These questions are asked and answered more times that I can count. Everyday there is at least one forum post from somebody confused by all of the discussion that surrounds towing capacities.

 

Beside the facts, there are the religous camps. The weight police vs. the conspiracy theorists. The most fervent of the weight police believe that you will burst into flames if you are 1 lb. over a limit, you will be sued into oblivion if you clip your neighbors hedge in this condition, and that every government official can site any number of felonies you are commiting. The radical conspiracy theorists think manufacturers and the government create ratings to force you into purchasing very expensive add-ons that do nothing more than pry money out of your pocket, futhermore, there are no laws that pertain to this, and if you have an accident, nobody will care what you were driving or how over far overloaded you may have been. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

 

Me?, I subscribe to the fact and rating camp. I believe that ratings are there for a reason and I want to stay under the ratings. I assign a marginal value to any rating that I have less than 10% capacity remaining, some think 0% is good, while others think being 10% over is OK. Regardless of how much faith you put into ratings, or which towing belief system you follow, you do need to know where you stand and the particulars for your setup.

 

Therefore, I give you two tools, the towing capacity spreadsheet, and the Truck Loading tool. They are MicroSoft Excel Spreadsheets that takes all of the best available data that you can find and provides an analysis of your setup. The analysis is only as good as the data. Only you can determine if this is acceptable. It provides what if's based on your data. The more accurate your data, the more accurate your analysis.

 

There are instructions in the spreadsheets. If you don't know a particular value, leave it as a default. If after you enter all of your data, you think the sheet is wrong, please send the completed sheet to me (Mark at RVNomad dot com), and I will take a look at it. There are over 100 formulas in the background of the computations and analysis pages, and although I've had several folks plug their numbers in and help validate the computations, more than likely, all of the errors haven't been found. I will update the sheets on a regular basis as folks use it and provide feedback about what's broken, what's hard to use.

 

Click on the tabs in the lower left corner of the sheet to go to instructions, data, computations, or analysis.

 

Remember, these are only tools to help you understand many of the specifications that go into towing an RV. If there's a specification here that you haven't seen, or don't know how it relates to your setup, then the tools have done their job. Please learn about your setup and tow safe.