Slow awning retract

[Jim Aitken]

Our Dometic motorized awning will only retract when we manually twist the roller while applying power. This is with fully charged batteries and connected to either my truck or shore power.

The awning is large (20 ft) on a Cougar 291Rls 5th wheel that is 8 years old.

Do motors lose their strength?
Is there a more powerful replacement motor available?
Has anyone had a similar experience?

I've tried contacting Dometic with no luck.

[chuckster57]

Its possible the tension spring ( at the other end of the tube) has broke. I haven't seen a dometic awning motor lose "power" but anything is possible.

[kenhigdon]

I had the same problem with the awning on my 2010 252fwrls "Copper Canyon" 5th wheel. The motor got more and more sluggish over time. Got to the point that it would slowly roll out, but the electric button only unlocked the motor so you could manually roll it back in. Replaced the motor with one from an ebay seller and the problem is fixed. There are videos on youtube.com that show you how to change the motor, adjust the spring, replace the fabric, and all sorts of awning maintenance activities.

Took my adult son and I about two hours to remove the awing from the RV, place it across a pair of sawhorses. Drill out the rivets, remove the old motor, insert the new motor. Rivet with aluminum rivets, reinstall on RV, rewind the spring and reattach awing to arms. (The arms stay in place on the RV). Was much easier than I expected.

The hardest part was identifying exactly which awning motor I needed to order. So I did the removal and disassembly first, then I could see exactly what to shop for. Took a week to get the replacement motor. Summary, an hour to take down and disassemble, then a week later an hour to reassemble and install. Did not count the five hours trying to figure out just which motor matched what I needed.

[Jim Aitken]

I have decided it's not the motor. If I connect a 12 v source to the motor at the connector near the motor it works fine. Maybe a spring has gotten weaker over time, but I am suspicious of the long internal wiring run having a bad connection, The awning power goes from the remote control panel at the front of the rv all the way to the back wall to the manual control panel, then back to the awning motor at the front. This is at least 60 ft. of wire! I may relocate the manual switch to somewhere near the front to shorten the wire run. And use heavier gauge wire.

[{tpc}]

Our awning has never been "fast" from the get go. It does work however, just not super fast. I always figured it had to have something to do with tension on it, since when it gets to a certain point (where the tension must be relieved) it picks up speed.