The Lemon Caravan

As you may have read here, we bought a lemon.

It was devastating.

I'll be the first to admit that we were too trusting and naive when purchasing the lemon. Our loss (kind of) but your gain I guess! It was all ok in the end, but some valuable lessons were learned.

We decided to upgrade our first caravan in 2018, we purchased our first caravan in 2016 but it wasn't one we felt comfortable towing so decided that in order to get to the New Forest, which is where we wanted to go, we would need a better set of wheels. We went big too, with a 6 berth Bailey Senator Carolina. The main reason for this caravan was the fixed bunks & the large end washroom. We had a 3 and 9 year old at the time so the thought of not needing to make up beds or squash into a cupboard shower to clean a tired, dirty, muddy, child was so attractive.

The lemon looked fine, we didn't recognise any damp smell when viewing. The person selling it was busy pointing out all of the stuff they were kindly including in the deal which made it difficult to really inspect the important stuff.

We parted with several thousand pounds via bank transfer - which was another error - and excitedly left with the lemon the same day. We parked the mammoth 8m beast on our front garden, it's on a slight incline so the caravan was parked slightly nose down which caused the rain to run off the front.

We quickly started to notice the problems but the full extent wasn't clear until our first outing.

The first thing to go horribly wrong was the front windows, the curtains were wet & on the ledge it was puddling with water, it was running in but we couldn’t tell from where. I removed the curtains & noticed the wall board was soaking wet and spongy all the way across, it had clearly been leaking badly for some time. We were annoyed with ourselves for missing this obvious problem, it was pretty dry when we bought it and the curtains covered a multitude of sins.

The first time we towed the caravan to the New Forest, the blinds fell off the front window, on account of the wet wall, the fixing was lost & the screws rusty. We stuck a Pringles can between the blind and the pelmet on each side secured with duct tape to stop the blind casing snapping in half. We used a gro-blind & a window covering on the outside to block the light. The front 3 windows were now, as we would term in aviation, INOP or U/S. I am an engineer’s daughter so my semi-permanent fix for this issue, much to my husband’s dismay, was to throw 3 cans of clear all-weather sealant at the windows and header rail. This sealed them shut and stopped the leak. The damage gradually dried out over the course of the summer. We are now aware of a problem with Bailey Senator in 2004 which meant that the screws securing the window mounting rail to the caravan caused cracks to the chassis & in turn water ingress from above the windows.

We were unsure about whether the windows were delaminated or not so the window cover also stopped them from breaking whilst towing.

Our next hurdle, the water system, had several leaks which were caused by not draining down the system over winter. The first time my poor husband plugged in the water barrels and tried to prime the system, the water flooded from underneath the bunks. To fix this, we needed to find a replacement part only available online, so it wasn’t a quick fix. On our next trip, having fixed the leak underneath the bunk beds, it moved the leak to the next weak point underneath the kitchen sink - some kind soul had duct taped the water filter back together & obviously this didn’t hold under any pressure. Once again, our trip was ruined by the lemon.

The electrical system was also a bit special. It didn’t seem to work properly which meant that there was a constant dipping of lights. We replaced the leisure battery but by day 2 of being plugged in on site, the lighting would flash when on the mains as if it had a surge. We operated the lights from the battery rather than the mains and 9 times out of 10, this solved it.

We found a nasty crack in the shower tray which had been patched, when we looked there was stuff piled up on top so it wasn’t visible. There went my idea of having a good shower for my 3 year old free spirit.

Obviously we never used the gas.

We had quite a frank conversation about the lemon & decided that we would use our glorified tent and make the best of it. We sealed the windows to stop the leak, the wooden structure was still sound & we fixed the water system eventually, after a few tries. We booked only sites with facilities and never used the gas. We unplugged at night from the hook-up & used torches. The trailer, tyres and brakes were road-safe and we upgraded the break away cable.

We kept the lemon from April 2018 to April 2021 when we upgraded to our current caravan. In 3 years, we used the lemon as we would normally use a caravan, averaging 5 or 6 trips per year, so it didn’t affect our ability to get away. The Covid-19 pandemic, raised the popularity of caravanning to a level where buyers were willing to purchase a caravan with known issues like ours just for the summer. With borders closed worldwide, the UK had never been so popular & so in April 2021, I advertised the lemon, warts and all on Facebook Marketplace for half of what we had paid for it. She came with a 2 page disclaimer. As a 6 berth, we had our hand bitten off multiple times & off she went to a family who probably used her for one summer only.

We recovered just under half of the money we had paid and had used the lemon for 3 seasons, so all was not lost.