Aliner Ascape - Pam's Review

so the escape cost me twenty thousand dollars and i'm going to be paying on it for 12 years i hope i don't die first and it just doesn't fit hey brian here with diy outdoor life i am in mount blue maine a beautiful state park the biggest state park in maine but one of the more exciting things that i ran into today is i got to meet pam and her amazing escape a-liner now i say amazing because it got my attention right away but like anything learning from a real owner is exciting so pam is uh willing to give us a little tour today and i'm super excited this is the escape i bought it this spring it's uh 2020 i bought it used um i i loved it when i bought it but i'm not in love with it anymore um it's it's too small to maneuver in um you're supposed to be able to you know get dressed and wash up and cook and all that kind of stuff and they're just i don't cook in my campers anyway so i use it as a countertop but it's just not fitting me and it's it's only one person usually so most of us in the tiny camper world know that you know one of the best things that we could do is like rent a camper because it's actually so common that like now this caught my attention i can't be lining over here to look at this escape but i'm finding a real user's experience this might be the perfect camper for someone but it's not the perfect camper for pam so i have a couple questions that i'm curious with this is advertised as a lightweight camper it's not really a teardrop but it's supposed to have some stand-up room and still be able to be towed with tiny tinier vehicles do you know how much it weighs 1500 pounds so she has a subaru forester so we're getting towards the max of that i think it has a 2000 maybe a 2 000 pound tone capacity but that's really pushing do you feel like you're pushing it with the 1500 it doesn't feel like i'm pushing it but i don't want to you know ruin my transmission it does have hot water if you want it it's got a heater it has a little refrigerator um it's got good storage but it's uncomfortable sleeping so we're going to take some shots around and i have some b-roll we'll take a peek inside but when you say it has heat is that propane heat propane heat so that's a plus it has a hot water heater it has a hot water heater soap water pump so pretty i mean because it has an outside shower not an inside shower it has an outside shower shower so i mean this is a pretty well equipped uh camper here for 1500 pounds it looks like it has a rooftop ac it does have ac now do you mostly we're at a non-electric sight dealer do you usually plug in never so you've never used the ac so yeah okay i mean i plugged it in at home to charge the battery and the ac worked beautifully these are the things we learn when and why the best tiny camper you'll ever have is probably the second or third one that you buy because it's so hard to get it right the first time i know a lot of people and i talked to pay them a little bit before this but a lot of people were super excited to have an inside kitchen and then when we get the camper we never use it right so why don't we use our inside kitchen because unless you're just making a cup of tea or heating up a bowl of soup it makes your camper smell you smell like food and that's not even the ventilation yeah it can be a bit much and if we're just making tea or coffee you can get like a jet boil or like these yeah and they they go in a drawer when we're done so the space in these tiny campers is precious now somebody might need that inside kitchen but i know most of us find out pretty quick that we don't overall the build quality looks good but this is mass-produced campers you know it's made by a-liner but i can see right away that it is the rv industry stuff so it's not like these little craftsman teardrops it's got the same materials that you find on every camper going down line including mine with the plastic diamond plate do you know if it's insulated i believe it is i'm not positive but i don't hear noise in it that's always a good sign the ventilation is not good really now ventilation is key so tell me about the windows crank out about this far on the bottom and there's two on this side and only one very small one on the other side i don't know if you could pick this up on the camper but this is three windows but these tip out does this one move at all okay and on the other side there's an escape hatch what about the rooftop it doesn't open at all oh okay so if you're in the market for a tiny camper you have to have a roof right and if you're making a tiny camper you have to have a roof bed heat rises and it gets humid it gets very humid yeah i was surprised with all the heat we had i bought a small battery operated fan and i was surprised that i could sleep even though it was like 87 degrees in there but the vent windows vented more than i thought and i put the fan right up against the screen and blew out the hot air so we have two adults and ripple who's misbehaving while we're trying to film um rip you said now oh she's these kids but the humidity you know an adult will release like a pint of humidity into the air in an eight-hour period so two adults and a dog that jumped in the lake you have an issue the walls will drip so just cracking the vent even if it's not a power vent goes a long way but that is sorely missing if you don't have a rooftop though in the heat it was and i had my grandson in with me one night and the humidity went way up an extra person and actually so come around the working side of the camper i see a couple really nice features on the camper it has a freshwater city connection so you don't have to fill up your reservoir have you used that no so again things to think about when we're looking for a camper you plug a hose up to this it pressurizes the system and you'll have water to your taps and hot water heater without having to fill up your reservoir this is the suburban furnace so these can be run uh boondocking the battery will just run the fan which is really nice have you been out winter camping or cold weather not yet my old camper i was and i love clicking on the heater to get dressed i don't leave it on all night or anything i never thought that i would get a furnace in a tiny camper but it is beyond a luxury for me now it's also dry so you close these vents because it's cold out um it gets very very humid so the furnace will actually dry it out which is nice uh 30 amp shore power that's 110 this is the outside shower is there uh that's a vent for your hot water heater probably yes okay yes um you have an outside gfci yeah so this is really nice i might add one of these to the bushwacker it's really nice when you do have shore power to be able to have this or you can run an inverter and spend a bunch of money once you right right but uh you said you don't go to shore power sites i do either wilderness camping or state parks because i don't want crowds and i don't care to have a hookup it doesn't matter to me so we'll talk about energy and batteries in a second but i'm assuming this is to the refrigerator yes so this is where and it's probably a dometic i'll check inside but uh does this run on gas yep so are you wearing it now yeah so now there is that's to not have to use your battery or shore power that's pretty nice because we're not going to town to get ice exactly so how well i don't have a freezer okay it's a little tiny refrigerator but it's enough it's well and it's still to be able to keep your perishables right without we're a little ways from town uh they do have ice here if you want to spend ten bucks a day or something costing me five bucks a day to keep my cooler five bucks a day to keep the core and you're by yourself right so i mean i i've done videos about this before but you can spend a lot more on ice i mean i'm not always by myself but it's the same system whether there's two of us or one of us very nice so before we hop inside and i'm excited about that uh we're boondocking right now i wanted to talk about uh batteries solar stuff like that so we were talking about how we're boondocking um i prefer these sites out here even at the state campground they're bigger yep they're quieter more private they're nice but there is more than one way to go boondocking there is the techno campers like me that end up with hundreds of amp hours of lithium batteries and solar panels all over the place i'm noticing this the battery that came with it yeah they gave me a new battery when i bought it simple small lead acid battery so how we talked about the gas refrigerator but how are you staying out here um off-grid without any solar without the big battery i don't use it except for my led lights this is the joy of being a minimalist yep and you know for those of us that came from tent camping i assume you did your share of tent cam lots of it so you don't need to spend thousands of dollars and if you listen there's no generator that's that's running around the campsite so you can run your lights yeah um charge your phone if you have to or i can't charge the phone unless i'm hooked up oh uh do you have a usb port no okay well that's i don't that's if you like i do have a plug the folks at aliner put some usb ports in this thing so um all right so simple battery setup and that is i think one of the most overlooked ways of going off grid for a long time is that you don't necessarily have to buy the expensive gear you can just not use electric now you have a fan i'm sure i have a battery operated fan and it i've been camping a week i haven't gone through batteries it's just lasts a long time nowadays the usb rechargeables you can charge in your car when you're driving someplace i have a couple of those little packs that you can charge at home and bring with you and i haven't used them up in a week uh while we're talking i took a peek at this now this is a seven pin plug that's been converted to a four pin plug that means this trailer could charge the battery when you're driving and it does have brakes but you're not using it but i'm not using them i'm not using them so i see a lot of discussion about this it's a subaru forester do you i'm some states you have to it's the law in some states but in others it's not do you notice a big problem with the camper pushing you i don't notice any problem with it even downhills it's i i want to be careful about what i said because that has been my experience and most owners experience but you'll still hear people say you know it's a 1500 pound trailer you load it up with gear 800 pounds she's pulling it with a subaru so if you're going through the rockies it might be nice to have breaks but it hasn't stopped you from going in no and i i go i don't necessarily go the speed limit if i'm going downhill i make sure that i'm being conservative and that i don't have to make sudden stops well that that's where we differ i drive it like i stole it so some of us need breaks um but i definitely love the minimalist approach so let's take a peek inside [Music] so for me the most important part of a tiny camper is it's got to be comfortable it doesn't have to be huge everyone has different needs but the step up from tent camping to using a tiny rv is really nice sleep and being able to just meet your basic needs there how do you feel like the inside of the 80s escape escape is for comfort i'm not very this is the these are the real world honest reviews yeah i mean it looks great it has a lot of nice features and but there's a very tiny space you can stand up to get dressed but you know if you lift your leg up to put your pants on or something you're hitting a cupboard and um it's a little cramped it's very cramped no some of that's tiny camper living you know it right it's for some people it's not for others but as far as the bed you said that you had to make some mods i bought a mattress that was six inches thick because the foam is that they have is not very resilient and it's only three inches and it just wasn't sleepable now that's not uncommon from the rv industry but you had an on uh you didn't account for the side effect of raising it up what what happened when you raised them when i raised it up with a mattress every time i turned over i hit the cupboards with my legs so for some of us especially with the teardrops there's a little cantilever there and it's our feet that hit but uh you know yes sometimes we gotta get rid of the mattresses all together and buy you know you know a three-inch mattress to go on top of it so um as far as amenities once again i took a peek inside the camper it has the dometic fridge it has the suburban furnace you have this really nice screen door pretty standard on bigger rvs not so common on the tiny campers that's very nice yeah it there's some ventilation you have a full-size door there's the entrance to the steps so some of us very nice some of us really love the classic teardrop shape it is not an efficient shape so when i saw the flat back on this there's pros and cons for everything this is not going to ride down the road as well because it's not as aerodynamic but it gives you a full no problem full entrance in and out so that's really nice i see it has the sink there's a lot more storage than i'm used to with the bushwhacker but for tiny campers comfort is key so if you're not comfortable you're not going to want to go camping so let me ask you are you going to stick with it nope i already plan to sell it when i get home it's it has some great features definitely but it's there's enough discomfort in it that i'd rather i'd rather be in a tent frankly it runs well everything works it had a tv but i took the tv out because it was right behind the stove which is a poor design and um i just stuck a mirror in there which gave it a little bit of depth too now you had a classic a-liner uh before you went with this were you more happy with that i was very happy with that it was just old and beginning to leak it was almost well it was like 17 years old 17 years old and camper life is like 180 years but even at that i i would say an a-liner didn't have quite as much storage still had you know it didn't have the water heater but you could have water and it had a furnace and it had a sink now your a-liner that you had is here is that because you sold it to or gave it to a relative i sold it to a relative okay i was gonna say it wasn't just a coincidence that your old camper was done okay all right that would have been a diy outdoor light first this was really nice and i think people learn from this style of real uh but i guess the takeaway for me comes back to watching videos like this but if you could have rented this for the for a trip do you think you would have figured some of those things out before i would have known not to buy it okay so i would say if we you know i don't want to speak for you but one recommendation out of this for me is uh you know see if you can go there's so many places now that you can go take it on a weekend trip and then go try something else because uh you seem to love the outdoors i do and this is a tool to facilitate us getting outdoors more but it's got to be comfortable and it's got to meet your needs so i'm sorry that this one isn't but i wish you the best of luck next time and uh do you know what you're getting next time i'm still going to look for another collapsible a-liner because i love the one i had it had all the amenities i didn't use them like i don't use these but um it was so less than a minute to put it up and spacious comparatively all right well i will if you're unfamiliar with that i'll post a picture on the screen somewhere of those classic a-liners i'll make sure to give you a tour on the channel one of those because they're always an eye-catcher when you see them at the campsite it is definitely something yeah so thank you so much thank you like subscribe all that good stuff and if we saw any trinkets here uh that we featured in the video i'll throw them in the description to help some people out but thanks for watching you

Channel: DIY Outdoor Life

Views: 51,768

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Id: 7IqREEAhcg0

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022