Saturday, our family spent most of the day working on, around or in the new HTT. I washed the exterior while it was still closed up (everything was very gru-uh-uh-uh-ngy from the freezing-rainy/sleety/snowy drive home), stowing all of our gear from the pup, doing some interior cleaning and really going through everything we could without de-winterizing to make sure I didn't miss anything on the PDI. While washing, I did open one latch at a time on each bunk to wash underneath the latch handles, so a little water might have gotten in despite the fact that I tried to be extremely careful to make sure there was very little possibility of that happening. This may be related to my question below.
The good news is that the only additional things I found were: 1) one missing screw on a window, 2) a missing hold-down bracket for the one set of metal window blinds we have, 3) they used two screws that were too long for one of the shepherds hook brackets.
Then, DS #2 and I decided to visit Camp Driveway on Saturday night. Everything went well, although the temps got down to around freezing overnight (mental note: need to get some Gizmos), so the furnace was running a good chunk of the night, but it did a great job keeping us warm. When I was folding up the bunks on Sunday, I noticed that the bunks DS#2 and I slept on had some condensation between the mattresses and the bunk door, but I didn't notice the same problem with the third, unused bunk. The third bunk not having the condensation problem might be a red herring.
Is the condensation under the mattress common? Or is it a result of the warm temps on Saturday combined with the exterior wash followed by the near-freezing temps overnight? Most of the condensation seemed to be right near the hinge area, and I didn't notice any near the outermost edges of the bunk, which is making me think it's related to the exterior wash.
Thanks for any advice.
as far as i know, all Forest River hybrids have a mattresses with fabric bottoms. not sure if the Palominos do.
ones with the fabric, instead of a vinyl bottom, will get condensation with warm bodies on top and cold bunk platforms underneath.
this is a common topic on other hybrid forums, such as HYX and RV.net.
no one has come up with a perfect solution, yet.
i've tried Reflectix underneath. others have said that it worked for them but we had limited success.
i'm now trying 1/2 construction foam insulation that has an aluminum side. this will hopefully give enough insulation between the inside warmth and the outside cold to prevent the condensation and also give an extra foam pad for comfort.
you might want to do a search on RV.net's Hybrid Forum on the subject.
Palomino is a Forest River brand, even though they don't appear on the Forest River site like, say, Roo and Shamrock. So, it's likely I'll run into similar if not exactly the same problems. The mattresses seem to have some sort of cloth bottoms, but it may be vinyl-backed cloth. At least, it didn't seem to be picking up the condensation at all, except at the piping on the corners.
Thanks for the pointers. I'll go check out rv.net and see what they have to say on the topic.
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