Keeping Cool and Enclosed.

I am a small town farm boy.   Growing up with frugal and old fashioned parents, I had begged them for air conditioning when it got hot.  They didn't seem to care though.  Usually telling me to be a good boy and it won't be hot when I get to the hereafter.  Thanks Mom.   As I have grown into adulthood and my own degree of frugality, I have discovered I don’t mind the heat as much either.   Maybe I am preparing for the hereafter.

To keep the van cool I am looking at a few options.   First off, while I had the boys and their plasma cutter at work cutting the hole for the propane tanks, I had them cut a secondary hole near the front of the van.   This hole is going to be used as a vent.  If I am parked somewhere for a few hours, the coolest air around me is going to be from under the van.   I am thinking of making some sort of metal sleeve that will drop down through this hole.   If I make up some sort of heavy fabric column that can attach to the sleeve via some magnets, I could pull air from ground level.   At night, that air will be significantly cooler than air at the top of the van.

Since the back of the van doesn’t have any windows that open, just a hole in the floor isn’t going to do much.   So the second thing I am looking at is a temperature controlled roof vent.   Maybe even two of them.   There seems to be two competing brands of fan.   

The first is named Fan-Tastic  (The model 7350 from Amazon)and is a company that builds the traditional looking camper fans you have all seen. Except these new fans are nothing like the ones my parents had in their 1977 Coachman.   They have a digital remote control with thermostatic control.   So I can open up the vent in the morning (with a button on a remote not a crank!) and once the van heats up to the degree I set, the fan kicks on.   Another big difference from the old school fans, they have rain sensors.   So if I open the vent up and look out in the afternoon and it is pouring, I know my van is still dry!  And they are bi-directional, so particularly if I have two of them, I could set one to go-zinta and one to go-zouta, and have some built in draft.

The second brand I am considering is a Maxxair.   (The model 6200K available from Amazon)They have much the same feature set as the Fan-Tastic, but with one fairly major design change.   It goes back to the rain feature.   On the Fan-Tastic, I open the vent up the fan is blowing.   But it starts to rain, the fan shuts off and the vent closes.   …Well, it still might be kinda hot outside and in.   Now it is hot, damp and stuffy.   If I am sitting in there, that doesn’t sound like much fun.   The Maxxair is designed so it can’t rain in, even if the vent is open.   It starts raining, the fan keeps running.  Nice!  The Maxxair fans are pretty good sized though and they are black with a company logo on the side that is a downside.   A big fan on the roof bends the stealthy-ness factor rule quite a bit.   Even if I were to paint it white.   That is why the jury is still out and I haven’t bought anything yet.

What I would really like to do, were money no object and I could get around the concern about stealth, is buy one of each.   Put the Maxxair up front, the hole just behind the bulkhead door.   That fan could double as a stove vent.  Put the other fan in the back under the solar panels and modify the vent cover to more of a flat piece of plastic I slide.   This is all still very much in the design/budgeting phase though.

I feel like this combination of ground vent and ceiling fan(s) can get me through most of the warm and pretty darn warm, maybe even most of the hot days.   But there are also the damned hot days, and the days where The Wife is joining me.   For those days I might need something additional.   

Version one of a business card for the blog...

Here is where I started out.  I thought the solution was like one I had seen on someone else's stealth van.  They bought a very small conventional window air unit.  I think it was about a five thousand btu size.  They mounted it inside, under a bench, near the floor in the driver's side.  They cut a large hole in the side of the body and mounted a metal lattice cover inside an angle iron frame, painted white to stealth it up some.  You really couldn’t tell it was a radiator behind that screen.   The effect was very stealth.   This person had quite a bit of solar on the roof and had gotten a really good deal a bunch of used lithium ion batteries from a cell phone carrier.   Between those two things he could run the AC on his van eight hours on a sunny day.    He couldn’t quite cover the AC with his solar, but he would only drain down (or fall behind) by about 10% of his battery capacity per day.   Meaning he could run AC five days straight if he was real careful to not run much of anything else.

But the thing was, I think that would work out great where they were.  Down south.  But I was always troubled by this solution.  Up here in the great white north, they put a lot of salt in the roads.  I thought I would have to figure out how to seal this door up, otherwise getting any snow/salt liquid inside there would kick off a bad case of rust.   I just didn’t feel I could seal it that tight.   So I have been sort of casting about for other solutions anyway.

What appeared as a solution was involved in another question.  Do I need a refrigerator or not?   And if I do, where can it fit into the design.  I didn’t see it fitting in anywhere.  Where it really needed to sit was exactly where I had designed in the window air.   So it was really a choice.  Either a window air conditioner or a refrigerator.  But there just isn’t room for both things to happen.

At one point I described to The Wife how I seen someone who used his van for two day desert trips.   He had modified some type of house AC unit that was two piece.   It had a compressor unit that sat outside the window and allowed you to mostly close that window.   It had a couple of pipes/tubes that came inside the room and plugged into a plastic tower that had the fan and all that other mysterious equipment that creates air conditioning.   If you have central air in your house you know exactly what I am talking about.   It is just like your central AC  unit, just really scaled down to window size.   The guy in the van had it rigged up via a hole in his side door.   In describing this I realized I hadn’t really tracked this down much.   Are there other portable air conditioners?   I will get back to you on this.

Here the side wall of the bed once I got it set in place.   I was really happy how it lined up close.   I feel like this nice tight gap will be easy to insulate.   I will put some tape over the gap underneath and then put some expanding foam in the gap.  It will be a nice solid place to bring the sidewall plywood down to.    The sidewall insulation should also be able to nicely fit down and form a good seal.   Can you tell?   I am pretty happy with the bed top.   But I will admit this, after the struggle and workout of getting that bed plywood in place, I took about a week off from working on the van.   Recovery.

Building the Propane Enclosure Box

The next thing to build after I got the bed top in was the frame to go underneath it.   I know that seems counter-intuitive, but this is a situation where you build from the middle out.   There would have been no way to have gotten that bed top in place with the frame already there.   There just wasn’t the room.

I texted my friend Craigie.   He is a full-time small job carpenter.   He works for a company that keeps his calendar full of various fixes up to full remodel jobs where he works as part of a team.   The fix it jobs, he just has to walk in the door and know that he can fix whatever is broken inside out of the tool repertoire he has in his own white cargo van.   Basically this is exactly the kind of guy I want to help me with this next part.  

The next night I was backing the van up his driveway.  The weather was again warm enough for us to work outside in coats.   The job here was to build a box surrounding the propane tanks.  That box is built to the height I want the bed to be.   In my case the number was fourteen and a half inches.   Doing this design of dropping the tanks through the floor had lowered my bed height from 21” to 14-1/2”.   That doesn’t sound like much in some ways until you realize that adds 15 cubic feet of living space to my very small house.   Huge. 

Craig and I ran a couple of sheets of 3/4” interior plywood through his table saw and cut off some 14-1/2” strips.   We put two of them paralleling the wheel wells.   With a piece of one inch poly-iso foam between the plywood and the wheel well.   Then ran some deck screws down through the bed surface into the edges on the plywood below.   Once in place we cut a strip of the 14-1/2” across between the wheel wells.  And two more strips on each side of the propane basket, heading toward the back door.   I stuck in a little PL-200 glue here and there and the whole thing we put together with T-20 head deck screws.   It was pretty darned solid when we were done.

If I would have known I was having company I would
have swept up...   Here you can see the aluminum angle
that attaches the plywood to the floor.

At the base of this plywood where it met with the floor of the van we used some angle aluminum I had picked up at the big box lumberyard.   It is one inch on each side.   We cut that aluminum into chunks to match the base where the wood touched the floor.   Drilled holes in it just slightly larger than some one inch self taping sheet metal screws I had also picked up.   Then, ran the aluminum along the base of the wood and screwed it all in place.  Both the floor side and the plywood side.  …And Craigie’s got all these fancy cordless drills.   Really powerful so the self taping screws bit right in.  It made the whole thing just a great experience.

Finally as a last step we cut out a door to fit on the back of the basket.   The jury is still out on exactly how the door is going to work.   For now it is just measured to fit in tight.   It might get some barn hinges on one end so I just swing it out.   It might get some clasps and I lift it out and set it aside.   I don’t really know.  I am thinking it will have the propane tank switch mounted on it.   So I am leaning a little toward hinges.

So now it is done.  I have a box built around the propane tanks.   I will put some expanding foam insulation around the base where it meets the floor.   It is important this box be fairly air tight.   As I mentioned before the propane tanks do vent a little propane gas.   I want these tanks sealed away from the cabin so the propane can harmlessly (and smellessly) go out through the holes in the bottom of the basket.   (As a side note, the batteries have to be sealed away as well and that is a little trickier.   Batteries vent hydrogen which is lighter than air and would readily leak up into the cabin.

The finished propane box bed frame.

I am sitting tonight on The Professor’s sofa.   Still doing the couch surfing thing while the van is under construction.   I want to sleep in it.   Really excited to in fact.   I brought in a whole bunch of blankets from home when I came in this week.  But tonight is six degrees, tomorrow night might be the one, it is going to be twenty four.   After than we are going below zero for what looks like a stretch.

A couple of months ago, back while this whole project was still gathering steam, I suggested to The Wife we go for a drink at a place that usually has a pretty good guitar player.   It is an interesting restaurant, close to a university campus.   The food is kind of marginal.   I think it works out great for students to bring their visiting parents to.   Overpriced and under flavored, but a real attraction looks-wise.   The whole place looks like a stream train engine repair shop.   Looks like it has been there for a hundred years before someone turned it into a restaurant.   It isn’t until you really start to look close and examine some of the materials that you realize the whole place is new.   As it turned out, the guitar player was on vacation the night we were there so we stuck out one drinks worth while listening to the jazz piano replacement act and called it a night.

On the way out though, I ran into a friend of mine.   Chatted with him a bit.   Caught up on his news.  Then he asked me about mine.   Well I only had one exciting thing to talk about.   I thought I had solved my housing problem with this new concept I had just heard about called Stealth Camping in a cargo van.   I think the last time I had talked to him was during the summer monsoon season and I had been in a tent at the park that week.   He was excited about my project as well and happy for me that I wasn’t going to have to be camping in the rain any more.   But the real exciting information came at the end of the conversation.   Offhand he asked, “So where are you going to do the work on this van?” and I confessed I was likely going to be working on it in the back parking lot at my work.   He said, “Hey, my company has a shop.   Nobody is ever in there after six or so.  You could drive right in and work on it inside….”   Wow.   Yeah, that’s an offer I am interested in.