What to Watch Out for When Buying a Slide-in Camper? Told from My Personal Experience

Tags: Slide-in Camper, Camper Recommendation, Advantages of Campers, Camper Configuration

I spent nearly half a year converting a slide-in camper myself and have been traveling with it for almost a year and a half, making me a seasoned slide-in camper enthusiast. I see many people asking how to avoid pitfalls when buying a slide-in camper. Here are my thoughts.

First of all, I still insist that a slide-in camper is the priority choice—it has good passability, convenient parking, and safe driving.

For the internal structure of a slide-in camper, a transverse bed layout looks better and makes the space feel larger without causing a sense of oppression. The bed must be fixed. If you travel long-term, having to fold down the seats and make the bed every night then pack it up the next morning will greatly reduce the happiness of traveling in a slide-in camper. Of course, this is different if the vehicle is mainly for commuting to work and only used for occasional trips.

Many people consider how many beds and how many people a slide-in camper can sleep when buying one. As a seasoned slide-in camper enthusiast, I want to say that the best number of people for traveling in a slide-in camper is one or two, plus one child at most. Think about it: how many people can sleep in a ten-plus-square-meter bedroom at home? Of course, five or six can squeeze in, but how terrible the smell would be? Let alone a slide-in camper with even smaller space. Therefore, one bed is enough for a slide-in camper. If there is an extra person temporarily, an air mattress can be placed in the cab for sleeping.

A slide-in camper is a mobile home, so water and electricity are essential. Most slide-in campers on the market only have a 400AH battery and a 90-liter water tank, which are far from sufficient. There are many power-consuming devices in a slide-in camper, such as refrigerators, water pumps, lights, electronic equipment, water heaters, rice cookers, electric kettles, etc. Only a sufficiently large battery can ensure effective power endurance without the hassle of looking for a place to charge all day. My previous battery was 400AH, which was not enough. Later, I bought battery cells online and assembled a 280AH battery myself, making the total 680AH, which is sufficient.

A 90-liter water tank is really too small. That’s why you often see this strange phenomenon: many car owners use various containers of different sizes to hold water and place them outside the vehicle for daily use. It is very inconvenient, affects the appearance, and also takes up a lot of precious storage space inside the vehicle. My car is a short-wheelbase medium-roof New Transit. I installed one large and one small clean water tank at the spare tire position and under the middle door, with a total capacity of over 160 liters. With a sufficiently large battery and water tank, you will find that your travel freedom increases a lot.

Slide-in camper manufacturers usually tell you that their water tanks are made of stainless steel, but you need to carefully check whether it is really stainless steel. I met a slide-in camper owner in Qiliping, Sichuan, who said the water coming out of her water tank always had a rusty smell. How could such water be used for daily life, let alone drinking water? My water tank was custom-made at a stainless steel shop near my home, using 2MM 304 stainless steel. The shop owner is honest and trustworthy, and I inspected the goods in person.

The water for my slide-in camper goes through several treatments: first, there is primary filtration at the water filling port to filter out large impurities; there are drinking water effervescent tablets in the water tank to kill microorganisms, prevent water deterioration, and stop bacteria and moss from growing in the tank; there is also a filter before the water pump. The water treated this way is used for washing vegetables and bathing. There is also a double-filter water purifier after the water pump for cooking rice, making soup, and drinking. So I never buy bottled water, and I believe the water I treat myself is of better quality than bottled water.

A slide-in camper is a mobile home, so it’s better to equip it with everything a home has to increase the comfort of caravan life. However, the limited space of a slide-in camper is an unbreakable reality, so we have to make additions and subtractions in the limited space—perfect what is really needed and discard what is dispensable to improve the quality of caravan life.

My slide-in camper has high necessary configurations and much larger interior usable space than any other slide-in camper, all because of the trade-offs and optimizations in various configurations.

First, air conditioning. All kinds of slide-in campers on the market are equipped with parking air conditioners. To be honest, the usage rate of parking air conditioners is very low. People who travel in slide-in campers basically have plenty of time for long-term caravanning and won’t go south in hot summers. They usually go north in summer, south in winter, or to places with spring-like weather all year round, so air conditioners are basically unnecessary.

Some people say they use air conditioning not because of the heat, but out of living habits. Well, let me tell you a harsh truth: people who like using air conditioning are not suitable for caravanning; they are suitable for living in small apartments. Because the power on a slide-in camper cannot support running the air conditioner every day unless you have a very large solar panel far beyond the roof area, or you stay by charging piles all day. The reason why many slide-in campers have such small water tanks is that they are equipped with air conditioners.

Most slide-in campers are equipped with split-type household air conditioners, and the outdoor unit placed under the chassis takes up the precious limited space under the vehicle, so the clean water tank is only a mere 90 liters. Some slide-in campers are equipped with roof-mounted air conditioners, which greatly reduce the space for installing solar panels on the roof. In addition, roof-mounted air conditioners increase the height of the slide-in camper, and there are height-limited bars in many places, causing inconvenience to traffic.

Besides air conditioning, there is another item on a slide-in camper that is both necessary and redundant—the toilet.

A toilet is almost a standard configuration for all kinds of slide-in campers. Some merchants advertise that the toilets in their slide-in campers are imported, equipped with electric grinders, and come with various degrading agents. No matter how high-end the toilet on a slide-in camper is, it shares a common feature: it stinks and is hard to clean.

At present, slide-in camper camps in China are very simple, only providing camping sites, water, and electricity. Unlike mature slide-in camper camps abroad, they are equipped with sewage pipes for gray water tanks and black water tanks. When parked at a slide-in camper camp, you can directly connect the sewage outlets of the gray water tank and black water tank to the sewage pipes and enjoy all the conveniences of modern life just like at home.

Gray water is the water after washing vegetables and dishes. Most slide-in campers at camping sites drain gray water directly, which is actually not environmentally friendly. Black water is human excrement, namely urine and feces. You have to remove the black water tank from the slide-in camper yourself, pour the feces into the toilet, and then clean it. A small black water tank holds 10 liters (about 20 jin) of contents, and a larger one holds 20 liters (40 jin). Cleaning the black water tank is definitely a troublesome physical labor, and over time, the car will inevitably have peculiar smells.

Except for new slide-in camper owners who happily use the in-car toilet, basically all long-term caravanning enthusiasts use folding toilets or spittoons. They go to public toilets during the day and only use them at night. I use a folding toilet: put a plastic bag on it at night, carry the bag to pour into the toilet or bushes the next morning, throw the plastic bag and toilet paper into the trash can, fold it up when driving, which takes no space and is very convenient.