A Great Little Air Mattress Inflator

We've loved our Exped Megamat Duo ever since we spent the first night on it. Really, the only downside of this wonderful mattress is that pumping it up on a cold night - when the interior foam doesn't fully expand on its own - can be a bit of a chore. The mattress comes with a hand pump, but it can take 150 pumps - during which time my fingers and hands get rather fatigued - to fully inflate the mattress.

So, when trying to figure out something that someone could get me for my birthday, I wandered over to amazon to see if there was some battery powered Exped air pump that would solve my problem. If course, there was, but it wasn't quite as small as I'd have liked it to be, and I didn't love the fact that it only worked with Exped products. That wouldn't have been a problem at the time, but I knew that I might eventually get another brand of mattress or pillow - for backpacking - and I'd want the pump to work with that as well.

Enter the FLEXTAILGEAR Zero Pump. This little pump cost about the same amount as the Exped (so it wasn't cheap) but it came with an entire set of rubber adapters, allowing it to work with almost any brand of inflatable sleeping device.

Not only that, but the teeny tiny battery charges via USB-C, allowing me to quickly - without having to find some adapter or micro-USB charging cable - charge it in the Tacoma when it does eventually run down. That's not very often, since it can power the pump for about 20 minutes; filling the Exped Megamat + 2 Exped Mega Pillows that @mrs.turbodb uses takes a total of about 1 minute per night.

Of course, having this little guy doesn't mean we can get rid of the air pump - we need that in case I forget to charge the battery before it gets too low, but the nightly routing of setting up our sleeping area has sure been a lot nicer - and my hands less crampy - since this thing entered our life.

 

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