So in last week's video, I walked you through how to do your own DIY, poor man's RV inspection. But right at the beginning of the video I said that I recommend that most people, if you can afford it, get their RVs professionally inspected before they buy them. So today I'm gonna walk you through how to find an RV inspector in your area and why I like the inspectors that I recommend.

My name is Emily. I'm a certified RV repair tech.

I am not an inspector. This is not me doing promo for myself.

I just think that inspectors do a really important and useful job, and I want more people to know about them.

So my number one way to find an inspector in your area is to head on over to NRVIA.org you can go ahead and click this button in the corner that says Inspector search, and then put in your city and you can find all of the certified RV inspectors in your area.

You're gonna put in your city and you're hopefully gonna have a whole bunch of pins like this show up. You can see there's four in Las Vegas right now. You may notice on the side you. Or in your area, you might have two different colored pins.

The lighter color are certified inspectors and the darker color are master inspectors.

The difference between master and certified is that master indicates that this inspector has worked in the field for at least three years and went back to school to take an additional test.

That's it.

Just because somebody is certified instead of master doesn't mean that they are not as qualified or that they haven't been working for a long time. They may just have decided that traveling all the way back to Texas to take a test just wasn't worth it for them. So that's the only difference.

Certified inspectors have had to take a three week long, 40 hours a week, certification in order to learn how to inspect RVs, and they have to do a full inspection on at least two rigs before they then take a test to prove that they know what they're doing.

When you get an inspection from an NRVIA inspector, it's going to come in as a big packet. Whether or not there is a ton wrong with the rig or it is a perfect rig with nothing wrong in it, you're going to get a pretty decent packet because they're still going through every single item and telling you whether it's good or not. So don't let the size of the packet that you get scare you away from the rig. There's a lot of information either way.

The reason why I like NRVIA inspectors is one, they went to the same school that I did, the NRVTA teaches both techs and inspectors. So even though I am not an inspector and I didn't go through that side of the training, I do know the level of training that they got. I know that the school that they went to had good teachers and that the information they were being taught was valid.

So just on that level, I like NRVIA inspectors. They also have to follow a code of ethics. You can find that code under about, and then code of ethics. There's like 12 vows that they have to follow. The ones that I think are most relevant and really give me trust in these inspectors are code number nine.

It sounds like a lot of jargon, but this basically means if someone is both an inspector and a tech, they cannot work on a rig that they have inspected for at least one year after they do the inspection. This is great because you know that the inspector isn't looking for work for themselves. So they can't go around and be pointing out things that aren't actually broken so that they can then come in and fix them. That's a big scam. And NRVIA, inspectors can't do it.

And then number eight, along a similar vein NRVIA inspectors can recommend a tech to you, but they cannot receive compensation in order to make that recommendation.

So as a tech, I have worked with inspectors from the NRVIA in the past, and I have gotten recommended to customers from an NRVIA inspector, but I didn't, and I could not due to this code of ethics, throw them some cash in order to send me more customers.

So you know that if an NRVIA inspector is recommending you a tech, it is not because they've been bribed to do so.

And the last thing you should know about most RV inspectors, but specifically NRVIA inspectors, is that they are not allowed to do any troubleshooting. So as soon as they see that something is, not working. They have [00:05:00] to stop this goes hand in hand with them not being able to do technical work themselves, so that way they're not finding work for themselves as a tech to do.

I have had times where I have worked with a customer who wants to buy a rig that's being inspected. But I had to work with the current owners of the rig to get work done before the customer would buy it. And the current owners were like this inspector said there were all these things wrong with this rig, and they walked me through. And this was an easy fix and that was an easy fix and that was an easy fix.

This is a tip mostly for sellers. If you are selling a rig and the buyer wants an inspection, go through the rig and make sure that all of the little things work. If it's the middle of the summer, crank that furnace on and at least get it to kick over and start blowing some hot air. Make sure the AC turns on and starts blowing cold air. If you've lived in a rig and you know a lot of the idiosyncrasies of it. Make it as simple as possible for this inspector when they go through. If your RV has been in storage for a while, we all know that sometimes some appliances just take a minute to heat up or get things through the line.

It is not cheating to before the inspector shows up. Just run through all your appliances and make sure that they turn on quick and easy. Sometimes we just need to get propane to go through the lines or for certain things to heat up. And if things take too long, an inspector's gonna note that the furnace took a while to light. And it may have just been that you needed the propane to just work its way through the lines 'cause it's been sitting in storage for a while. So

do yourself a favor. Just go through and try to get everything to turn on once before the inspector shows up. And on the buyer side, just because an inspector says that something does not work does not necessarily indicate how much of an effort it's going to be to have a tech come through.

So usually how the process is gonna work is you're gonna have the inspector come through. They're going to spend a day, sometimes two, combing through the rig from tip to tail. They're going to test the liquids, they're going to test every appliance. They're gonna go through every seal and nook and cranny and find anything that could be possibly wrong in that RV.

They're going to give the potential buyer a big packet that walks through everything with pictures showing you everything that works, that doesn't work, how the fluid tests came back. Anything you could wanna know about this rig you're gonna learn about in the inspection.

And then as a buyer, if you want something fixed before you buy it, if it's from a dealer, they usually have a shop in house that can fix things. You're gonna have to work it out with the dealer. If it is from, someone you [00:08:00] found on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist, you're probably gonna have to call a tech like me.

Hi. Hello. You can find me at rvrepairwoman.com, and we will usually come through and give you an estimate for all of the work at once. So, If the AC and the furnace didn't work and some bulb seals, usually a tech will come through and give you an estimate for everything and then part it out for you. If you decide you only want some things fixed and you can use that as a bargaining chip when you go back to negotiate how much you're gonna pay for this rig.

But yeah, super quick and easy. If you need to find an inspector near you, head over to NRVIA.org and find one that knows what they're doing. This has been RV repair Woman. If you found this helpful, go ahead and hit subscribe cause if you're looking for inspector, then I bet you're gonna become an RV owner soon.

And I give tips and tricks to RV owners on how to do repairs yourself that most techs aren't going to tell you. So go ahead and hit subscribe, and if you wanna learn some super easy maintenance tips that are going to save you so much money on RV repairs in the long run. Check out in the description. I have my ultimate guide to RV maintenance where I give step-by-step tutorials on how to maintain everything in your rig from the AC to the furnaces, to the fresh water tanks. This has been RV Repair Woman. You got this.