10 THINGS I wish I knew before buying a POP UP CAMPER! (worth it?)

what's up everybody so this is my camper there are many like it but this one is mine and you've probably seen a lot of videos navarre big lagoon fort pickens all those really cool destinations we've taken it to and it's changed our life for the better but in this video i want to talk about the main things that i wish i knew before i bought it the things i sweated about things i didn't know i needed or things i didn't know that i didn't need and at the end i'm gonna get a woman's perspective and see what samantha really thinks on what we should have had and what we shouldn't and from a woman's point of view things are a little different like storage and decoration and things that men don't think about so that's what we're gonna talk about in this video i'm pretty pumped i'm gonna give you everything i know about this camper in a nutshell so here we go also also don't hate me it's not clean yet we haven't done our spring cleaning but it's that time of the year to get it out and get it ready to go all right everybody so from the beginning me and samantha really didn't know what to do about about this whole pop-up camping stuff we were like what is a pop-up camper it looks pretty cool on instagram there's some really cool pictures and stuff and i think it might be kind of fun and so we finally found one we went and got it we bought it and we brought it home and we automatically had to you know decorate samantha you know did the curtains and she did all the decorations for it which turned out to be awesome and it added our own little touch to it but since it was a older camper you know we needed to fix some things like our breaker went out on it and we had to fix it and you know we had to do some of the wiring and i need to lubricate a lot of the parts on it and we've even broken some things over the years so you know starting out we really had a few things that it needed to do it needed to store in a spot we had it which for us was side of the house and it's still the side of the house it had to be able to pull well um like with my toyota tacoma because i don't want to have like one of those situations where i have to get a bigger truck to pull the thing we just bought and you know a 3 000 pop-up trailer winds up being a 40 000 truck you know how that always goes and the other one was it has to be big enough for us to have friends go with us or if we have a kid for him to be able to go or her be able to go vice versa now that we got little jack the pop-up camper and that idea has been you know definitely one we gotta think about on our next camper or if we keep this one so from the top i'm gonna talk about about 10 different items that you need to think about and the wish i knew more before i bought it and would have changed my opinion and that's the blue angels they're about to fly okay so number one is setup time okay setting it up is probably one of the things that has engaged us in the most arguments probably the whole time we've been married all right we're setting up see how long it takes us we haven't even argued yet it usually takes us about 20 to 30 minutes to get set up on ground zero when we get there that's backing up lowering the little you know legs popping the camper i usually do all the mechanical setting up like doing the canvas and the slides and samantha does the inside as far as cushions bedding food prep and layout and getting things out of the storage from underneath so it's really a trade-off of do you just want to roll up there everything's good to go you get out and you're there like with a regular non-pop-up with like a full-size size camper like hard side camper or does the trade-off of having the storage at your house and then when you get there it pulls well you get there and you got to set it up and you know unpack everything that's the first one that we didn't know a lot about after going through everything we've kind of got it down pat where we know what our jobs are and we get it done pretty quick it's just if you pull up at dark you know and you got to set up sometimes that can be a trade-off but you know i'm on the fence with it i still like my pop-up camper because some of the other things really adds the value over the top of that 20 or 30 minutes especially if you're staying quite a few days it really goes down to be a moot point so item number two happens to be storage okay so uh we really didn't know how much we'd be taking to our little adventures uh sometimes when we say a long time gotta take a lot you gotta take food and water and ice and and a lot of accessories you know bicycles things like that but sometimes if you're just going for a night or two nights and you're going out there and you're packing light not a big deal pop-up campers have a lot of storage under the seats under the bed uh some of them have them you know in the trailer ours doesn't i wish we had a bicycle rack which that might be something i add later either on the front or on the back if you're wondering this right here is a must at a campsite best investment for camping i ever made was this right here you know if you're taking games and extra little stuff you know usually like under the kitchen counter and things like that you can put stuff there but optimizing your storage is a really big deal and it really boils down to how much stuff you want to take does something does the practicality of not taking a lot like really uh weigh in on you i usually just throw it in the back of the truck um we have our little spots of stuff we have pre-stored like we the camper has its own silverware it has its own cooktops it has its own little grill we use an electric grill by the way because taking all the charcoal and everything was kind of a pain but we have it's got its own gas tank it's got its own lighter it's got its own bedding it's got its own everything so everything stays in that the bundled enclosed camper and then we just pull up hook up and ready to go right so that really you know allows us to be more efficient samantha really spent a lot of time actually trying to make sure all the storage is right on point we didn't have anything we didn't need and we really thought a lot about what we do and don't need that's really key it's it's really uh basically a tent going down the road so simplicity is key putting these up guys our little um reflective coverings for the morning supposed to be like over a hundred years so we definitely need one more thing put a hammock in your storage like a camper has its own hammock because hammocks are awesome and they're great for just swinging in front of the camper instead of a chair so number three is the mechanical difficulties of having a pop-up camper okay stick with me this and don't make fun of this giant log sitting in my yard because that's a long story but basically we have bent slides we have uh broken fuse boxes our fuse box caught on fire one day in the middle of camping and i think because you know when you're you're storing a pop-up camper it's basically like a hot box right humidity in you know but they're not watertight stays in there the humidity just stays in there and for electricity it's just not a good conglomeration of stuff so check your electrical box every year make sure it's not rusted or there's any water damage it's not complicated it's just a small little breaker box like two breakers but it'll make our breaker trip when your air conditioner doesn't work or you smell something funny burning down there and your lights don't come on but just know you've got to maintain your your cables your pulleys your crank system you got to make sure lug nuts go on and off if you get stuck on the side of the road and make sure you swap out your tires every two to three years i just replaced the tires on my pop-up camper um i got the really the best ones they could i think it was like four or five ply or whatever they are tires just so they last a little bit longer because this guy doesn't like to be stuck on the side of the road for anything i could have prevented uh for a marginal amount of money okay and uh make sure you grease your bearings on the trailer you know i try to do that every few years um because you know having a hub or a axle lock up on you going down the road is no bueno and that's for sure oh and make sure your tongue uh lock and everything is greased and lubed make sure everything's grease and lube make sure the the elevator arms on each side that stabilize your pop-up camper or lube because they will they will rust up that has happened to us and yeah i mean maintain your awning okay our awning is toast uh you know it's been blown around way too much and it's old so it it has most the parts are broken on it make sure that thing's good to go because an awning is key for us oh and run your ac before you get out there because sometimes dirt daubers wasp nests i actually made a video on this will clog up your ac drain lines and it'll just start leaking inside all right hold on this is really scary what are you doing in there i'm trying to get in the camper are you locked out off jack you and make sure it's watertight you know because you know rainy season is it here but that's kind of it for the mechanical difficulties there's really not a lot of things to go wrong with it you just got to maintain the things you got okay so number four okay so number four of the things that you need to know and i wish i had known see we thought well do we need a bathroom okay do we need a an actual sink and running water a hot water heater do we need these things that everybody says in the forums that we need and we realize oh we don't need a lot of that because really most of the thing most of the places we go have water and bathrooms so we realized we didn't need to sink because i don't want to go in and get everything nasty to wash my hands off most of the campgrounds have showers they all have bathrooms i don't really want to clean out the black water the nastiness once somebody goes to the bathroom into the camper so we don't have one in our camper and i don't foresee the way we camp needing one anyways okay we would have rather had the space instead of a sink you know instead of we would rather have the counter top space in our camper than the sink uh the refrigerator takes a while to get cool it's more like a icebox it's like it'll get cool by like maybe four or five hours later or the next day like you need to keep some milk or whatever it'll keep some things you just got to make sure it turns on is working properly so we always cook outside we don't cook inside because it'll just smell up your camper so those things we try to take everything outside we'd rather you know do everything outside plus you don't want to have the food out and in your camper because then the ants and the bugs want to get in and also i have a place to store that that you have outside because the raccoons they're ninjas of the night and they will get it so just be cognitive of those things that you don't always need them and that brings me into my next one is have a good set of coolers we usually carry three coolers with us drink coolers food coolers and like so like we have two big food coolers and we just fill them all the way to the brim and we have one drink cooler i have a couple igloos a yeti um so those are just things to keep in like an idea of is uh the more times you open a cooler the less ice will stay in it no matter what kind of cooler you have and we'll usually swap them out every two days or so we'll put more ice in there and just keep it in the shade like don't leave it on the hot concrete out in the sun put it under the camper put it in the shade and if you really want to keep them cool get one of those like a car visor and sit on top to reflect the sun and the heat and that's going to go into my another one that you might ought to have for your camper like are these reflective blankets but i'm gonna talk about those in a minute but yeah just have some good coolers big coolers you'll be and you'll be good to go so the next thing is will your camper stay cool yes it is a tent with a massive air conditioning unit on it and it stays perfectly cool no matter the hottest days in july now adding to that we will kind of like what i was talking about with the reflective blankets we got some reflective blankets off of amazon i think i'm going to link them down below okay and what we do is we cover where the beds are and we cover the windows with it it's like insulative and it keeps a lot of the july august heat out and it allows the air conditioner to get it cool like freezing cold in there and it's worth every penny they've held up um they're like reflective bank uh blankets i think that's maybe that's what they're called and uh it keeps it perfectly cold um without it you will you you'll tell the difference because there's no insulation and a pop-up camper as far as heat heat actually is uh pretty decent we just have a little heater about this big that we turn on like when we get ready to go to bed and or we just leave it running and it keeps the camper pretty warm i mean we've been i think in like 29 degree weather in our pop-up camper no problem i mean it's actually worked pretty good and because our ac unit has a heater on it but it's not it's not a hot hot blowing heater it's not like the ac portion and honestly to have a real heater it takes a lot of power to do that and your ac unit like ours is only 20 amps so you know it's just get a small little portable heater okay so the seventh category i wanted to talk about the stove uh our stove is outside we never took it with it inside that's why i don't care about having a sink or anything like that we use it on the outside or put it on the table however far the gas line will reach it you can't cook a lot on it but you can use it for like a skillet to fry some eggs or cook some you know whatever hamburger meat or sausages i mean it works pretty good um you know sometimes hard to get it level and your eggs or whatever it'll slide around because you know you're gonna get hooked to a camper so you know like there are limitations to how much weight you can have on it and how big of a pot of water you can cook just got to figure that out and what we did is got an electric grill and used an extension cord and we cook a lot of food on that makes it really easy clean easy to clean up and or we'll just take a little grill with this places but we try to keep it very simple as far as the stove and a tank of fuel for our camper has lasted us a year or more so number eight eight is the awning okay awning is a must because when you come out you don't want the rain on you this has got me holding the awning it's about to blow away you don't want the sun on you and when we go camping at the beach during july august it's really hot it helps shade the camper itself and we love sitting under it gives us a little more area to just kind of hang out especially if it's drizzling rain which here in florida it rains every day during the summer so it's a good thing to have and uh they're expensive so like you know we've had to kind of rig ours up and i think this is the last year i'll be able to kind of rig it up but um it's really important we love our awning so number nine is something you need to be cognitive about is not everywhere will accept a pop-up camper some of them are just too high class why you ain't bringing that junk in here others are like hey we have bears here in bear country you can't really have a pop-up camper because they'll open it up like a can of sardines and eat whatever food you got in there and you might happen to be in it too so just keep that an idea i haven't seen any raccoons get into like a pop-up camper but definitely a bear would uh mice things like that you gotta be cognitive of that stuff so just know where you can take it where you can't how much space you need when you're popping it out i think ours is like 16 feet uh how high it needs to be um i would try to park it kind of under some shade if all possible because you know you got to keep it cool and yeah that's really the big ones on that so number 10 is pulling okay and i mentioned that before i think ours is like 1500 pounds empty so my toyota tacoma pulls it pretty well furthest i've gone from here to where lando i think we went with it and it pulled it pretty fast pretty fine because it's pretty flat and i noticed when i got to about 65 70 miles an hour you know my truck going up some of the hills i started to burn a little more gas and really i kind of learned that you need if you're going a long ways you got to stay over two or three days to really even be practical with pulling your camper just be easier to get a hotel room but i did see you know burning a little more gas on the long runs but my truck pulls it pretty well and with the v6 small v6 you know a pop-up camper is really the way to go so if i would have gotten a full-size camper and you know especially the wind resistance the weight everything inside of it and when you've got more space you're going to bring more stuff so i learned that in and around our normal course of camping it's fine and i don't i can pull it into most places like back it up pretty well i can see up over the top of it and around in the side samantha's learning how to ground guide and how to you know kind of know the ropes because it's not easy back in the trailers everybody thanks but anyways really it pulls pretty good and i was afraid about the pulling you know it's one more thing but i'm glad i had the pop-up camper because it pulls great if i had a full-size camper i would be like oh man so my toyota tacoma pulls it just fine in the scheme of things um i've never gotten stuck with it it's not too heavy to pull out and in the dirt and around the mud and yeah it it does well i haven't really hit anything because it's not very tall so pulling it pulls fine and i wish that somebody would have just told me you're gonna be fine with it you're not gonna have to buy another truck um so yeah pulling has done well so on the next one i'm gonna let samantha talk to you about from a female point of view what is important okay and what's not important because she has a different outlook on it to me i'm more of a mechanical tactical thing and she's more of a decorative fun cooking hospitality viewpoint so i'm gonna let her take it away little jack's got shades and his girlfriend he's got jessie little girlfriend jessie cool dude that's cool dude all right i finally tracked her down she's been at work so tell us what you think you should have known before buying a pop-up camper what was big and what wasn't well i was really worried about the whole bathroom situation you know because we all have to pee in the middle of the night and not having a bathroom in the camper but we kind of wanted to go that route because we don't want to clean it so it really wasn't as big of a deal as we thought it was going to be because everywhere we go there are facilities that we can go to and it's actually clean and nice and quick and not at all a hassle so we definitely were glad that we did not get a pop-up camper with the bathroom yeah and what do you think about the counter space versus a kitchen yeah so i would much rather have counter space in the pop-up camper than the sink i could see why if you're going for a long time places i think would be helpful to wash things and wash your hands but for the kind of camping that we do there's no reason to have a sink i would much rather have more countertop space put snacks out and all that kind of stuff that we bring with us all right so that's the biggest things i think about storage yeah i just i did a thing on storage about having everything tucked away oh yeah everything tucked away um you know we leave a lot of stuff in the camper so that every time we go camping we don't have to pack up a whole bunch of stuff and move it so just having like extra towels and blankets a couple of canned goods games um batteries matches just all that kind of stuff that you don't really think about every time you go camping keep it in the camper sheets pillows all that stuff and then just wash it as you as you use it is so much easier than bringing it every time you don't get me all righty that's it little jack's excited for his first year of camping he hasn't been in the pop-up camper yet couple weeks since i'm pretty excited see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Yak Motley

Views: 239,946

Keywords: pop up camper, popup camper, rv living, buying a used pop up camper, 5 things i wish i knew before buying a pop up camper, how to buy a pop up camper, how to decorate a pop up camper, renovation, pop up camping, rv camping, rv travel, pop up camper with bathroom, tent trailer roof repair, yakmotley, before you buy, pop up camper fridge, popup camper sink, buying a pop up camper, how to renovate a pop up camper, travel trailer tips and tricks, pop up trailer hacks

Id: YC9dXeExpGY

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 16 2022