Sorry to hear about your awning troubles. That sounds like quite a mess. Our Carefree electric awning is great. When it is at the highest setting, no pitch, it automatically dumps water when it rains. That makes a mess, but it does protect the awning. Before I figured out how to adjust it, it was at the highest setting for 2 or 3 trips and one of those trips it rained almost the entire trip.
We generally leave our's on the 3rd setting down. It's probably at about a 10 degree pitch. With the awning at the lowest setting, it is pitched at about 20 degrees, but then it blocks a good part of the view out the main window and the top of the door rubs against it.
To adjust our Carefree, there are 6 holes on the arm on each side of the awning. We have to push the button in and push or pull the awning arm down to move the button to the next hole. I have found that if both arms are in different spots, the awning is really, really slow to come in. It goes out fine, but is slow coming in. I have seen others (don't know the brand) where the arms don't have to be level to come in at normal speed. We always keep ours in the same spot.
The instructions that came with our awning were pretty vague about how to adjust it. It just showed a picture of the holes in the arms and said select the desired location. The first couple tries, the button was really hard to press, but after a few attempts it moved and now moves easily enough.
-Michael
