 I live full time in an RV and recently I switched to a truck camper and when I did that and I thought about the setup what I wanted was for it to be safe easy to use and work for boondocking. Now honestly I was pretty naive about truck campers. I thought you just slap it on the back of your truck and tie it down right? Not so. So today I'm going to show you the whole setup from tying it down to lifting up the back in with airbags, charging the new lithium batteries using the truck battery, solar and more. Happy Sunday birdwatchers it's Robin with Creativity RV and as promised today I'm going to show you my truck camper setup. Now behind me is my 2019 F350 and off of the truck right now is my 2008 Lance 1191. Now this is a monster truck camper. It goes three feet behind my truck. First thing of course is that the base of the truck camper has to fit into the truck. Well mine wasn't going to fit because when this camper was made the backs of the trucks weren't as big so if I tried to put this onto my truck the sides would have scraped. I needed about another three inches of height in the back of my truck so here's what I did. I got some really strong industrial insulation that was two and a half inches tall that could really take a lot of weight and I was excited to take off the camper to see how it held up and you could see it really wasn't smushed at all. I got this heavy duty bed liner for my truck and just put it out on the ground and cut the insulation to match that so that gave me the extra two and a half inches that I need so that the camper can fit in here without hitting these side rails. And then to these tie downs I got the torque lift system. You can see that they just come out here but these are actually attached to the frame of the truck so when you attach your camper onto here you're basically securing it to the frame of the truck so you don't have to worry about it coming off. Now I could have spent less money and gotten some tie downs that were more complicated. I didn't want to do that so I got the torque lift fast gun turn buckles which you basically hook to both sides and then you just pull a lever and you're done. Totally worth it to me. Now because I'm a boondocker and don't always have access to a hookup I needed to make sure that I had enough power going down the road and the first two months that I was in this camper I did not. Now the camper had 200 watts of solar and no inverter but for some reason my house batteries inside the camper were not charging while I was driving. Well after a ton of research and going to a mobile RV repair guy and going into forums and talking to a Ford dealer here's what I found out. Truck campers will not charge on top of the newer Fords because the truck battery will not charge the house battery unless the trailer brake is engaged which doesn't happen with a truck camper. Now opinions vary other people say things like you have to slam on the brakes or turn on the lights or do a bunch of weird stuff for your onboard batteries to charge. I tried all of it and none of it worked. So when I decided to have more solar put in and an inverter and lithium batteries the same company that installed my solar installed a Victron DC to DC converter. Now you have to have one of these if you have lithium batteries anyway. You know I was in my fifth wheel with six lithium batteries and a ton of solar on top and I never even noticed that while I was driving my lithium batteries weren't charging because I had so much solar it was really evident when I got into the truck camp. Here's what they did. They drilled this little hole in the bed of my truck and on the end of this you can see there is a cord for the DC to DC charger that is connected to the converter which connects to my batteries in the truck. Then over here on the camper you can see that they have the other side of the cord which goes back to my lithium batteries. So all I have to do are plug those two cords together when I put the camper on the truck. I love the DC to DC charger it has a bluetooth so when I'm in the car and I stop somewhere I can actually look and see how well it's charging my batteries and on rainy days cloudy days or when I don't have propane to run my generator I can just start the truck and it will charge my on-board batteries which is a game changer. By the way everything I'm showing you today I will put in one link in my amazon store so if you go to the description or the top of comments you will see my amazon store when you hit that it's going to take you right to the page that shows you all of this equipment so you can find it for yourself. Now I am standing in the back of my camper in the part that goes three feet behind my truck. Now when I thought about getting a camper I was kind of scared to get a camper this big because I kept seeing truck campers on the road that would take a turn and like lean and I kept thinking they were going to fall off and I really wanted to be safe. In fact I found this clip from Canadian treasure hunter that shows a guy with a 10-foot camper on top of a short bed truck and that did not go well when he took this turn. My truck camper is 13,000 pounds and even though I have an f350 with a duly I still felt like I wanted to lift up the back end just a little bit more you know and cradle it in some safety so I got airbags installed. Now I thought the airbags go in the front of the car before all this no no these airbags go in the back of your truck just behind the wheel and you can inflate them so they take some of the load off of your truck. Installing the airbags was no small task we had to lift up the back end and it took a lot of time for us to figure it out but finally they are installed. It's so smooth I can not even tell the camper is back there when I'm driving so I just love it. Of course when I take the camper off I have to put it back down to five and you can do that manually or you can do it with a remote. Now personally I didn't want to be attaching a compressor to each individual airbag and pumping them up and pumping them down and trying to figure out what PSI worked best for me so we also installed a wireless one system this remote actually changes the PSI in the airbags on the fly you can do it while you're going down the road. All I have to do is hit the button right now I don't have a camper on so it's down to the minimum which is five but if I wanted to pump it up let's say I just put it to 12 I normally have it to 75 while I've got the camper on because it's so heavy but do you hear that that was the remote system pumping up the airbags. As I mentioned before my generator in this rig runs on propane and the tanks are up in this bin that is ridiculously heavy and I cannot even get the propane tanks in there by myself when they're full so I really needed more power. Here are my lithium batteries I'm not even going to try and take them out because look how they had to jam them in here but these are two lion energy lithium batteries that I got at a scratch and dent sale so they were only about 600 bucks a piece which was a pretty good deal so in addition to the lithium batteries and the DC to DC charger I had an additional 200 watts of solar put on the roof that gave me a total of 400 and I also had a 2000 watt slimline inverter put in now I wanted 3000 but we couldn't find a place to fit it the 2000 fit nicely in this back bin and I have to say it's worked just fine well it all worked great for two whole months I have to tell you that while I was originally filming this video I noticed that there was an auxiliary outlight on my solar controller and I couldn't figure out why and it said no solar was coming in well it was a little bit cloudy but I still thought that was really weird so I did a bunch of troubleshooting finally called the place that installed my solar they were pretty useless they told me to take off the solar controller panel and see if I could find a fuse there was no fuse and so we went up to the roof to check my connections to make sure nothing had come unhooked turns out the solar was fine up there but I'm so glad we went up there because it turns out somehow my refrigerator vent was ripped off so it's been raining in a little snowy where I am now some shirts wet in there there's probably a squirrel in there but we put some wood up top and we called the manufacturer of the solar controller which is blue energy and I have to say they were great on the phone immediately they replaced the unit it comes next week and so I will reinstall it there she is the faulty solar controller and there's the hole hopefully when I install the new one it just keeps working all in all setting up the truck camper did take some work and it was definitely more expensive than I was expecting but I have to tell you it's been totally worth it for me I love my truck camper I go places I never could have gone before and I fit into the tiniest little spots and driving it with those airbags is like no big deal if anybody out there wants to get a truck camper I recommend and I hope this video helped I'll see you guys next week until then everybody have happy travels and be free