Why a Truck Camper? Honest Six Month Review Living in a Truck Camper

foreign [Music] howdy everyone hey everybody welcome back so on this Vlog we'll be going over our six month review of living in this truck camper but we're going to start out with how much we have fallen in love with the Ford F-350 let me tell you something she's a beast so if you've been with us for a while on the channel you know we had a 06 Hummer H3 prior to this we love that thing but we didn't realize that it didn't have a lot of power actually we knew it didn't happen in real life that didn't have power real quick starting out though one of the greatest things that we have fallen in love with this is the clearance this has so much clearance and this is the reason we bought this Ford F-350 there's other reasons too but clearance and four wheel drive is one of them a second reason that we loved it is our Hummer did have four wheel drive of course why would you have a Hummer H3 that was a two-wheel drive they don't even make them this one had rear lockers on four wheel drives you always have only one tire in the front and one tire on the back pulling at all times but with these lockers both tires pull at the same time which prevents us from being stuck as easily and the third thing that we love about this truck is the fact that we went with a crew cab reason we wanted to go with this and it has worked out great for us is all the storage in the back we live out of this full-time so we're able to carry everything we've always wanted including our workout equipment in Kelly's lounger which was a big one we were concerned that going with a truck camper we wouldn't be able to have this much available space and we did oh yeah I can't live without my lounger that's my outside relaxation but we haven't had any issues with the truck at all we've been able to get everywhere we wanted to go with the camper on top we've gotten to a lot of our old school places we like to camp in Arkansas and we've put ourselves in some situations out here in the desert so far and we've had to inch through things and we've made it we haven't had any issues with clearance when we were in Tennessee we drove through a bunch of treat areas and we've made it pretty much through everything now we do have a couple of scratches on the camper but that happened within the first week that we had it we bought this stuff to use not to keep it looking pretty so everything gets used for what it it's for another thing that we really like about our setup is the truck and the camper together is 23 feet long which makes it easy for us to get around town park in parking lots for grocery stores and eat restaurants anywhere else we want to go it's just all around better for us to get where we want to go and I will have to admit whenever I drove the H3 with the trailer that was so much more stressful driving around town then this has been I really did think with the height it would be more stressful and at first because it was a mindset thing it was pretty stressful because Kelly was always looking and still does look at Bridge clearance Heights which we haven't come up on any bridges that we can't get under we know of one in our hometown at Texarkana and we already knew about it so we just don't go that way you can go around it but as far as this being on the road we haven't had any issues issues with Bridges now I still get afraid that we're going to tip over but Cody's like come on Kelly the troll truck weighs more than the camper and then we have a 45 gallon water tank which has been awesome and when that is full that's right in the center of the bed so that just puts more weight on the back of the truck so we're not going to tip over even though I still get scared and I think we're gonna tip over I know we're not well that kind of leads into uh wind speeds so recently we have been in some really high wind speeds with gusts of probably 50 miles an hour and it has made us a little nervous sitting still and we chose not to drive in that but we have drove through 30 mile per hour winds coming at the side of the camper we've had no issues it also helps that we had an aftermarket sway bar installed if we didn't install and I'll show you right here you see that bar right there it's a thicker sway bar if we didn't install that I think the whole truck would sway a lot more so all in all it's been great we've also enjoyed the storage like Cody said in the truck but also all the storage in the camper and the outside of the camper so if you watched our beginning videos when we first got the truck camper Cody and his dad did one of these storage units on the side it was that you had this we'll open it and show you but it was completely empty in there so they had to box it out to make it able for storage to fit in there so Cody and his dad built out one box on one side and then Cody and my dad built out the box on the other side so like I said that when they had to build the box out you they had to build all of this right here it was completely empty it was an empty cavity and if you're wondering why was this an empty cavity to begin with this camper is designed for a short and long bed truck and if you have a long bed truck the long bed will actually go further and probably come to about right here that is why that's an empty cavity and you have to build it out I'm glad we have a short bed truck yeah I agree before we go inside there's something that we aren't too happy with on this camper however Kelly's dad who has a RV shop told us that is very common is the gray water handle so inside this camper we have a black and gray water handle this actually broke away from the valve door and I had to hammer this back down into it to get it to work and our gray tank was backflowing and what we did was go with an external valve trap door and it just screwed on directly to the outside pipe you might be asking why are we even keeping the gray and black open together is because we've removed the toilet right here that goes up in there and we back flow this into the black tank so that we have 50 gallons of gray water versus just a 25 gallon gray water tank okay once you step inside I want to talk about storage again we have tons of storage in here and it has worked out perfectly I have not rearranged anything since I ordered organized all of these cabinets so food pantry is still here shoes are starlink stores in here and then we'll talk about the rest of storage when we get inside so let's talk about this bathroom because we have used the shower more so than we thought we were going to mainly just because we've been in the desert we haven't been where there's any creeks and we can use our outdoor shower that we use prior The Joker system so we've been using this quite a bit let's just start with the shower curtains so I've noticed after about maybe two months shower curtains need to be washed so these are the soft shower curtains that you can wash in the washing machine and you can hang them up to dry and they dry really quickly you don't have to buy the hard plastic ones that are just really stiff I thought at the beginning I wanted to rip these out and do something different but now that we've been living in here for six months using it almost daily I think that it is great and I wouldn't want to change anything else about that so we have two shower curtains this one will block the door and then this one hides all of this stuff back here which is our dirty clothes and our shower stuff and the storage in the little cabinet has worked out perfectly as well now this we did change out this was not original it was a white stiff cord same brand as this we just got a stainless steel now we can talk about the toilet we did like we said take the toilet out and we are not missing that toilet we flow the gray and black together so that means that we have more room for Dish and shower water not our waste also we are not wasting water flushing the toilet so therefore we save a little bit water to wash dishes or wash ourselves and this is just a regular camping toilet we had it before when we were in the tent and you just put a bag in there there's bags that you can buy that come with it and it has the bag has like some material that expands which liquid touches it you fold that in and zip it up and you just dispose of it now we did replace there with a plastic piece here this is what you would put down to stand on you know you once you shower that way the floor is a little higher and you don't get your feet wet this is just a cedar wood Plank and it seems to be working out great and it makes it smell really good in here because it smells like Cedar another thing with this bathroom is and this really doesn't have to do with the bathroom it has more to do with the door so this door we noticed even when it would magnetically latch here sometimes we would park and come in here and the whole door's just been flung open my dad had this little idea that you do this in a lot of RVs once we have it closed you just snap it together and that has held it closed and we don't have any issues with the door retracting at all all right so that kind of concludes that refrigerator has worked out fine it's refrigerator and freezer we've actually been able to keep our Frozen stuff really Frozen and the refrigerator stays very cool we haven't had any issues with that another thing with this pamper is we we have this table here that is removable and when we first started Living in this we thought we would totally be removing this table just to like hang out in here but we don't have to remove the table to hang out in here we still hang out in here just fine we just find ourselves not removing the table there is so much more room if you remove the table we remove it just to kind of get stuff out of storage under here but other than that it pretty much stays in place we did get a cute little pillow recently so this didn't come with the camper we just needed a little accent pillar right there to put behind your back sometimes if you're sitting here for a while like when Cody's editing he needs a little back support sometimes she's right and I'll be honest this is not the most comfortable seating especially for long times of editing and that pillow has been a game changer sounds weird that it's just a pillow but just by itself this is real thin foam you go down and your butt touches the plywood almost after about 30 minutes see I don't see I'm not I don't think I'm as heavy as you so my butt doesn't touch the plywood but I think that next time we roll into our hometown my dad knows somebody there all we have to do if we have to have time to take these cushions to this upholstery place and he can replace the inside phone with something stiffer maybe like a very very firm foam and I think that that would fix the issue yeah it would so we'll talk about the storage again we've had this all this storage I have not moved anything it has worked out perfectly fine our utensils have worked out fine the storage under here I've kind of kept it as as it was originally the oven has worked great by the way a lot of people said hey you need to get you one of these Stone things to put at the bottom to help regulate the Heat and that stays in there it doesn't go anywhere and it works out great the stove top has worked really good as well haven't had any issues with it it is very very worn I mean we have used the heck out of it and then Cody's dad built this little wooden I'm gonna just call extra counter space because I don't use it as a cutting board I just use it more when I dry dishes I put them here or if I need extra room to prep food it's just great to have and it's worked out great it doesn't move because he's got these little wood slits that go in here so we're driving it stays here as well and if you want to have a place to stand up and work for a little bit it's really nice to put a laptop around here and you can just stand and it's like the perfect height so if I'm doing work on my laptop I'm he's usually sitting in I usually stand over here and do a little bit of work now we have somebody had somebody ask if we missed the microwave so we completely ripped out the microwave made this aftermarket cabinet here out of old RV door and painted it which I'm still not happy with the color of the paint I just maybe next year when we go home uh to my parents I can find a different paint color or if we get bored on the road and somebody has chalk paint which this is the brand of that paint it's called chalk paint which means you don't have to sand prep or anything like that before you paint it a lot of people use it for antique furniture or furniture that has the particle board sticker on top of it people will use it for that so no we have not missed the microwave when we had a house we never used a microwave so I thought it would be better to have more storage and it has worked out great so all the spices and oils I've got some coffee back there pretty much stay up here haven't had issue with this thing moving it's pretty heavy with seasoning I think the only thing at home we ever use the microwave for was to melt butter I melted butter that was important because I would make care pop popcorn and that was it and I wanted to talk about one other thing if you have a microwave you have to be hooked up to shore power while we're hardly ever hooked up the shore power but that leads me to this AC unit I didn't really think we would use this AC unit kind of joked about removing it yeah we thought about putting another extra weight that and putting another max air fan in here oh yeah and we left it and when we were down in Key West we use this thing a lot because it was hot down there in December still hot and humid and you have to be hooked up to shore power for this as well worked out great so we're kind of looking forward to it because last year we were trying to escape the heat well this this go around this summer coming up if we're in a hot area we might be able to get just a campground and hook up to shore power and not have to drive 15 20 hours across the country from Wisconsin to actually be able to go swimming this summer yeah because we both love being in the water and we like warm temperatures so this will allow us yes we will have to stay in a campground but it is so much easier to stay in a campground now than in a tent you're in your own little Dom style and you have your own privacy and it's just so much easier so we are happy that we did opt to have the air conditioner now we can talk about the max air fan the reason we thought thought about putting one here is because when it is a little warm outside especially in the evening when the sun has set if you open all these windows and you turn on that max air fan there's so much Breeze that comes through here it cools it off I want to say at least 10 degrees cooler than what it is outside so that is why we thought about just taking this off and putting the max air fan but when you're somewhere where it's very humid it's nice just to have that dry little bit of a dry air especially to dry things in here like towels and stuff like that speaking of air we'll talk about heat so this does have a furnace here a lot of people have talked about replacing the thermostat because you it's not perfect on temperature but you can just kind of gauge it with your eye and it works out great for us we haven't had any issues with the furnace it keeps it very warm in here the only thing is is at night if it's going to be below 40 we do have to bump it down to in between the 50 and 60 degree Mark here so I just kind of gauge it like that it's off right now so we'll bump it up maybe to in between these two because if it's any higher than that it will consistently kick on and off kick on and off kick on and off and we're asleep anyway under all our blankets so it's just nice just to have it kick on every now and then and we're used to cold temperatures living in a tent for a year and a half so being warm and cozy in a bed was never an issue when we were in the tent it's getting up that's an issue so now we can get up turn the heat up get back in bed real quick and then when it warms up then we can fully get out of bed she always looks at me she goes I'm ready to get up when you turn on the heat speaking of the fairness here is the furnace this little bad boy right here it just it's a beast it is loud though it will wake you up at night you know what they're used to it though you have well that makes me think of another thing that we don't really care for but we're getting used to so this has a tankless hot water heater and because of that it has lines that have to stay warm whenever the temperature drops below I think 40. I think 40 is when it starts doing that so whenever it kicks on it's loud and it'll be in the middle of night and you hear and this whole monitor the blue light comes on so we when we know it's going to be cold like that we just open this so we don't have to see the light so if you're like I'm a very light sleeper so any loud noises or any bright lights that just show up it's gonna wake me up I don't know why it's not like my eyes are open so we'll just open this just to cover all these lights right here when that starts kicking on and this is a Four Seasons camper so the rest of the walls are insulated the windows are insulated the hot water heater matter of fact the hot water heater is outside and there is no insulation here it is just a thin metal door and that's what it looks like but as long as you keep this on and there's a flame that ignites I don't really know where I think back there but if you see this is the water line all this has to heat up you don't have to worry about this freezing if that's all on but it does get a little Annoying whenever it's three o'clock in the morning and you hear loud mechanical sounds that's one con we don't like and that also leads us into another con about the water tankless hot water heater we do have endless hot water but we don't have Inlet water we don't have it almost water so whenever you take a shower or you're using the sink and you don't have it on high enough it doesn't kick on it has to have a lot of pressure also once it sets off say you're taking a shower you got the hot water going and you use the nozzle up here to prevent the flow of water when you do that and then you're ready to rinse off because that's how we shower as we turn it off on off on to conserve water it's cold water coming through the line again until that reignites and heats up so you're wasting water because you don't want the ice cold water all over you so we we've kind of got a system I'll take the ice cold water and rinse out my hair I usually until it warms up to like get soap off the wall yeah I do the same shampoo and stuff but I honestly think we use more water washing dishes than when we shower I don't know if it's because this is coming out in one huge stream and the other one is kind of like spraying out I just feel like we use more watering wash dishes but we haven't really had an issue with the water since this is our vehicle if we have to go somewhere we just fill up with water like if we want to go do an activity hey let's just go fill up a water um if we want to go to the grocery store hey while we're out let's fill up on water so that's really not an issue it's not like a travel trailer where you kind of park it somewhere and you leave it and then you take your truck and you go wherever we're able to actually just refill and drain our 10 tanks whenever we go into town somewhere and whenever it comes to doing dishes I have noticed Kelly has started a new process where she allows a little stream to come out and not using a whole bunch of water so you've just recently started well I think what it was because when we first left Arkansas we did stay at a lot of campgrounds because there wasn't a lot of public land to camp on so I got used to being hooked up to water and just letting it run like it was a regular sink in a house but now that we're out west and we are boondocking more often I've learned to just let a little trickle stream come down so that way I do conserve water as I'm washing dishes and speaking of water it reminds me of one other thing that we really are happy that we installed was a water filtration system we have the one that we carried with us prior it's down here it's called Survivor filter as you can see there it is so that line comes up here and that way we have fresh drinking water we make sure all our water that we put in the tank is potable so all our water that we put in the 45 5 gallon water tank is filtered then when it comes through here it's additionally filtered through a bad of the bone water filtration system and we constantly have fresh water to drink I love water another thing when it comes to water we can talk about piping so when we first kind of went out and did some things in this camper we did notice we had some drips under the sink here and in the shower and some of the pipes were not Twisted on all the way so Cody just had to go in there and re-tight even just hand tightening all the pipes and after we did that here and over there we haven't had any issues with that and one thing you do want to make sure if you do have a camper and you never check up under your cabinets if you do have the Quick Connect screw-on connectors if it cools outside and it gets cold under there the plastic in that material does shrink and it causes it to back off and it will leak again so after we already tightened it once we went through the first cold spell and it leaked again in that time it leaked and covered the whole entire area under here and then we had to dry it all out we tied tighten it even more now we haven't had a link since knock on wood we're good to go another thing that we loved about this camper was that we have a TV now we went like a year and a half without TV so we use a fire stick we're not connected to cable or anything like that the Amazon Fire stick but we did notice that this when we plugged it into the back there's an outlet on the wall and it connected to the batteries in the camper that it run the batteries down we were only getting two days with deep cycle batteries we were only going to get two days before we had to go charge it so we did end up getting Lithium-ion batteries we've only had the lithium ion batteries for two months and that has allowed us to go off grid for at least seven days the solar panel up top which came with the camber it's only 100 watts does pull in some wattage so I've noticed we get at least 0.20 extra Watts a day if we've got full sun which just kind of keeps it the voltage in between like 13.8 and 13.40 something depending and we can get about seven days so now we do not plug this into the camper we plug the TV into a smaller power bank if we decide we want to watch TV that evening we will do that so that way we don't waste any battery power we do not use this at all this is the radio there's a huge LED light that comes off here and so we just put electrical tape over it because that's just I don't like lights either um and also put a little piece here on this button because it was red this is a power button the only thing we use is a USB um that's where I charge my cell phone every night just don't listen to the radio we have a JBL audio speaker and we just listen to Pandora on our phone so to be honest with you the JBL audio speaker this little guy sounds better than the speakers up here this is speakers there's two speakers on the outside of the camper and then back here there's two speakers back there they sound God awful there's a no base to it it's all treble it's really high but you can just buy one of those speakers for 80 but last you forever as long as you don't lose it and it sounds great so let's move up here into the Boudoir so this is our closet and when we first had the camper it just had a hanging bar up here and no shelving and we just didn't have enough room for all of our clothes before Cody's dad helped us to build some shelves we just added two shelves and there's Cedar yeah they're Cedar so it smells our clothes always smell really good there's also clothes that go down into here it's pretty deep there was a hatch that closed right here we just removed that because as you can see our clothes are just they're just right there these aren't attached you can remove them and lift them up if you want to but we haven't we haven't had to do that so I'll have our clothes fit in here just fine now the bed the mattress that came with this camper with a six inch thick firm queen mattress quickly we realized about two months after sleeping on that that it was way too firm we do like firm mattresses but not that firm so we ended up going with a lucid eight inch memory foam cooling gel mattress and it is very comfortable we thought we didn't know if eight inch was going to be too tall but it's really not it didn't make much of a difference so we are happy with the Lucid 8 inch memory foam mattress and it fits perfectly it's still a queen all that works out great but there is one love hate relationship we have with this camper right now this window we love this window because I mean look at the view ignore the dead bugs or the crack that occurred because a rock flung up and hit it we love the view we love the sun coming in it really opens up the space but we also hate it because it's not insulated so we always have to keep this closed in cold weather or it makes the whole camper cold and then whenever it's hot it makes the whole camper hot right now it feels great because it's because it's a little a little chilly outside so the sun coming in here it heats up the camber so it's perfect for that this window and the window in the door are not insulated all the other windows are insulated the last thing I wanted to talk about up here is all these electrical outlets so on each side of our bed we have two USB outlets and two 110 volt outlets on my side I put a huge sticker around it because there's a green light that just there's a green light that just comes out and it's so bright at night well I don't use the USB on my side I don't know if yours does this but when I plug a USB into it it kind of makes a smir noise so I do not use the outlet at all I don't know why it's making that noise maybe it's not safe to use I don't think I've we've charged some stuff back here but usually we charge whenever we're down here mine makes the same noise all the rest of the USB and 110 volt doesn't make it sound but for some reason even the 110 volt right here here whenever I plug my laptop in when we're on Shore power it makes a sound that's just something else that we don't care for and I'm just kind of confused as to why all the plugs are up here I'm like hello they need to be down here where we're doing stuff and we plug things in but that's you know that's okay thank you to leave it last thing we can talk about that was original to the camper that we removed was the carpet there was a little bit of carpet here and then there was carpet at the front door anything anywhere where you see this would be replaced it the carpet was here we replaced this whole thing with wood which is the same thing this board is made out of we just really didn't like the carpet it would just hold a lot of smell even though this camper is a 2022 and we were the first owners of it it just still hold it held smell and of course it held hair and dirt and everything else especially by the front door I knew that was going to be an issue when it rained and it got muddy so replace that by the front door first really liked that so then on Christmas we came back and we decided we wanted to replace this piece with the wood and so far it starts out great we're not missing the carpet what else is nice is up here when we replace this one we gained more storage fresh water tank DeWalt power tools and a green umbrella we have an umbrella I forgot about that for the beach I almost forgot to talk about how awesome it is having the truck camper on the truck at all times you can take it off but we choose to leave it on because we never know if we're going to come back to the area we're located at an example of what I'm talking about is we went into Phoenix which is about two hours from where we're at right now maybe an hour and a half while there we still didn't know where we were going to camp but we were able to get all our errands done and Kelly and I want to go out to dinner we were dirty and nasty all we did was Park in a restaurant that we wanted to eat at walk in here shower put on some clean clothes and walk out into the restaurant and after that we just went out to middle of nowhere and BLM land don't even remember where it was and just slept for the night that pretty much concludes our review on our setup and this is a I'll just repeat it because I don't think we said what the camper was it is a 2017 Ford F-350 diesel 6.7 liter engine and this is the Palomino HS 2901 and 2022 model and I'm completely happy with it after all the modifications and changes we've done to kind of suit our lifestyle this was a great choice Kelly did a great job because she's the one who did all the research on it I was busy you were driving I was driving back from New York if you would like to see a complete detailed tour of this camper we did when we first purchased it we'll put the link in the description below however we'll catch you on the other [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Cody & Kellie

Views: 590,634

Keywords: why a truck camper, truck camping, livingin a truck camper, camping, rv living, living in a rv, review, six month review of a truck camper, slide in truck camper review, how to live in a truck camper, off grid in a truck camper, why live in a truck camper, van vs truckcamper, van life, reviewing a truck camper, truck camper tour, why i bought a truck camper, pros and cons of a truck camper, live in truck camper

Id: BzLaRUcOH70

Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023