Using and Maintaining a Pop-Up Camper Awning
RV Lifestyle & Repair EditorsHere’s one of the most important things you should consider when deciding whether a pop-up camper is the right RV model for you and your particular brand of travel: in most cases you’ll have to set up and tear down manually. This applies to the pop-up camper awning as well as the walls and roof. Very few brands come with push-button extending systems to get your awning set up automatically.
So in this quick video lesson, our RV repair and maintenance expert walks you through the process of extending a pop-up camper awning, and discusses some of the minimal but crucial components of proper awning maintenance.
How to extend a pop-up camper awning
The process for extending the awning on your pop-up camper may vary slightly, but by and large it’s a fairly simple process. If you’re a bit vertically challenged like Dave, he has a solution you can use to easily reach the awning’s zippers and open the bag holding the awning in place. From there all you have to do is pull out the poles, and make sure they’re properly fixed once you have your height right.
How to maintain your awning
Similar to the extension process, there’s not a ton you need to do to keep your pop-up camper awning in good working order. Dave recommends keeping a close eye on the weather conditions at your campsite. Given that these types of awnings are a little flimsier than most, you’ll want to roll it up prior to any storm’s arrival.
If your awning does get rained on, you should be sure once you’ve made it home or to your next campsite that you let it completely dry out. It’s not a big deal to roll it up and head out after a rain, but you won’t want to leave it too long after. Otherwise you run the risk of mold and mildew setting into the canvas.
For further maintenance, Dave suggests that you clean it annually with dish soap (Dawn is ideal), and apply a canvas conditioner every now and again (these are available through many various providers). Apart from these few things, there’s not too much to worry about regarding your pop-up camper awning. Do the bare minimum, and your awning should last you a long time!
The more you camp, the more you're gonna come up with ingenious tricks and tools to help you get at some of the hard to reach items. We're gonna show you how to bring this awning out and conditioning it, some maintenance you would need. If you had a bigger rig and a bigger awning, you would come with a tool that would allow you to bring out and hook up and flip the latch and bring this down. But this one's pretty much a manual one. So we're gonna use this bungee cord and a step stool.
You could also fashion some type of a stick with a little hook on it, but since I'm vertically challenged here or horizontally challenged, we're just gonna hook this up. And use it to bring it out here. And unhook it. Oh, come on. There we go.
And pull our awning out. There we go. So one of the things you'll notice when we pull this out, there is some moisture in here. You can see up the top. And even though this was probably put back dry, you will get some condensation coming out of this stuff.
So it is a good idea every once in a while to pull it out, just make sure it dries out. 'Cause if you let it set too long, let's see here, that it'll start to mold and mildew. So this does come with braces. Here. On both sides, okay.
We're simply gonna hook this in here looks like. There we go. Find where the deal is at here. There it is. So we're gonna adjust this a little bit 'cause it's now high.
There we go. And this just twists and allows us to pull it out and then twist back. So it just threads and that's what holds it up. There are, we're gonna do this again. One more down it looks like.
There we go. There are little stake areas in here that you can put down as well. This is an awning that's kind of temporary. If you're gonna have some winds and rains going, I would definitely watch this and put it in. It's not gonna be as sturdy and durable as some of the other awnings that you have.
But again, it's on a popup. Not a lot of maintenance with these other than you gotta make sure that you put 'em away dry. Otherwise it is going to mold. If it's raining when you tear down, that's fine. Get back, bring the camper up when you get a chance in the next few days to let the whole thing dry out, as well as this, otherwise it will mold and mildew.
Once a year, you should clean it with a Dawn dish soap. This happens to be a Dometic awning. They make A&Es on the big boys and stuff. They do recommend conditioning it. They have an awning conditioner you can get, and it just helps make sure it's weatherproof and that it will disperse rain and moisture coming off of it.
So pretty easy to put up. Little more work than typically the other style, especially the electric ones. That's a push button on the side. So that's how you can put an awning up and very little maintenance.
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