Personally, I think the air restriction gauge is useless. I owned my Monaco for almost 10 years and thing never really changed. You could reset it and it would immediately go back to the same spot after a hard pull, as stated above.
I know these air cleaners are expensive, actually cheaper on the Monaco's with the Donaldson replaceable element, but many seem to want to get 3-4 years out of them.
Many here will argue that theirs has lasted three, four, five years, but at what price to performance and at what risk of filter element failure. I use to replace my Donaldson on the Monaco every year which was about 12K miles and my coach always ran great and got good mileage. My new coach has the sealed unit which is twice the price and a pain to remove. I just changed it at 18 months with 15K on it.
Recently, there was a discussion on another site where I was labeled by two posters as foolish for changing my filters so often, even though it was my coach and my money. They argued I was giving bad info to others. My argument was that on the sealed units, it's hard to tell if it has failed. About two months later, another post surfaced where the OP had engine trouble because his sealed air cleaner had ingested water and he didn't know it. His was three years old. The other two posters quickly forgot their previous statements and suddenly were siding with changing more often. It's just not worth the risk on these big engines. We're also seeing more companies talking about shelf life and water ingestion causing element damage.
Don & Mary
2019 Newmar Dutch Star 4018 - All Electric
2019 Ford Raptor Crew Cab
