Sorry its me again .I am now on the look out for some air beds. Dont know whether to go for self inflating or the regular air beds are there any pros or cons for each???
I suppose it really boils down to what you are must comfortable with. Personally I could not get on with airbeds, had reasonable results with a campbed and absolutely love my Outwell self inflating mattress.
Some people seem to get on fine with airbeds though, so don't let my experience with them put you off...............
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Have used airbeds that need to be inflated until now. The problem is just how long it takes to inflate the blasted things. Now have 2 fat airics and although at the moment they don't inflate fully because they are fed up with being rolled up they inflate to about 70% and then I can just blow into them a few times and the rest is done.
So based on that and 4 years now of reflating beds I think anything that does the job for you can't be bad!
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I have used air beds previously, and now use a camp bed with a self inflating mat on top. The self inflating one doesn't go down during the night!!! Plus seems to block the cold better.
For me the camp bed/self inflating mat combo works really well. But it is personal preference.
if you do a bit of a search you will find a squillion replies but it seems that self inflating mats have properties that make them the winners and if you put them on top of a fishing chair bed you have covered all bases.
Self inflating ones I've seen are only about 1" thick when inflated. I don't consider them that comfy. They do pack up small though if that is an issue. We have had PVC flock covered type, they are comfy, but don't last as the material is thin. Best we have found are the rubberised canvas type. Heavy & more bulky, but in my view the best value.
Trouble is, it's such a personal preference it's difficult to advise.
We've just returned from our first trip using the stretcher style camp beds and thin self-inflating mattresses on top of them.
We both found it really uncomfortable with just the one mattress and could only get comfortable with both mine and my husband's mattress on top of the camp bed (obviously not fair!).
For experimentation's sake I tried sleeping on the self inflating mattress just on the ground and found it really really uncomfortable.
I'm considering buying two of those aerobed airbeds that everyone raves about - 2 year guarantees and inflate in 20 seconds.
I think if you like quite a firm mattress then the self-inflating mats (as long as you get a good one) are good.
I borrowed some Thermarest Basecamp mattresses last weekend - we couldn't go camping due to the wind, so I slept on the floor at home. I can honestly say that I couldn't feel the floor through it (and I am big!) but that I wasn't comfortable as it was too hard (and that was on top of underlay). I much prefer my airbed for comfort.
I can see that in spring/autumn they would be warmer - but we just put a cheap karramat type mat on top of the airbed and that seems to cut the chill.
We have a car-operated pump and the airbeds blow up pretty quickly.
The thing that prompted us to try the self-inflators was a weekend where we forgot the pump and had to blow them up using a footpump. However, we have now decided that as long as we don't forget the pump again and given we will always have the car with us when we camp, that we are going to stick to airbeds for now.
fat airics are the coleman comfort of self inflatables.. according to all the posts (and there are many!) on the subject of what to sleep on in a tent :)
what settled it for me is that there is nothing more useless than a flat airbed.. but (i am told, see other threads) a fat airic is still usable even it it isn't inflated.
We've got one of the double aerobed active's which comes with a dual power pump. Basically the pump is rechargeable or works from the car cigarette lighter and it goes up in 60 seconds. Very quiet, convenient and comfortable.
Have found it to be really good although it doea need a bit of extra pumping every day.
i very very nearly bought one of those (is there still a discount on them? ) but decided to wait until nearer the time to make a decision and in the end came down in favour of the airic, for reasons given above.