it cost?

The spray is lanolin-based, so it's water-soluble. The protection will last for years if you don't drive in the rain much, but only for a year to two if you do a lot of driving in the rain.

The cans cost about $10 each, and it would take several cans (depending on the size of your rig). To have the job done by a professional, it's more expensive. The guy I used charged $10 per foot, so since I have a 34-foot rig, it was $340. He had a crew of four guys, and they worked for about three hours on the project.

Bottom line: If you were only going to be camping near the beach for a week or two, you could get by without worrying about rust prevention. But since I'm going to be here on the beach for four months (before I head back to Costa Rica for four months), and I didn't want the underside of my motorhome to look like the BBQ grill, I had the underside of my motorhome treated with a rust preventive spray.