Test Camping in the Winnebago EKKO!!

[Music] hey everyone it's james and stephanie and we are not in lance that's right we are in we're calling it test deco testy testy that's right i named it i named it testing so so for those of you who don't know we the echo the winnebago is now in production yay and so we rolled up to iowa and they sent us off in this yep so this is a pre-production echo and we are just test camping in it so we are going to just talk about our first impressions of actual camping in it we've been in it just under a week now yeah so we've got a lot to say a lot of opinions but we haven't done any real like detailed testing or anything like that so we're trying to camp we're trying to camp and have fun we're trying to be people not those people anyway so let's get to it [Music] all right well since we're kind of set up right here now in the galley and the dinette let's start by talking about those okay well so we started with taking all our stuff out of lance our camper van and transferring it over here to the echo and what we found is we've got plenty more space than we had in lance's gallery we have we have room left over yeah it's just not terribly well organized yeah space so like some of the drawers or no the drawers but like the cabinets yeah i if this were our coach i'll be planning to put a shelf in there so we can actually get more things in there and not have them kind of jumbled up yeah there's a lot of wasted space in the top because some of these cabinets are really tall so if we could get a shelf in there we can use that upper space and we can get our stuff more organized because right now it's all just kind of jumbled in there packed in right and we end up putting most of our food in in this pantry over the dinette and even that could use some storage just again to get more levels of things in there and there's this little hidden pantry behind the seat here and you can get a ton of stuff in here i was surprised at how much stuff you can really get in here yeah what we found is that that was best for like stuff that you want to get to frequently yeah and often like coffee yeah because it's just so easily accessible so anything you're you're taking out a lot is handy in that so now what'd you think about the fridge yeah the fridge was fine it's not as big as the one we have in lance not as good we're spoiled with that but it's plenty big yeah and the one thing i didn't like about the fridge is the freezer is high and it also opens you know top to bottom so you got to stand on your tippy toes if you're shorter too but i'll adjust i can still access this it's fine it's just different yeah i gotta get used to that one thing i i did notice about the fridge that i liked is this fridge has a night mode oh yeah and so you hit the night mode button and then it kind of goes into this super quiet mode now the fridge and lance i can hear when we're in bed right when the compressors kick on this one in night mode i didn't hear it when it was on at night so yeah that was that's a nice feature to have and so if you're a light sleeper you'll like that yeah um the microwave the microwave so i struggled with the microwave at first i i don't know i was pushing i'm not very technical and so at some point i thought i pushed one start and it was at three minutes and 17 seconds i think she hit like baked potato or something i don't know it's my first time using it james then used it and it works fine so i think it was just user air but the water i boiled a mug of water in it super fast compared to lance's um yeah by a minute faster the one thing i noticed about the microwave kind of like the uh freezer in the fridge the microwave is a bit high up yeah so like if you're probably wind up with a very dirty bottom on the microwave and you won't even know that you've spilled stuff in there because it's kind of high up unless you're taller yeah yeah and so you'll be on your tippy toes but you can see in there or i can at my height i'm 5'6 but i guess i'll adjust to that taller you know there's always compensations for getting the small space and they had to raise some things up so everything could fit so if that's a sacrifice i have to make standing on my tippy-toes that one i'm okay with okay um so big window so a lot of people said you know they're they're missing a window in that door but with windows big windows here and here i didn't really feel like it was that closed off yeah that's that's true i didn't either especially with all the windows up front you're real close to the cab windows as well yeah and if you were if you're really feeling closed in you could open that door and just leave the screen open which is so nice to do so all right so now moving it over to the dinette the dinette seats they're pretty comfortable i probably spent more time here than steph did and they're pretty comfortable they they lean back in adequate amount i didn't find myself thinking they don't they're in one position right right but it's already leaned back right you don't lean them anymore um and yeah i thought they were pretty decent and i spent quite a bit of time here yeah there was some conversations over on the echo owners and wannabes group about them compared to solas seats and some people thought that they were identical to the solar seats but when you see a side-by-side comparison they're actually there's some differences there they have a similar look the especially the headrests but they're padded a lot differently so okay yeah um now as far as working from the road which is primarily what i did from this from this area um i thought it was pretty decent now i did wind up kind of sitting between the two seats but i didn't really notice that i was like sitting on a crack or anything like that that was fine and there was good access to like the power outlets that were right up above the above the dinette table so i thought it was fine so the table is a little shorter it doesn't go all the way to the edge of both of the dinettes people have noticed that yeah and that's a concern for some people how'd you think we thought that was okay because it makes it a lot easier to get from the the cab seats into the back of the coach if the table was much longer you'd have to like turn into shimmy to get by the table and you don't have to do that with the shorter table so i kind of i'm kind of okay with that yeah we had to do that shimmy in lance and so that was one of the things that we noticed in here is that we can just walk through no problem no turning sideways to walk by the echo table so winnebago don't make this table any bigger all right now since we're talking about tables i'm going to throw it back at you what did you think of that lagoon table over there okay well i'm lukewarm on the lagoon table i mean it works great and all but it blocked the door so you know we would it would either be you know behind my seat or we would just kind of have it off to the side and then we found that we were never using the door so that that could be just because we're weird van people and we're not used to a regular door but the entire time we had it we did not open that door i know i mean i get what winnebago is doing they're trying to give more counter space they're trying to give another dinette or remote working spot for a second person i get that but i think i would rather us have something a smaller table so but also you can store it back so we have it right now right here it's behind the seats because we wanted it out of the way and then you could use the door yeah so smaller table there i think would be our vote and then this table kind of leave at the size that it is yeah all right that's going to kind of wrap up the galley in the dinette [Music] so the bathroom and the shower rings yeah so this is kind of a unique bathroom and shower it's we haven't seen it over here but we see it in europe sometimes like it's like a pivoting wall so it's either in bathroom mode or it's in shower mode and what we found is that that pretty much works as designed when it's in bathroom mode you don't see or notice the shower stuff in there and when you take a shower the rest of the bathroom stays kind of dry protected by that wall yeah so it's not quite a wet bath it's not exactly a dry bath it's like something totally new yeah it's either one or the other but not both at the same time so the shower if you're coming from a van and you're showering in an echo it is such an awesome experience first off there's 50 gallons of fresh water that you've got to work with so you're not going to be all stressed out like you are in your van of quick wet yourself down and quick turn off the water and then soap up and then take another 10 seconds and rinse off none of that you can shower more like you're in a home and it's so luxurious she actually washed her hair i know and in lance i can count on my hands a number of times i washed my hair in lance a lot of ponytails yeah my hair's gonna be down see my hair's down now it's gonna be down a lot more uh the truma aquago worked as designed instant hot water i think just like a second or so with when we had the recirculating thing going that was awesome yeah that was a nice plenty hot um i think as far as clean a lot of people have asked about cleaning it off when you're done right because you don't want to close up the water on the and so i think we'll probably get a squeegee and squeegee off the walls behind there before we close that up but it doesn't they don't butt exactly up to each other that pivoting wall there's a there's a gap there's an air gap back there and we'll probably also get a clothesline or something to dry towels with maybe and and speaking of towels be careful when you put towels or some towel hooks in the back of that pivoting wall yeah be careful when you put towels on there because you put like a big thick luxurious turkish bath towel on there you probably couldn't get the the wall shut yeah there's not big enough gap there to make the magnets hit yeah so we have some thin towels and that worked with those thin ones that worked pretty well yeah okay um the sink when you have it pivoted back around in sync mode yeah so i was very glad to have the pump switch right there in the bathroom winnebago yeah since the prototype now there's a pump switch there yeah um now i like to just kind of stick my face in the sink and and wash it like that it was a little small for that i think the the sink was might have a big head i guess i don't know but the sink was a little small for that but it's fine in the space that you've got right yeah it's fine i found the sink a little small in there too but i if that's one of those sacrifices i have to make no problem yeah all right and so now finally i guess we have to talk about the cassette toilet ah yes the toilet okay so first you do have to sit kind of sideways in order to be able to fit there so those of you or people you know planning on maybe trying i want to replace it with an incinerating toilet or a composting toilet you better get something where the head swivels around or you're gonna have to amputate your legs or something to sit on the toilet well it'll be fun to see what people come up with though so now for those of you who are completely new to rv toilets like any rv toilet before you use it if you want to put some water in the bowl first right because it doesn't normally have water in it that just helps things out so so there is a separate button you push to flush right so you can fill it with water that way and then there's the lever for flushing the lever to flush and then everything just drops down into the cassette now if you've seen our cassette video from a few years back where we said we will never have a cassette toilet well this is what happens when you say never publicly she the fates will catch up to you yeah so the big problem we had with the cassette toilet years ago was the dumping we liked everything else about it honestly um so what we've learned is that if you use a lot more chemicals than than what the manufacturer recommends it's less gross and so for this trip what we just used are aquacam just these in packs now granted those little packs are meant to treat a 40 gallon tank and this is a little five gallon cassette so we're keeping our eight to one ratio but but i think it worked out okay i we just we're not suggesting you all do that it's a little over the top using one of those packs in a tiny cassette but it worked so we dumped we dumped at a rest area um i just kind of took it in to the rest area like a highway rest area yeah in the bathroom and i just kind of dumped it into the toilet there and i was able to do it without any splashing or anything and no you're not gonna get video of that um well and i've dumped before too and a lot of people are concerned with the lifting of it and really the when you're taking it out of the echo it's more of a controlled fall you're not really lifting it then you're just controlling you're pulling it out and controlling the drop and then think of it as like a negative curl yes yeah you build a lot of strength on the negative phase so there you go um and when we just did it in the it dumped it in the rest area i didn't bother rinsing it out because we were just putting it right back into service so you know it probably wasn't like super clean but we haven't noticed any odors right in the rig we haven't that's true and when we used it a few years ago when we had all those problems and said we're never going to use one one of the problems was we were getting some smells yeah certainly not as bad this time around probably due to our excessive use of highly toxic chemicals so moving on to the bedroom so the sleeping has been one of the highlights of being in the echo compared to our van lands it's it's pretty comfortable i gotta i gotta admit so all right first thing um it's it's we all know the echo is very well insulated and so the first night it actually got below freezing somewhere in nebraska and i didn't notice any cold spots along the wall or anything like that and it was pretty quiet i mean it's fairly well insulated yeah it appears to be and same with the windows the dual pane windows seem to make a big difference for sound those also they do they keep it a lot quieter here yeah so now the beds i don't know what winnebago did with these mattresses in the wind sleep thing but two thumbs up yeah they're very comfortable um they i don't know they they just they're firm i don't even know how to explain it they're firm but you kind of are cushiony on the top you just got to experience them yeah really really try them out you're not going to be disappointed now um sheet size these are not exactly twin size beds um the sheets we had from our time in parky we had left over some uh some like massage table sheets actually and they fit these beds really really well they fit better than they fit the beds in parking yeah the size was worked out really well for those we started with some yellow bed spreads it was a a king bed that we had cut in half and that's what we had at the beginning of the week on here and that worked out pretty well you didn't really love you didn't feel like it was wide enough for you no yeah i felt like every time i rolled over i wound up uncovered and so now we have proper twin size yeah and we just tuck them in all around these are the ghost snug blankets that we have and yeah i like we like those um so in the echo group there was a lot of concern about being able to lounge under the cabinet so i can show you guys that right now it really does work you can you can lounge here and read no problem so here i am lounging and ta-da i could read a book no problem and when i come up you don't hit your head it's not a problem the cabinets aren't that deep yeah no not a concern i'm not one to read in bed i just stay up until i literally crash and then i'm asleep in 10 seconds so that that doesn't look another thing i've heard people be concerned about is like this uh this pedestal kind of thing in the corner of the bed like is that going to take away a lot of room from the bed you know believe it or not when you're asleep you don't notice if there's like a three inch square cut out from the bottom of your perfect rectangle yeah so that wasn't we've already stopped seeing that and i think that's something that happens too once you start living in it and using it you stop seeing all those things that concerns you yeah and and the corner of that bed is clipped a little bit did you know no problem anything yeah yeah that's fine so storage in here has been fantastic we didn't fill these cabinets at all and i my cabinets under my bed are empty actually there's nothing in them so i am probably going to since since we were able to come up with some place to put mel and his litter boxes up i didn't have to give up my wardrobe for mel and so i've got i'm gonna probably make myself some sort of drawers or something in that wardrobe space because it's a great idea i don't i don't know but i don't like to bring clothes that have to hang up when i'm like on vacation i do though i i would like to have some drawers can i have drawers in there and hang would that work in that space i don't know how well we'll have to figure out something it's kind of a one or the other sort of thing anyway but the drawer that you do have this this big pullout drawer down here is really big um all socks underpants undershirts that kind of thing and some toiletries i had in my drawer and i still had extra room yeah i had all my toiletries and all my electronics in there and i still had extra room too so that's nice in fact you know there's a there's another storage compartment that's under your mattress a little rectangular deep thing right we never even looked into that yeah that's what i was saying i said everything under my side of the bed is completely empty yeah we just didn't use it didn't even didn't even need it so so the bedroom is awesome lots of storage comfy beds and we're loving it [Music] all right so let's talk about the chassis because this is one area where things are quite a bit different from what we're used to yeah and lance and the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about this is compared to lance's oh my gosh the power of this thing has so much more capable than the promaster chassis i think it's just going uphill you want to accelerate from 60 to 80 going up a nine percent grade no no problem yeah just go it's effortless and in a promester it kind of does you you promaster owners know what we're talking about doesn't happen in the transit the transits just chill and it'll it'll just take anything you want to give at it on a climb yeah that's fun the other thing that's really was really impressive about it is the cruise control this has a cruise control that you can set to an actual number with promaster the cruise control is more of it it's a suggestion you know i i'd like to go 75 but really anything between 60 and 80 is what you're gonna get right yeah so no with this if you say 75 you will go 75 all the time uphill downhill doesn't matter you will go 70. but not just that it has adaptive cruise control and i've heard people talk about adaptive cruise control but now that i've driven it it really it changes the drive experience completely you know when you come up on a semi it's going slower the echo just adjusts to however far you set it to be behind that until you get out of the lane to pass and then it goes again and i cannot tell you how that changes the comfort level of driving it's just cool you're not always looking and you're saying hurry up hurry up hurry up because if he doesn't hurry up it's okay um so the adaptive cruise control was cool now it does have uh blind spot monitoring which is a winnebago ad which is little lights that show up if there's someone kind of in your blind spot yeah that was nice it was interesting yeah i came to depend on the one on the passenger side when i wanted to come back in front of a semi after i'd passed a semi because then i could tell if it was clear to get over so i like that feature so now but again in comparison to a b this is a little bit bigger and so definitely more susceptible to winds like crosswinds in here we've been driving a lot out west it's been pretty windy and so you'll notice it more it's not hard yeah to drive in the wind but you will notice it more than in a front-wheel drive class b absolutely yep the winds were one thing um turning radius radius was another it wasn't as good as the promaster it's okay but promaster wins for turning radius yeah you gotta you gotta get used to taking a little more to turn around yeah um so let's talk about mileage because everybody's asking this so okay on our trip back so we've been averaging somewhere between 11 and 12. right now and i haven't done the math i'm just relying on the dash right now it's sitting at 12 miles per gallon yep yep but we have seen it you know again we're out west so the speed limits are 80 the winds are ripping and the mountains are tall so i'm hopeful that people that drive around in florida or something will be able to get better mileage than what we're getting yeah i think they i think you will if you're not you know hauling butt like we've been but um also there's there's some wind noise up front we're getting some wind noise we assume that's coming from the cab and we're coming from lance too again i don't know how much we should say about the wind noise because you've done so much work to quiet lance but it's it's louder than lance uh it's there's no rattles the body when you walk back it's actually quieter back here it's crazy quiet when you walk back to this bedroom when you're when somebody's driving along not that we recommend doing that but yeah um so speaking of handling there are different modes for the all-wheel drive and we've played with maybe three of them first is normal mode which is just default and that's fine then there's there's an eco mode which actually kind of slows down your shifting a little bit it's not as quick to up shift or downshift and it's keeping things more smooth and maybe saving you a little bit on gas i haven't really been able to correlate that too much with the mpg um but then we also got into some mud just for for giggles and mud rut mode that's when it applies torque to every single wheel um maximum torque and yeah we we would have been stuck in lance i mean let's admit it yeah but anyway it's it's it got plenty muddy yeah um let's see the backup cam uh so i'm kind of a reluctant backer upper and i really appreciate the big screen and that i could see really well and it really boosted my confidence with backing up that i could see really well in the backup cam so now the backup camera does not have the little this is where your car is going to go kind of lines on the screen right it's just a screen and it also no matter what i tried with every setting on the dash i could not get it to come on except when the vehicle is in reverse that's really the only time the backup cam is active okay when you're in reverse so um but apple carplay we both thoroughly enjoy yes and love so seat adjustments is another thing and i i'm giving the nod to the transit for having seat and steering wheel adjustments i find it i don't know we haven't even talked about this i think it's more comfortable than the seat the seat in the steering wheel is more comfortable and perhaps that's because the the steering wheel i can get it closer to me than i can in lance but i find it i like driving this and i like the seated position that i can get myself in in the transit i really like the promaster too it's hard to compare because the promaster is such a pleasure to drive but this seat is really comfortable too um but i kind of wish there were some things different about the seats um they they don't turn so great we we haven't figured out how to get them to turn yeah well we have to open the doors and and and then the other thing is like if you want to lean the seat back you know in a lot of cars there's like a lever you pull and then you just lean the seat back it's a little dial it's easy that's the oh yeah the circle yeah i don't love that either and um let's see what else on that there's the oh the leg room getting up that's another that's another knit um to pick at there the center console in the transit is quite a bit bigger and so you really got to thread the needle with your legs to get them through so you can come back around to the back yeah so overall the the handling the drive in general i'm happy with yeah it's it doesn't handle quite as well as lance but lance is very special but it handles perfectly fine and power wise it puts any promaster to shame so i'm quite content with how it drives [Music] okay now i want to talk about the electrical systems and this is a huge topic and i'm just going to scratch the surface of a couple things here i realize we haven't had time to do a lot of detailed experiments so there'll be additional videos coming later on where i get into like the nitty-gritty of things but i just wanted to give you a couple observations about the electrical components here so this coach had two batteries and no generator and the first thing i noticed and this was unusual for me because usually in these lithium-powered rigs with a lot of lithium battery capacity i don't pay much attention to solar but there's enough solar on the roof in this coach that that solar will with the exception of air conditioning that solar will keep pace with whatever you're using day to day you could go on almost indefinitely with just solar power as long as it's reasonably sunny we've charged up when i didn't expect we would so the solar on this one thumbs up which is unusual because i wouldn't have expected that much and then the second thing i want to point out is this inverter the xantrex 2000 watt inverter one thing i noticed that i was able to determine with the lithionics battery app is that that inverter has a standby power draw of only 27 watts there we go the microwave kicked on only 27 watts not like 200 like some other ones that i've come across 27 watts that's almost to the level where you could literally leave that thing on 24 7 and you'd be fine with it so like i said there's a whole lot more to get into with the electrical and i'm not going to do that in this video because this is like a first impressions and camping video and as far as camping goes we're a-okay with this okay all right so that's going to wrap it up for this first look at camping in the winnebago echo yeah it's been a great experience we've learned a lot of the things that we like things we want to mod and i can't wait till we get ours i can't wait to start modifying cars i'm looking forward to camping in ours too not just modifying okay fine anyway that's gonna do it we'll see you later bye [Music] you

Channel: The Fit RV

Views: 314,908

Keywords: RV, TheFitRV, FitRV, The Fit RV, Fit RV, Winnebago, EKKO, Test, Review, Camping, motorhome, Transit

Id: NxXY8FGG-bo

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021