We've put a few miles on the clock, a
couple of UK weekends and a trip to France, and now almost all the
motorhome niggling problems have been sorted out one way or another
and we look forward to good times in the Pilote during this year.
A spare wheel has been acquired, a
brand new Michelin tyre and wheel (£45 in total), and we've had a metal cage built
and fitted in a very accessible position underneath at the back. Now
the pathetic 'blow up' kit provided by the Manufacturers is redundant
and we can travel confident that in the case of a puncture we can
carry on our journey with minimum delay.
The Pilote 'own brand' battery has been
checked and tested to find how good or bad it is.
'Excellent' was the opinion of those
who did the testing and checking and now we can confidently go for a
week or so during the Winter without hook-up and can forget about EHU
completely at other times of the year.
The Combi heater works a treat during
the long cold days and nights when we've been away and, although I've
not been able to check exactly how much gas we've used, it doesn't
seem to be very high usage.
We changed all the interior bulbs to
LED, it was a combination of halogen and LED, to keep the load on the
battery to a minimum. We bought 30 LED bulbs off Ebay for less than
£20 and now have plenty of spares just in case we do get problems
with the new ones – we haven't yet!
The amount of storage space is ample
for the two of us – 7 overhead cupboards, a wardrobe, over cab
space, two cupboards over the sink/cooker area, three drawers at the
side of the cooker, one large cupboard over the fridge/freezer and
one under the sink, two cupboards in the toilet/shower area and
access from inside the MH to the fairly big garage under the bed.
When we were away during late Autumn in
this country and a Winter break in France we took a coat for every
type of weather, shoes and boots galore, umbrellas each, and a
multitude of towels for wiping the wet and dirty dog.
This extra equipment was still no-where
near enough to fill the ample storage space in the Pilote.
The garage quite comfortably takes the
high back outside chairs and table, water pipes and electric cables,
boxes of 'essential' tools and water connectors, jump leads (you
never know!) and other miscellaneous bits and pieces – you'll never
know when you'll need that watering can!
Our Pilote is the 150 Multi-jet version
and the extra 20hp more than the 130 engine seems to give the
motorhome just that bit more ooomph when accelerating and we seem to
be able to get up into sixth gear at much a lower speed, without
feeling as if the engine is labouring, than our previous motorhome.
Out of built up areas we rarely drop
down from sixth gear, except for long hills, and fourth and even
fifth are quite all right to use without a problem in urban areas.
Without realising it, when on a
downhill stretch of a French motorway, we managed to record 80 mph,
we slowed down fairly quickly, and the engine certainly had the power
to go faster if we'd wanted to.
We usually keep at or close to the
speed limit on Motorways, our trip to the Eurotunnel Terminal on the
way to France is all except one mile on Motorways and a round trip of
440 miles, and we've recorded a fraction over 26 mpg for the 2,000
miles we've done since we bought the Pilote.
