Looking for truck camper answers

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

We have been truck camping for over 20 years now. On our fourth truck camper and 3rd truck.

We rarely take the camper off the truck. Mainly because the camper doesn't make traveling around that cumbersome. Now that we are retired and will be mostly full timing we may drop the camper if we are going to stay for more than a few days. Not sure how often that would happen. We tend to move around a lot.

As far as pets. We travel with 2 dogs. Both are elderly and do fine for several hours unattended. Campers are insulated living structures and shouldn't have shocking temperature swings over short periods of time. Just running the vent fans the inside will not exceed outside temps normally.

That being said we have set up our new camper up to be able to both heat and cool the camper without us being there via the factory thermostat. The heat is provided by the onboard propane heater and the cooling is provided by our inverter and batteries running the roof mounted air conditioner. Both can be run far longer than we would ever leave the dogs alone in the camper.

In general we feel most comfortable sightseeing with the camper and dogs, limiting our hikes and other excursions to under 5 hours.

While my wife and I have been long time campers (5th wheel) about a year ago we purchased a Lance truck camper for some long distance travel. Our first trip was from Iowa out to Portland, OR and then up to the Canadian Rockies. Were were gone a few days short of 3 weeks and drove a little over 5000 miles and the only time we removed the truck camper was to drive the "Going To The Sun" road in Glacier. So long as you level the camper properly you can use it off of the truck.

Our Lance has a built in Onan 2500 watt LPG generator and I also packed a Honda EU2000 in a front mounted storage box. I don't think we ran either one at all. If you were to run an LP powered generator a lot I think it would use a fair amount of fuel. I purchased the Honda because I felt it would be a lot handier refilling a gas can vs a propane tank. Also, a lot of campgrounds have restrictions on hours of use for generators. If you want to run the AC a lot for your pets, I think you would be better off finding campsites with at least electrical hookups.

The big surprise most newbies have when considering a Truck Camper is how darn much the camper weighs. And how much truck is required to carry that camper.

Many folks look at some of these beautiful slide in campers only to find that their 3/4 ton pickup is woefully inadequate to carry a large camper.

So, before you get ahead of yourself, tell us what kind of truck you have. And lets see if your contemplations will work.

The answer is "depends."
If we're in the same spot for a couple days or more and are doing a bunch of local driving or getting further into the back country to fish or hike, etc then we dump the camper at the campsite and don't re-load it until we leave.
Ours, and most newer campers I believe, is fine to use when off the truck.
It's just a game of is it easier to pack up the camper or unload it and not deal with it on the truck for X amount of time.
Generators are built in on some. Those typically run on propane. Super convienent, but use a fair amount of propane and they're loud in the camper. I prefer a separate generator for the above reasons, but the convienence of built in has its advantages sometimes too.

You'll find when you start weighing options that most every RV is a compromise in some respects and ideal in others. For now, a TC checks more of the ideal boxes than the compromise boxes.
Happy camper shopping!

We always leave our camper on the truck. I like having my bathroom with me at all times, not a fan of public restrooms. Also when stopping at grocery stores we can put everything away asap. As for the pets, after losing our lab we haven't had the heart to get another pet. Love our TC after having all kinds of other campers!

I would think an exhaust fan running with a few windows open would be good enough for pets unless they have some medical condition.

bighatnohorse wrote:
The big surprise most newbies have when considering a Truck Camper is how darn much the camper weighs. And how much truck is required to carry that camper.

Many folks look at some of these beautiful slide in campers only to find that their 3/4 ton pickup is woefully inadequate to carry a large camper.

So, before you get ahead of yourself, tell us what kind of truck you have. And lets see if your contemplations will work.

I second that. I spend 6 months researching what truck camper would fit the truck I wanted. And vise-versa. It's not a trivial matter. And take the camper manufacturer's listed weight as a bare minimum.

We spend 9 weeks last summer traveling with our dogs and I recall only 2 nights when we could sleep with no AC.
I had Honda generator mounted on front receiver and that worked great as Honda is just sipping fuel and gas was easy to buy.
Most of the time we stay at campgrounds with electricity and I unloaded the camper lot of times, so I could leave dogs with AC on.
Unless you are bad driver to start with, removal takes about 3 minutes, loading on flat pad about 6, what takes longer on pad with slope as it takes more getting out and checking (I always load alone)
Campers have fresh water tank mounted on front and it happen that the weight pulled the floor down, so I carry aluminium tubing that I stack under front floor. That adds a lot to stability as well.
Before I got aluminium tubing, 4x6 sitting on 4x8 block was doing the job.

Even if you are the best driver in the world, it takes a lot longer than 3 minutes to unload. Unhook the tiedowns, disconnect truck plugin, lower the jacks to raise the camper (this is the longest part), pull forward from under camper, lower camper to lowest level (the second longest part). I 'd estimate 15 minutes to unload and 20 minutes to load it back up. So like others, we usually leave it on the truck if we're going to only be somewhere for a day or two, and take it off if we'll be 3 days or longer. We usually never stay anywhere longer than two or three days.

We were on the road 6 weeks this year, and used the AC one night. Not a high priority.

I agree that modern campers don't need support under them when they're off the truck, other than for stability as the camper will move bit when you walk around if it's only supported by the jacks.

I never liked loading and unloading a camper off a truck. This is especially true in the outback on uneven ground. People that use their campers the most are the ones that load up their campers and leave them there for the camping season.