I agree. I think a lot of pre- 2010 motorhomes were well made. It seems as if some epidemic of everyone making the same changes swept the known world. My 2009 Hobby was brilliant. My neighbour has a 2009 Autotrail and it is demonstrably better made than my 2019 mh in build quality. My opinion is that there is an obsession with making things more computerised to impress would-be buyers. Those would-be buyers don't realise the MTBF times are constantly reducing, as they add more and more flashy gimmicks. In case you didn't know, MTBF is Mean Time Between Failures, and that isn't some acronym I have made up, it is a defined standard in the electronics industry. Probably other industries as well. In the companies I worked for, we had to design circuits which would meed certain MTBF standards. We had to measure voltages at every component junction, and analyse the signals at certain points in the circuits to ensure that spurious noise spikes had not entered the circuit.
Anyway I didn't know my mh had four owners before I bought it, and I don't think it would have made any difference. I would have wondered, and I might have asked the salesman if I could have the previous owner's number so I could call them and ask. Some people keep theirs a long time, and some don't. I kept my last one for four weeks. That was an expensive mistake, I blame the clever dick salesman.
I have spent today on my knees ridding the EC700 of its awful, not fit for purpose plugs and sockets. I haven't finished yet, that is a job for tomorrow.
"Incompetent installation staff at A/S" may be a bit strong for which I apologise. Mine had two mains wires not properly connected to the EC700, causing three mains sockets not to work. The 'nearly-connected-but-not-quite' wires must have been sparking a bit. To be fair to the poor A/S electricians - or is it the Sargent electricians, I don't know - whoever failed to connect the wires correctly must have been instructed to do it thus. The pins the wires were connected to were never designed to take two wires to one pin, so whoever had that job to do was on a losing streak to start with.
I can recall one job I had which was to fault find on about 900 electronic units a factory had made but which had failed the final test. A few passed. When I looked into it I found a design fault in the test circuitry. I went to the boss of the company and said look at this, no wonder they all fail, the test bed has been designed wrongly. I have rectified the test bed fault and now all these ciricuits are passing the test. There is nothing wrong with the product or the hundreds you have made, it was the test equipment designer who was at fault. They gave me a raise. If I were working at Sargent or A/S I would do the same thing.
