$180k vs. $40k VAN SWAP (full tour of the Ekko)

we have spent almost two years traveling around the us living out of our converted sprinter van that we bought for a little over forty thousand dollars after what some might call a rough start we've come to love our van and it's taking us all around the us on some incredible adventures but if there's one thing we've learned over the last two years it's that any home on wheels comes with its own set of unique challenges the pipes froze and burst oh tragic yeah it's really in there yeah those challenges encountering challenges like these has made us wonder could life be better had we chosen a different home on wheels so from time to time we move out of our van and into a different vehicle to see what life might have been like had we made a different choice today we're trying out the winnebago echo which retails for over 170 thousand dollars we're going to be moving out of our van and into the echo for the next 48 hours home sweet home we'll be giving you a full tour and doing a side-by-side comparison of the experience so you can see just how much comfort you get for an additional 130 000 but for that additional comfort you also have to be willing to move into something that looks a little more like an rv than a van [Music] we rented this van from a company called blacksford they're the same ones who rented us the revel last year so if you need an rv in las vegas definitely check them out shawn gave us a quick tour and after awkwardly taking possession of the keys guys have a wonderful trip we drove both vans west to the middle of the desert where we made the move into the echo so at this point we've gotten some driving in cooked a meal i love cilantro yes i do done a little work showered and slept in the van have you seen any pillows no he said no one's ever slept at this before good thing we have our van with us so now that we've experienced what it's actually like to live in the echo let us give you a full tour and show you how it stacks up against our van i do not mean to do that but before we get started i just wanted to say that i have been pleasantly surprised with the echo so far honestly when we were thinking about doing this video i was concerned that this was going to end up being a lame rv oh right there that that's an rv but i would actually say it's closer to an earth roamer for a third of the price you're not going to be getting the stairs that you would get driving the earth roamer down the road but for the average person the echo is a lot more practical and once again a third of the price first let's talk about the size when we first picked up the echo the other day and i hadn't seen it sitting beside our van i thought it was going to be way bigger then we pulled them side by side and it turns out they are the exact same length the echo and the 170 inch wheelbase sprinter van are both 23 feet long i couldn't find a width measurement on the internet so this morning i just measured the width of both of them with my arms using my best guesstimation i would say the winnebago echo is about a foot wider than the sprinter van that definitely makes it feel a little bigger while you're driving down the road but that extra foot of width on the inside makes a massive difference also our sprinter van is nine and a half feet tall and the echo is ten and a half feet tall so you have an extra foot of headroom so i'm six foot seven and i can not only stand up but go like tippy toes in here if he tried to do that in our van he would have to work his neck to about a 90 degree angle to stand up straight all that to say the echo and our van are actually very similar in size but somehow the echo feels twice as big inside kara's going to give you a full tour of the inside so you can see the awesome layout which includes the most genius bathroom we have ever seen wow first let me show you around the outside starting with the retractable awning all i have to do is lean in push a button out goes on and then we're ready to bring it back in one more press retracts it straight back into the rv also when it gets dark it has some really cool led lights retractable stairs so one massive difference between our van and the echo is that the echo is full of outside storage compartments it makes it feel and look a little more like an rv which i don't feel like is quite as cool as van life but if we're being completely honest these compartments are super convenient this first one is a storage compartment oh look there is actually a little latch here that keeps it from falling on your head if you want to use that one thing that i love this is something that our van doesn't have this is an outdoor shower it's really more like an outdoor hose pipe i always call these outdoor showers so you plug it in right here and then you have both a hot and cold water tap why would you do that oh that was another thing i wanted to tell you is that there's actually an option on some of the echoes where you can put an outdoor kitchen in here it slides out there's like a freezer there's a cooktop so if i was gonna live in the echo i'd definitely have one of those installed here because i love anything that encourages you to spend more time outdoors i'm gonna have to disagree there i think i would choose more storage every time thankfully there's a rubber floor in here so if it gets wet it's no big deal i think moving back we have two 120 amp outlets so if you need to plug anything in outside you can do that and then down here i think this is like a cable plug-in for a tv i don't know if we don't really use tvs in this family and here behind door number two we have two regular propane tanks what makes them special is that they're regular if you live in a van or an rv or a camper most of these things have these special propane tanks that have to be filled at random locations that can sometimes be hard to locate so because these are just normal propane tanks like the ones you would have on your grill at home it's super easy once they get empty all you have to do is take them out switch it for a full one all in all much less of a headache you have 30 gallons of propane between these two tanks which i assume will last you forever the propane tank in our van is seven gallons and we filled it up once since owning the van granted we only use the propane to cook but still unless you're constantly running your heat i bet you have to fill these up once a year another bonus is they're stored outside instead of in your home where there's less of a chance of getting poison while you sleep okay the back is home to my favorite feature on the echo real quick in case you've never heard of fair drop it's a service we created to help you find incredible deals to amazing destinations all around the world thanks to a deal we found on fair drop last year we got to take our whole team of 12 people from nashville to athens grace for 300 round trip per person and this was not just a one-time thing just check out the deals we found in the last 48 hours if you don't already know here's how fair job work first you become a member which is either 49 a year or 99 a year depending on if you want business class deals or not or spoiler alert you can get 20 off your first year by clicking the link in our description below then you set your travel preferences and now you can just sit back and relax and wait for your notifications to roll with our team at fairdrop searches millions of flight combinations every single day and whenever we find deals that meet your travel preferences we'll send you a notification with all the information you need to book the deal now just to be clear we're not a travel agency so we don't book the flight for you and you don't have to book the flight through us we just let you know the deal is there and then you can either book it directly with the airline or however you book your flight and the best part is there's no limit to how many deals you can book and you can book them for as many people as you want that's up to you make some different stuff we just want to help you save money our team's been working super hard behind the scenes every single day to make bear drop better and better and we would love if you check it out like i said before right now if you click the link in the description below you'll get 20 off your first year at fairdrop okay back to the tour this is the gear garage i still cannot believe that i cannot get this unlocked that's the echo what in the world this thing is huge so this gear garage is made to fit two bikes and there's a few things that i especially love about this one there are 120 volt outlets on each side of the garage if we own this we would definitely have two electric bikes back here two super 73s would actually be my dream the other thing that really impressed me about this gear garage besides the fact that karen and i could sleep back here is that there is a heater so we just spent four weeks living in below freezing temperatures skiing all around colorado and in order for us to store the skis in our van we had to turn our shower into a ski locker which went just okay we also couldn't use our shower for an entire month the echo would be the perfect ski mobile another great thing about this garage is that it can be open from all three sides which makes it super easy to slide in long awkward things like skis and bikes apparently that's all i think about doing these days honestly if you needed to fit an extra person in the van you could easily put a sleeping pad back here and somebody could sleep so instead of dusty sleeping on our crummy floor with his face right next to the toilet he could have his own private space back here there's even a night life and bag light we'll do a rave back here before i show you down the driver's side i wanted to point out how thick these walls are this is the amount of insulation that you have all around the echo it's four season insulated which i wouldn't have been able to appreciate except for the fact that we just spent a month living in freezing cold temperatures in colorado you could live in this van year round very comfortably and while we're on the topic of four season usability i wanted to point out that the echo is all-wheel drive with that said our two-wheel drive had no problem taking us around the snowy parking lots in colorado maybe just um oh shoot oh shoot oh shoot don't try to take it up a very steep mountain road with several inches of fresh snow that only happened once so the first compartment that we come to on the back driver's side is what you could call the hydration station this is where you manage all of your water needs this is a gravity fed water field some buttons oh don't know what happened there you also have a winterization valve so if you're gonna leave your van for a long time and it was cold you could drain all your lines that's way easier than having to crawl underneath your back seat like i had to to turn our shower water off we have another outdoor shower here also this seems a little dangerous but it looks like there's a cable and satellite hookup in case you wanted to put an outdoor tv on this side of your van there is actually a heater to keep all of this warm in the winter we learned how important that was in our van even though we shut off the water to our shower we brought our gray water inside and we did our best to insulate the floor and we kept the heater running for a month straight our water pipes still froze it's just a little inconvenient living out of giant water bottles so the heater here is key this black tubing down here is your gray water dump let's give this two extra points compared to our van our current situation is we have this seven gallon blue water tank that sits under our sink and we literally have to struggle to pull it out and then break open an icy dump station you sit there and you pour it in with your hands here all you have to do is you pull over the gray water dump you just pull this black lever and then all of your gray water dumps exactly where it's supposed to put the cap back on and you're ready to go and behind this door we have our cassette toilet honestly i've been on the fence about cassette toilets for a long time we have a composting toilet in our van which never stinks most of the time when we've tried living in things that have cassette toilets there's a slight smell i think i left that open too long but the benefit to a cassette toilet is how easy it is to empty all you have to do is grab well that's embarrassing oh here we go all you have to do is lift up on this little blue tab pull out and now i am holding all of our waste in my hands this is your dump tube and that just twist out then you unscrew this cap you could dump it in the toilet you could dump it at a dump station you never have to see your waste which is really nice because we have this this slightly opaque uh yeah for lack of a better word pea bucket and every time we need to empty our toilet we have to carry it through the van there's always risk of spillage okay my p bucket across the campground and don't even get me started on emptying the solids portion of the toilet as a rental company we do a lot of black tank cleanouts and we would do a hundred of these versus one traditional class c the chance you have to aggressively wash your hands doing a cassette toilet are almost zero and so it is preferred kind of across the board so that just slides back in this is really exciting this compartment houses the lithium-ion batteries and the inverter this model has not one but two 320 amp batteries for a total of 640 amps our van has 200. i have been super impressed with how well these batteries have held up because we have really put them to the test cara dried her hair this morning but she would never do an hour van we made two pots of coffee anytime in our van we're doing anything that requires heat because heat pulls a lot of electricity we always turn our van on so the alternator charger is running so it's charging up the batteries at the same time we're pulling that power in the echo we didn't have to worry about that at all and the revel that we rented last year you had to be driving in order to recharge the batteries here if you're sitting still as long as you just turn the car on they start to recharge i didn't understand this alternator charger thing when we got ours put in and i'm pretty sure the guy who hooked it up just hooked it up off of our car alternator which means that eventually that's going to go out and we're probably going to be stuck on the side of the road no regrets last but not least if i bring you up to the top of the van you can see not one but three solar panels for a total of 455 watts of solar this is why the echo was charging up so quickly this morning we also have three solar panels on top of our van however they only pull 300 watts of solar also up top there is an air conditioner and i believe a satellite that was not getting strong enough signal to play the olympics last site but we are in the middle of the desert oh yeah and there's a max air fan that wraps up the tour of the outside now we're gonna head inside and let kara show you the incredibly spacious interior okay we will start in the front and make our way to the back the cab is beautiful it's not that different from our van but it's seven years newer so everything is just a little prettier you know how much i love storage and there are so many little compartments to put things and so many cupholders one two three four five six seven eight it's also gas instead of diesel i don't really know which one is better but i do know if it's gas you don't have to do death fluid which is super annoying and then once you're parked the driver's seat swivels into a living room chair so it just it's probably user error that's it to be fair i can't do this in our man either now this one swivels two which is very exciting okay i am obsessed with this layout our van has a big wall right here so you only have one swivel seat but once you get parked you can turn both of these around you immediately have four places to sit our least favorite thing about our van is in order to have a place to sit or a place to work or a place to eat we have to convert our bed into a table which never ever happens and here it's so easy watch how quickly i can set the same one no problem the kind of weird thing about this is the cab sits a bit lower than the rest of the van but they've included two of these cushions they go in these front two seats and then you're in a much better height to do whatever you need at the table so this is where we ate dinner last night i keep slurping chili's down my throat we ate my delicious soup watched the olympics looked into each other's eyes it was lovely but then we had some work to do and we discovered a second workspace ow first head bump in this van so this is slightly more inconvenient but not too bad all you have to do to set up this second table is boop and i have my very own desk do you know how much this means to me oh this is a digital nomads dream i would consider buying the stand just to have this desk moving on slide it back here above the cab is the television which we are actually really excited about because the olympics are on right now but unfortunately like nate said the satellite doesn't reach out here in the desert but we were able to watch on our computer and use the bluetooth speaker in these giant storage halls on either side of the tv we have all the window covers most importantly this giant soft insulated blanket the front of the cab is the only part of the van that isn't insulated so this was a pretty big deal last night it got really cold so nate snapped it in and it's nice and snug so no air escapes that was pretty painless and it has a big zipper down the middle so if you needed to get in the front you could just easily slide through one thing i forgot to point out about the office slash dining room area is the amount of windows up here you pretty much have 180 beautiful views of the mountains and i'm pretty sure these windows are the exact same as the earth roamer they're super nice because they open up why isn't it there we go ours you can just crack a little bit we have this permanent screen i love how you can just have open air if you want to but if you have bugs you can very conveniently pull down the bug screen and if you want some privacy or if you want to keep out the heat or the cold boom instant window covers these are such a big deal because hours one are super annoying to take on and off but also they're really annoying to store once you take them off you're not using them you have to put them somewhere and these just disappear thankfully the table is just as easy to put down as it was to put up all you do is lift it up and you're ready to go plus these seats double as passenger seats with seat belts we have never ever ever driven with our friends in the back without seat belts on so it would be really really nice to be able to legally drive our friends around although i'm not sure where they would sleep oh yeah in the trunk we are pretty sure that winnebago held a focus group whenever they were building the echo and they were like what do you people want and the people said we want outlets and boy do they give them outlets we have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten twelve fourteen don't look in here yet this is the grand finale of the bathroom 15 16 17 21 22 23 24 25 26 37 28 places to charge whatever you want like a traveling youtuber's dream moving on into the kitchen area we'll start with some storage this cabinet is gigantic if we lived in here full time this would probably be our pantry also all of the cabinets here have these really strong magnets so it's not gonna fall on your head cabinet number two is quite a bit smaller over here they have our coffee making stuff plates bowls cups underneath the sink we have this itty bitty drawer because there's a bunch of pipes behind us we just have some cleaning stuff here we would probably put all of our cutlery in this drawer in this big drawer we put like plates and bowls and other big tools underneath the stove we have this giant storage area that has a trash can and some cleaning supplies i used this kitchen to make us dinner last night and i have some mixed feelings when this is up and i'm using the sink there is zero counter space i do like this sink setup where they've made this custom board that when you're not using the sink it's counter space you can also flip it over and it becomes a cutting board you can also use it to hide your dirty dishes yeah the propane it's a two burner stove i love that they're next to each other and not stacked one in front of the other and it has this nice little lighter you just press this button i just lost all my arm hairs if this was our van i would definitely get rid of the microwave we don't ever use microwaves i don't really feel like you need them i don't think they're very healthy and how much could you store here i guess you could just like put stuff in here so i guess if we had to have this man if we had to have this van if we lived in this van i would just probably put stuff in there oh more storage there is another little pantry oh my gosh they pull out i don't think they're supposed to oh gosh let's talk about the control panel on this touch screen we can turn our water pump on and off with just one click we can look at our battery levels and most importantly our tank levels in order to see how much fresh water we have left we have to turn our bed back into a table and then we have to lift up the cushion and lift up the wooden thing and then look at our tank and see how much is left we've been living in here for over 24 hours we've both taken a normal length hot shower and i did dishes last night without really thinking about water and we still have 64 left this box is for all things solar that i don't understand we have some more controls down here this is all of the lights in the back and then this is the button that nate was pressing to move the awning in and out this is the awning light this button is pretty cool and i just accidentally pushed it and it basically turns off all the power in the back if you wanted to conserve power or you were leaving it for a while you could just hit that and you'd be good to go in our van we literally have to pull out each individual fuse last but not least in the kitchen we have this beautiful refrigerator and a pretty good-sized freezer i'm gonna save the bathroom as the grand finale so follow me into the bedroom i kind of like that there are stairs that's kind of fun but i have mixed feelings about the bed setup i absolutely love that it's pretty much a fixed bed you don't have to do much converting so i wouldn't change that but it's definitely unique when i did this last night i wasn't fully convinced that it was gonna work but it actually did so all you do is shove this cushion and you have a bed plenty of room for the two of us however this middle bit is a little short so the weight is definitely going on those foot websites but like i wasn't gonna sleep over here and nate over here so i ended up sleeping in this middle part with my feet hanging off so that makes the sheet situation a little tricky too there's not really a way to put a sheet on the whole thing because then you would lose this access to like a weird ghost sheet area but i do love that when you're not using it as a bed you just simply fold this up and it doubles as like an armrest slash drink holder above each side of the bed we have our own cabinet that holds sheets and some towels plus i love the two giant windows on both sides now beneath the bed is where things get really exciting i think the reason this bed is so comfortable is because you have about six inches of memory foam but beneath that you have these weird squishy things that i think are kind of meant to be the replacement of a box spring under a mattress it's like it just gives you a little extra give i've never seen that before but what really blew my mind is if you lift this up what there is lots of storage underneath the bed and i remember from our time in the revel thinking it wasn't really a full-time setup it was a lot more of like a weekend adventure mobile but here we actually have a place to put all of our clothes and stuff there's also another secret compartment back here where you could store a bunch of stuff i picture putting like i don't know like papers and documents here which surprisingly it's hard to find a place to put that stuff when you live in a van then you have this giant cabinet which you can access from the front or once again above by the way this is on both sides i don't know if i made that clear we have never been in a van that had enough power to sustain an ac unit without being plugged in and since we camp off the grid 99 of the time that doesn't really do much for us but this one can run for 20 minutes just off of the battery there's nothing worse than falling asleep sweating not that bad no no you spread out like this and now for the grand finale of the winnebago echo the bathroom when sean was giving us a tour he really hyped up the bathroom he said so without a doubt the best bathroom configuration that i've ever seen in the rv industry so my expectations were pretty high and then he opened the door and he was like this is it and i must say i was a little underwhelmed i mean it's a great bathroom but just wait for it okay so first we have plenty of space i really like how there is a curtain and or a door so total privacy which nate really appreciates there's also a window in here so when you do have to go number two you can crack that window and i think it makes a pretty big difference we have a cassette toilet like nate mentioned if you're unfamiliar with them quick lesson you pretty much use it exactly like a regular toilet everything goes to one place and then instead of flushing you open this lever and everything falls you run a little water to flush and then you close it back up in our experience cassette toilets have a bit more of a smell than composting toilets but they are very convenient because you don't have to worry about where your liquids and solids are going you have to aim and then you just have one thing to dump we have a cute little sink a nice mirror quite a bit of storage space but where is the shower here's where things got really fun ready you just move this magic door we now have a full full-size shower there's great water pressure and it yeah just worked like a normal shower but my favorite part is this wall like contains all of the water so when you're done and you go back to a regular restroom the only thing that's wet is the floor all this stuff stayed dry including the toilet in our shower every inch of the walls are wet i even left my toiletry bag right here so even if they're stuffed somehow it all still fits when you move the wall over so pretty amazing and i have to agree with sean it's the best setup i've seen are we done is that everything [Music] so that is the full tour of the winnebago echo let the points show that it is much nicer than our van but it also costs an extra 130 000 but you could also look at it as it costs 480 000 less than the earth roamer and i think the echo is actually a much better comparison to the earth roamer than it is to our van i feel like during these tours we're always a little negative towards our van but the truth is we know it's not the best but after living in it for two years it's just home so tomorrow we're moving back into our home and we are continuing the next section of this 3 000 mile road trip from vegas to la you

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 3,432,733

Keywords: #vanlife, converted van tour, couple vlog, daily vlog, full time travel, kara and nate, kara and nate vlog, morning routine, off grid living, self converted sprinter van, sprinter van, sprinter van conversion, tiny home, tiny home on wheels, tiny house, travel, travel couple, travel vlog, unique accomodations, van life, van life couple, van life usa, van life vlog, van tour, vanlife, vlog, winnebago, winnebago ekko, winnebago revel, winnebago revel 2022, van vs. rv

Id: gJSIRwaDmWw

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022