Van Upgrades and Spring Heat

As you saw in the last post, I have been doing a lot of work on the van.

• Pulled out all the seats in the back
• Placed insulation on the floors and walls
• Put down a wooden floor
• Added a roof vent with a built in 12V exhaust fan.  
• Added 4x 175Ah deep-cycle batteries in 24V array (2 parallel banks in a series circuit)
• Added a 180W 24V solar panel
• Added a Xantrec C35 24V charge controller
• Added a 24V 1500W inverter
• Added a 24V to 12V converter
• I have replaced the air mattress with a foam mattress

All this expensive stuff is going to seriously reset my equipment cost breakdown.  I hope to be updating that soon once I tabulate all my receipts.  All in all, I expect I easily crossed a $2000 mark.

Now, with all these improvements, I plan on being able to be "generator free" this summer.  I have also purchased a Frigidaire 5200 BTU AC that will consume < 500W when running.  It also has an energy saver mode that will kick off the compressor and operate a fan.  I am very excited to see how everything works together.

The downside: This week, I did not have either air conditioner in the van.  Temperatures Mon-Wed peaked in the 90Fs, and according my thermometer and others, reached 100F over the parking lot.

The upside: The insulation and exhaust are definitely doing their trick.  Previously the van would heat up approximately 20F more than the outside.  If it was 60-70 outside, I would get 80-90 inside.  It was a tin oven.  For this week, it was hot but understandably so.  Monday: temperatures outside showed reaching 97F on my thermometer.  Inside the van peaked around 92F.   On Tuesday, the situation worsened.  At the peak (around 1-2PM), the temperature outside reached 100F while inside went to 102F.  Unbearable even with the fans blowing all the air around.  Today however, was somewhat nicer.  The temp still made it up to 98F outside, but inside stayed about the same or a 1-3 degrees less.  It was hot, but the humidity went down to 26%.  Normally, it is 35% inside the van.  The lower humidity made it bearable, even comfortable inside.

Another downside of running fans is that you have to be careful how you sleep.  If your mouth is slightly open, it will dry out from all the air rushing around.

Now that the major work is done, I will be able to leave the van stationary again, prolonging the vehicle's life and reducing my gas expenses.  Currently, it sits around 127k miles, which isn't much for a '93, especially with the truck engine inside it.