So this post could be really long and boring for some, but for those who are wanting some ideas for their van or a recap of my learnings... here we go! Also consider this a intermediate for sale post of BoostiBeluga Mk1 as well as an evolving post. If anyone is interested in purchasing my van, I'm selling it fairly cheap. Just use the contact form and I'll be happy to discuss things.
I guess firstly I want to thank the community and all the awesome resources that helped me along the way. That includes companies like DIYvan.com, youtube channels like Humble Road and blogs like faroutride.com without them I think a lot of us would be kind of the dark or doing things entirely wrong. I eventually want to put together a page with a trusted source of van build information. I try to surround myself with people who I can learn from in my life and that also extends to resources on the web I guess! DIYvan for instance is who inspired me to even start doing this. I've even purchased some things from them for BoostiBeluga Mk2, which will be outlined in the future build threads.
Anyway onto my previous build.
My van had some basic requirements which I'll outline first. My wife wanted a queen bed and a bathroom. I needed a desk/office area I could work from and I wanted it to be able to be off-grid for at least a week. I went through 3 iterations before landing on the final design.
Iteration 1:
Two folding beds that meet in the middle to make a complete queen. Bathroom in the back.
Iteration 2:
Bathroom in the rear, office in the front and a dropping bed.
Iteration 3 (Final):
After more hours than I would like to admit, I settled on iteration 3. The main issue I faced still was, without killing the aesthetic of the "lounge" area, how was I going to make a safe lowering bed? More on that in a later post, but here's where I netted out after two more Summers of iterations in my 2015 Ford Transit 350 HD.
Note: Everything super important is bold, if you don't feel like reading it all.
Plumbing/Bathroom:
- 40 Gallons of fresh water
- Lays flat below the step up you see in the image above. This helps keep the low center of gravity. Always think about your heavy items and how they're going to affect your center of gravity. It's one of the many engineering challenges with a van. The only thing I wish, is that my fresh water was inside the wheel base, but at least it's center and low.
- 21 Gallons of grey water storage, below the van with a 24v tank heater.
- Any pipes, tubes, etc that will be full of water should always be weather proofed. You will be surprised how fast you'll find yourself in an area with a frost advisory outside of the middle of the Summer.
- All piping was PEX and routed in a way to be as maintainable as possible.
- Yet another fun engineering challenge with building a van is making sure everything is accessible as possible and maintainable. I've had to change the main pump and it was breeze. Having to change a water pipe that's burst and tearing down walls would be a real bummer, so all my pipes are easily accessible.
- Full bathroom 32x24" with
- The floor pan was a single piece RV floor pan. The walls were formed with 1/8" birch plywood and then FRP'd to make absolutely sure there would be no leaks then caulked. This is basically the best way to insure that your van isn't going to leak and grow mold. A single piece sealed shower pan, with FRP panels overlapping the edges.
- Nautilus shower door, don't even think about getting another door. These are cheap, effective, self cleaning and look great.
- Internal propane instant water heater.
- This is probably something that a lot of people will disagree with me on, but it's not vented outside. Here's my reasoning; I have a CO detector directly outside the utility closet that's never gone off. If you're showering in a van, you're using the hot water in very quick bursts. I've never had an issue with this. However doing this without the proper/calibrated detector or onshore water hookup where you'll be taking long showers, this is extremely dangerous.
- Cheap, but effective/nice RV shower head. It has a valve on the head that allows you to turn it off to a trickle if needed. The shower utilizes a normal shower kit with a mixer valve, nothing fancy there.
- Dedicated drinking water faucet with its own pump, lines, etc.
- I learned from someone living in their RV, about the Primo water network. Basically my system relies on a normal reusable 5 gallon jug of extremely filtered water that's exchangeable for something like $6. $6 for 5 gallons of clean drinking water and no plastic waste! The real kicker is 13,000 locations like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Office Depot, etc.
- Basic Thetford cassette toilet with its own 5 gallon black water. There's lots of toilet options out there. But if you just want a place to pee, like my wife did, in the middle of the night. This is the most simple (and cheap) sane answer. The black water tank is easy to empty, even at dump sites.
Electrical:
- Batteries are custom LifePO4 battery packs that equate to 10.5KWh of power storage (or for those who think in Ah 888Ah @ 12v).
- The system however runs at 24v, so 444Ah @ 24v. This is for the Air Conditioner pump. 24v also allows you to run higher gauge (smaller) wire which is cheaper and lighter. Each of the three custom battery packs have handles and can be removed for winterizing. Each has its own BMS (battery management system) and you can turn the battery packs off with bluetooth. If you live in a cold climate, always remember you need to configure it to be winterizable!
- Another thing to note about choosing batteries. My first setup was 4 200Ah AGM batteries. These were around 540lbs! AGMs only have 50% usable capacity. This meant out of 9.6KWh only 4.8KWh was usable. The new batteries are in at around 130lbs and 80% is usable of the 10.5KWh, meaning I went from 4.8KWh@540lbs to 9.6KWh@130lbs. The extra money is worth it for LifePO4 over AGM, trust me.
- 24v -> 12v power source.
- For things that absolutely require 12v, a buck converter is the answer. Victron makes a great high wattage 24-12v buck converter that I then run to its own dedicated 12v car style fuse box.
- 3000 watt pure sine wave inverter with a remote switch to power on/off.
- A good quality pure sine wave inverter is important not to fry your AC components. Also remember that inverters have parasitic loss, meaning they can pull quite a bit of battery power doing nothing!
- 720 watts of DC-DC vehicle charging via two 12-24 Victron Orion Tr Smart chargers.
- One of them can turned off with the up-fitter switch for on hot days so you don't overload the alternator. It's always important to check your alternator load and what its output is at what RPMs. The last thing you want is your alternator going out on a hot desert road!
- 800 watts of solar on the custom rack.
- On a nice sunny Summer day I've seen it charging around 1600 watts between the DC-DC and the Solar while driving! This is important with bigger battery banks. That means if you use more of your power, your (what I call) "power debt" is greater and harder to get yourself out of that hole you dug yourself. With this though you can be fully charged with a roughly 4 hour drive if you use your A/C over night!
- Wiring.
- All high voltage wire (AC) utilized NM (non metalic) normal household wire inside conduit. This future proofed if I need to maintain it without having to pull the walls out, remember keep it maintainable!
- All other larger wire utilized high quality in wall speaker wire that's CL rated. This is for resistance of spreading a fire and usually has a strong thick outer insulation layer that isn't prone to catching fire.
- All other smaller wire, especially if I needed to run things for lower voltage (and amperage!) or sensors I utilized CAT6 UL/CM rated wire for in wall use. CAT6, being networking wire, you can also double up the pairs to pull more amps if needed, but typically at this point you're better off using bigger wire.
- The main thing to keep in mind is what amperage you're pulling. That's why 24v is better than 12v in this regard. The basic principle is if something needs power, it'll draw roughly half the amps at 24v vs 12v. Amps is what causes heat and thus resistance which can be a feedback loop. Always find out what your power requirements are and pad it a bit with lower gauge (bigger) wire. This page has a pretty good wire gauge chart.
- Fuses/Breakers other things to think about with safety.
- Between every component you should have some type of fuse or breaker as close to the power source as possible. The reason is in case something downstream on the wire were to short. Closer to the power source, the better.
- Fuses are the safest, but that's not always the answer to a problem. It's nice to have a breaker you can manually switch off. When I say every component I mean every component. Example: I have a breaker before the 24-12 converter and the fuses after the converter. You should have breakers on things like solar coming in, before and after the DC-DC converters, etc.
- Your fuse or breaker should match the amperage your wiring can handle. Imagine something shorting and pulling 20 amps. If your fuse/breaker is a 30 amp and wire can only handle 20 amps, your wire will be the fire hazard. Your fuse/breaker will not trigger until it's much too late or not at all.
- Always have a smoke detector with its own isolated power source. Last thing you want to do is wake up on fire in your van.
- Networking is achieved by an internal Unifi Pro WAP, gl-net router flashed with rooter for cell/starlink fallback, TP-Link POE switch, and an external TP-Link WAP which I've gotten service on up to half a mile away! The starlink is setup on the roof to be removable and remotely deployed in the case of parking in a wooded or shaded area.
- The stove is a pretty basic amazon single burner induction cooker. These are safe, comparatively, small, cheap and basic to use. The only downside is the power draw, which is why I have a 3000w inverter. It only draws 1800 watts max, but always be safe.
- The stereo setup in my van is a bit over the top, but here's how it's set up and how it works. I have a 200 watt 24v amp that has a line-in and bluetooth. When the van is on, the van's head unit goes through the amp and powers the speakers and 12" sub. When I'm parked I can play music to the "house" speakers via bluetooth. I can then choose to power only the in-wall speakers and/or the rear door speakers.
Build "Unconventions":
- I wanted the drawers/cabinets to not have pulls at all. I thought this would make a much cleaner and open aesthetic and I imagined having pulls on the drawers/cabinets would just get snagged all the time.
- For the most part the push to open latches and push to open drawer slides have worked great! But they're not perfect. I would say the wider the drawer the more PITA it is make sure both slides are latched, you have to push from both sides. I will say though, with all of my smaller drawers and cabinets none of them have opened during high g turns or off-roading. The big drawer on the other hand you can't load too much or it will open.
- During the height of COVID Dometic and other brands didn't have fridges in stock. I went with an ICECO chest fridge which didn't really work with my layout. So I designed a drawer with a wood facia to hide the fridge and have it slide out. This also required redesigning the latches and printing them custom. IMO it's a WAY better design than stock anyway.
- So I had to design a push button mechanism using a rotary latch to keep it closed around turns. So if you're looking to keep something heavy in place (or closed), this was the key I was missing. A rotary latch is the same thing that your car door uses to stay closed.
- Because of the note above about the parasitic loss of an inverter, I've converted as much as I can to DC power through buck/boost converters directly off of the 24v fuse box so I can leave the inverter off 99% of the time.
- This list includes the POE switch to power the external and internal wireless access points, the Gen1 starlink dish, the 34" ultrawide computer monitor, ryobi battery charger, etc.
- To utilize as much roof space as possible I opted out of getting a maxxair fan. More on this below, but all of the normal things that are usually on the roof have been replaced with more solar panels.
Fans/Air Condition/Heating:
- For the air conditioner I started with the Ecobreeze Mk2. I remember being in Yellostone on a warm day and realizing how little it cooled. It's really meant for blowing on your face to cool you off, it simply does not have the cooling capacity (BTUs) to cool even an area the size of my bed while the sun is out. What I ended up doing was ordering a chinese 24v AC pump and building my own. I ended up going to a junk yard and pulling apart a Toyota Camry's dash and putting it all together. There could be an entire post about this, but this thing is insanely awesome and pulls only 600-800 watts without any compromise!
- For the heater I decided on giving the chinese webasto diesel heaters a shot. I mounted the diesel 10L tank in the cabin and the heater under the seat, while keeping the stock location of the van's jack in place. In all honesty, the new ones are awesome. They're supposedly rated at 2000' max elevation, due to the air/fuel mixture tuning, but I had no problems running it at even 9000'. If I were to do it again, I think I would get a webasto petroleum heater and not have to have the tank in my van, but at 1/10 the cost it's awesome.
- For the air circulation, since I wanted the most solar possible, that meant I really couldn't mount the fans on the top like 95% of builds do. When I built the new system with the Camry's blower unit, I decided to use two 4" 45 degree PVC pipes and have them pull air from below the van. This is awesome for a few reasons and will be in my new build.
- I can bungee cord active carbon pre-filters on them so that it pulls out VOCs (like smoke) and also filter out dust and sand that usually gets circulated into your van.
- Since it's pulling air from below the van, theoretically it's cooler.
- Having metal screens on the end of the PVC keeps animals from even thinking about getting into the van.
- Since the fans are blower style the static pressure is less of a concern. This means if you have more resistance (like your windows closed) it's still going to move a ton of air.
Exterior Upgrades/Other Technology:
- The rack was pretty easily achieved with DIYvan's brackets. The fairing was custom made by routing half a template on my CNC machine and using the fairing brackets from Colorado Fairing Co. This allowed me to configure it how I wanted exactly. Without a fairing, my rack wasn't only loud, but it felt like it was causing a lot of drag and even stress on my panels.
- On the rack I have 4 wyze 3 cameras with excellent night vision. I custom designed black cases to go over the white body and mount them to the rack. Then I flashed them using their custom RTSP firmware. This allows me to use an app on my iPhone/iPad called IPCam to see all around the vehicle at night without having to look outside the window. I can't recommend this enough.
Ford Transit Specific Upgrades:
- For engine upgrades I only did a few minor things.
- Since it's a turbo, due to the emissions system, oil can track back through the intake and start to gunk up stuff. A basic air/oil separator is the answer. It just simply captures the oil and keeps it from going into the intercooler and other places you do not want it.
- A friend owns Tune+ and has a great option for all ecoboost engines. He sells NGK plugs, one step cooler and perfectly pregapped to what the ecoboost engine wants. These engines like to go through spark plugs under load, this is the best option I've found to combat that.
- Since I wanted a reusable intake filter, K&N is really the only way to go. It's just a drop-in filter for the engine that's cleanable and reusable.
- One common thing people don't know is, at least pre-2020, the Transit cargo vans DO NOT come with a cabin air filter. This means if it's dusty outside and you have the HVAC set to pull in fresh air, it's not filtering it! This is a cheap thing to solve and takes 1 minute to install.
- My van did not come with the upfitter switches installed. So I simply bought the upfitter switches for pretty cheap from Ford and wired up my own relays. Right now they just control my external lights and my second DC-DC charger (see above). I can post the pinout if you want to handle creating it yourself, but if I were to do it again I would just buy the whole kit again probably. Here's the part number for the pre-2020 upfitter switch SW6760
- The speakers in a cargo van are... well you can imagine. So I decided to upgrade all of the speakers in the van. The van got JBL speakers in all of the doors. For the "house" speakers I went with 10" klipsch in wall speakers and a custom 12" rockford sub.
- The sync 2 system in the 2015 Transit was absolutely trash. So I decided to replace it with a apple carplay head unit. I just used an older AVIC-8000NEX unit, which is still pretty damn awesome.
- One of my favorite upgrades is the rearview camera. The only catch is it needs a rear view mirror to attach to. So I started by getting an OEM rear view mirror from Ford and installing that. For the camera I went with the Wolfbox unit and it's awesome.
- Leaving Big Bend on my first trip in the van, I literally saw 50 deer in a matter of 10 miles. This lead me to update my grill and install fog lights in the grill along with a big light bar on the rack. These are setup via a 3 way switch to be independently turned on as well as triggered via the brights so they can be quickly turned off.
- Having my phone holder is a great use of space that's useless. This allows me to have Forscan up all the time to see the engine load. Or I can have victron's monitors up to see how power is being generated, etc.
- For nights you want to get all of the heat out of the van, I created my window vents which is probably why you even came to this site.
- Wind guards was a great addition too. Driving with the windows down and not all the wind noise is awesome.