RV Accessories for Your First Camper Season

Start here if you just bought a trailer

The hard part of a first camper season is not any individual product. It is that you are asked to make about twenty purchasing decisions in the two weeks before your first trip, in categories you have never heard of, and the consequences of getting one wrong range from “mildly annoying” to “cannot camp at all.”

So this section is organized by moment rather than by product category. Leaving the dealer lot, arriving at a site, hooking up the three utilities, the first night, the first dump. That ordering exists because it is the order in which you will discover you need something, and because it makes the genuinely urgent purchases obvious while the rest wait.

What to buy first

Six items cover a first trip: a sewer hose, a drinking-water hose, a pressure regulator, a surge protector, leveling blocks and wheel chocks. A bundled starter kit covers the sewer and water half in a single purchase, which is worth more in week one than optimizing any one item.

The exception, and it is a real one: buy the surge protector separately and do not economize on it. Kits never include one, and it is the only item on the list standing between an unknown campground pedestal and every appliance in your trailer. It is the single highest-value purchase a first-season owner makes.

How this section divides

Three kinds of page. The must-haves shortlist is the reasoning — what you need, when, and what to skip in year one. The two checklists are the doing: essentials is what to own before you go, and setup and departure is the arrival and leaving sequence, which has a correct order that saves you doing the work twice. The roundups cover the small categories that do not need a whole hub of their own.

What decides price in this section

Almost nothing here is expensive, and that is worth saying plainly because the small-ticket items are where the value is concentrated. A headlamp, a step rug, disposable gloves and a clear elbow together cost very little and are, by a distance, the items owners report using most. Meanwhile the categories people agonize over — stabilizer upgrades, weight distribution, macerators — are mostly second-season problems.

The mistake first-season buyers make

Shopping from the RV forums. The forums are full of people in their tenth year solving tenth-year problems, and their shortlist is not your shortlist. Working through it in month one is the single most reliable way to spend a lot of money on gear that solves problems you do not have yet, while the surge protector is still not bought. What not to buy for your first RV is the specific list.

The other one is buying leveling blocks and assuming they also stop the trailer moving. They do not — that is what chocks are for, and they are two separate purchases doing two separate jobs.