Pop-Up Camper Cleaning & Maintenance {Pop-Up Camping}

This camping season we really dug into the care and cleaning and maintenance of our pop-up camper. This included cleaning mold, battery maintenance, and flushing the fresh water tank. We are a learn-as-we-go type of family so every new thing we had to take care of for our camper required research and a learning curve. Hopefully by sharing some of the things we learned we can help you when its time to maintain your own camper. Here is my beginners guide to must-do pop-up camper maintenance, including cleaning mold from the canvas, battery maintenance, and flushing the fresh water tank.

Cleaning mold from the inside of your camper

Moisture had gotten in the camper between last fall and this summer when we began our camping season, and we found on of our bunk ends was covered in mold. First we opened the camper completely and allowed the sun to kill the mold completely. Next, I bought StarBrite Mildew Remover. I covered the beds in towels to catch the over-spray of the cleaner.

I followed the instructions on the bottle, wearing gloves. I sprayed it in a small test area first, and once I realized it was working I sprayed directly on the areas on canvas that had the mildew spots. I held my paper towel near where I was spraying to catch over spray and to smear the spray around the areas I wanted it. After a few minutes the spots disappeared!

I wiped the canvas with damp paper towels when the spots were gone (about 10 minutes) to wipe the excess cleaner of the canvas. I wiped the canvas several times with damp paper towels to try to remove as much of the cleaner as I could and then let it air dry in the sun. The result was a clean canvas!

Because the cleaning was a light case of mold and I did not have to use a heavy amount of cleaner, the canvas remained waterproof. Some cleaners can cause the waterproofing to lessen, and re-waterproofing will be required. If you need to do this, a good product is 303 Fabric Guard. Follow the directions to re-waterproof your canvas if needed after cleaning mold & mildew!

Flushing & sanitizing the fresh water tank

It’s a good idea to flush and sanitize your fresh water tank annually, before your main camping season (or seasonally if you camp year-round). It’s a pretty easy process! If you have a hot water heater you will need to bypass it. Turn off your gas and power to your water heater. We do not have a water heater so we skip straight to the next step.

Empty your fresh water tank completely. Then, using your fresh water hose (I never use the garden hose at home because of the bacteria that can grow from sitting outside year round) and a funnel, you will add bleach into your fresh water tank. Consult your owners manual for the appropriate proportion of bleach for your tank size. For our camper, we have a 30 gallon tank.

Our manual instructs us to use 1/4 cup of household bleach for every 15 gallons of water in our tank. We have a 30 gallon tank so we used 1/2 cup of bleach to sanitize our system. The easiest way to do this is to use a funnel and slowly pour the bleach directly into the tank (where the hose is connected in the photo below), and then put your hose in and fill the tank completely.

Next, allow the tank to sit for 30 minutes, then turn the pump on and run the water through your sink and allow it to drain from the camper. This moves the bleach water solution through your pipes and then drains it out.

Finally, refill the tank one more time (with NO bleach) and then run the water through the pump and sink and drain it again.

Maintaining the camper battery

We learned the hard way that you have to care for your camper battery, or else it will become useless quickly! Campers use deep-cycle batteries which means they need to deeply charge and discharge over long periods of time. After we allowed our camper to go unused for one winter, we didn’t realize that we had destroyed our battery because they are not meant to sit discharged for so long. Our fuses kept blowing and nothing in our camper seemed to function correctly because we were using a bad battery (and had no idea).

We have since learned that in order to care for our campers battery we needed a 3-stage charger that will bulk charge the battery (charging up to 90% of the battery) and then do a float charge (also known as a trickle charge) that maintains the battery over long periods of time. During the off-season, a battery should be either checked on regularly and charged or left on a float charge until your ready to use it. If you want to read a more in-depth article on camper battery maintenance I highly recommend this article!

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