Retired engineer builds transforming, off-grid, stealth campervan

the object of the van was to make it stealth from the exterior - it has virtually nothing that shows. there's no electrical outlets. there's no water hookups. there's no awning. it needed to be able to be converted into a cargo van as well, so that I could haul stuff, because I sold my pickup years ago.  so either side there's nothing showing and the only thing we have -- we have a solar panel up on the roof -- but I specifically built it so that the supports weren't visual -- so when you're down here you can't see anything.   

so we got a roof vent and a 300 watt solar panel on the top 

things like the grey tank grey tank is underneath the van to drain it you just reach down there's a hose that comes down with a plug in it so that's hidden up underneath then on the other side of the van there's a electrical shore power hook-up it's just a regular three prong 15 amp cord and it just hooks up on a little hook up underneath so you don't see that either so very specifically I don't have anything on the outside of the van other than the solar panel which gives it away as being somebody sleeping in it 

the major pieces 

we got a cabinet here 
which on the front it has a cupboard 
we have three drawers 
yes so this has a drop-down table 
that's just there to keep the support from moving 
this is my shower water hose 
this is a filter that I use when I putting water into our freshwater tank 
and this is just a drain extension for the drain that comes out up under the van then you have a swivel seat and my latch 
could be better 
everything in here has been designed with cab before I started building 
which I didn't just come in and start building 
I knew ahead of time what I wanted 
I knew ahead of time how to make it fit 

I built the swivel I was dumb I didn't just buy somebody else's in hindsight 
I should have bought somebody else's 
it took a couple of tries to make it work 

on the sink I got a table 
it comes up 
hinges are aluminum so they're easy to cut 
and it slides out so it lines up with the seat 
so it lines up that's good for computer use and eating for a single person 

back here there's a bench seat on each side 
the bed is made by four panels that fold down 
so if this this is now set up for one person traveling 
but if you want a bed for two people you just just fold down the bed 
and so now you have a place for two people to sleep and the other advantage to this is I can fold all four of them up and remove the table and then I can haul plywood or wood or stuff in the van like the transit it's to me it's a much better vehicle and the Sprinter that I had I had a OAH sprinter and this is gas 

I want to get rid of the diesel and this so far has been much more reliable when you build a band very limited space and so you have to make everything usable for more than one thing the problem with putting an indoor shower in is it's a huge waste of space so I did it so that it is useful for something besides a shower so one of the things I got out of it is I got a lot more counter space because 

I got another counter here this is about the same height as the sink counter so when you're preparing food it's nice to have two places to put dishes and stuff and food then I just have two bins then this this stores the pots and pans and the second one stores dry food not refrigerated food and then like my wife needs to get up in the middle of night and so what we do is we just pivot the shelves up out of the way and then the Porta Potty is usable two things wrong with most people with porta-potties they have to drag them out and they're not at the right height

 at the bottom is the shower drain pan happens have a road plug in it right now and then why do I use the shower I pull the plug out all the way so that's how you use the space as a toilet if you want to use it as a shower you take out these rods which are made just like a toilet paper holder rod with a spring in the center so now you've got full height and you take out the shelves now you have a shower you needle down you stick your head in the shower to do your hair because that's where the water spretz plays out so you take the same hose that I use to fill the water tank I'm gonna have a quick disconnect to the pump and they can support the hose off this shelf you just have a switch up here to turn the pump on and to conserve water you use up the valve on the hose so this is a solid flow this is not a spray nozzle like you would have in a normal shower and that's the trick for not getting water out of the shower so you get you get down punching Keys and you get your hair wet it's open rinse it when you're done with your your head you get in the shower it's a navy shower with you get wet and soap and then rinse off 

I've got another probably 3 or 4 inches above me that's one advantage of the trance that the high roof is taller than a sprinter high roof and so this makes this more usable because you lose some space because of the drain pan you know which one does get clean it's not like you shower at home it's not that enjoyable but it does get you clean and it's also because this is stealth I do a lot of city parking a lot of people put showers out the back doors and stuff well you know in downtown Carmel that's not something that's going to work very well so it's nice to have the shower inside I don't have a built-in stove don't want to build that stove oh no because first office I don't want to cook in the band anymore and I have to because you get the grease and fumes and smells in the van so 

I have a two burner stove that can be put on the sink up here to cook it can be put on a shelf out here you can cook out here or you can pick it up and take it and put it on a picnic table I used to have a little coleman folding stove but when I'm outside when it's windy that wouldn't boil water because there was only a 10,000 BTU burner stove so then I went looking and I found this it's got 17,000 BTU burners and so it does not have any problem boiling water no matter what the weather conditions it's propane the cylinders are in here that's a one pound bottle it's refillable 

well yeah you if you use induction or electrical you end up requiring a lot bigger electrical system to power what I have 2000 watt inverters and the thousand want won't run an induction stove well 

one of the things that I decided early on was to have the sink on in this location so when you're working at the sink and using the sink you can look out and see the the world with the slider door open 

it fill fresh water tank there's a PVC pipe with a plug in it this is an old-fashioned radiator fill hose which has a valve on it so when you go to fill the freshwater tank you don't get water everywhere and I use the same valve from the water pump it's a little solar water pump it's not a normal RV water pump because they're huge and noisy this one's very small and quiet but the water comes out of this pump it goes over and up to the sink faucet or it can come out of here and then this has quick disconnect on it 
so you can have pressure water outside the van I also take it over and fill the shower water tank and the same hose I use for showering 

so they used to use for three things the Sprinter I had a regular RV water pump and it took the space from like here to there and it's noisy and it also pressurizes the water system and I didn't want the water system to be pressurized all the time because if I had a leak then the water all end up inside the van so the way this is set up is there's a switch on the wall that starts and stops that pump and that's that's 

I can show you now I have a house battery which should be on correct so you just hit the switch and you get water to switch turn it off yeah and you can leave the pump running and turn the water off with a regular faucet I only have cold water don't need to hot water to the sink I can wash dishes with cold water just fine so you can see how quiet that is that compared to a regular RV pump this option no nobody that I know of is doing it there's a lot of things this van that aren't done like everybody else fortunately I wasn't experienced in Harvey building so I came in to with my eyes open and didn't necessarily have to do everything exactly like everybody else did 

the bed we used to self-inflating mattress pads tried one to start with and it wasn't thick enough and you'd bottom out take your elbow down to the plywood but two of them is very comfortable then you can fold it up during the day these two panels and then you end up the seat table for two people you can also use it for you know tailgating if you took out put all four of them up and then you have you know four people would sit at a table and then the table 

if you want to use this a cargo van you take this stuff to take the bedding out fold those two up against the wall and there's four bolts you just unbolt this leg from the floor 

the floor is all made with 80/20 this is so you can stick bolts in the slots so the whole framework 
everything here like all of the sink and all of the comforts are all made out of 80/20 with plywood panels or drawers or whatever this stuff is an inch and a half square 5/16 carriage bolts slide in the slot so if you want to bolt something to it you just put a carriage bolt in if you need to both some of the end the center hole is the right diameter for a 5/16 tap so you could prove something in the end 
they come in different thicknesses so in a van you want the lightest one they make of that size you can buy them with solid sides like this smooth sides which I did on like corner the cabinets because it looks nicer than having a slot you can buy them with two sides you can buy them with three sides just one slot you can buy them with one side and three slots what you buy depends on where you want to use it one other thing that you got to keep in mind is aluminum is a good conductor of heat and the Sprinter I made the mistake of bolting the aluminum framework to the van and so I bypassed all the insulation so it was cold you reach up and you touch the aluminum it's the same temperature as the van steel so one of the things I did different on the transit is 

there's some sort of insulation between the framework and the band so it's either a piece of plywood like those back cabinets so they're hung with a piece of half-inch plywood so that's is the thermal break and a bolt 
I would put a plastic spacer between the metal this is Nelson eat about 80/20 is 
you can put tie-downs anyplace you want you just stick it in and turn it 
and you've got to tie down it's not a lot of experimenting 
if you want to put a quarter inch plywood panel in you just use a wood block bolted into the 80/20 another way 
to put panels on is I make these fittings and you can bolt it down and you can put the panel on that's for removable panels because I need to be able to get to the battery I need to be able get the electrical so I use a tapped connector for that 
so then you got just tying two pieces together you can just use a piece of flat box three bolts 

so you just buy this in lengths and drill holes in it we make neat little fittings that allow you to tie down electrical cabling then if you want to bolt something to the extrusion you use economy nuts they just slide in the slot that gives you a threaded hole so it's a matter just picking the right thing for the what you're trying to do this is 80/20 

I don't have any doors 
doors just they rattle and they get in the way ~ 
if you want to get something out of a basket, you just pull the basket out and and it also increases your storage because you have things in a basket with over the wall if you had a door here you couldn't fill the basket this stuff would fall out when you open the door so the baskets are in my opinion the right way to do upper cabinets they make sure there's a lip there's a one-inch they can't fall out I thought I was going to have to add more to make them stay in but it ends up what I have this 1-inch here's is enough 

I move the table a little bit further forward than I had in the Sprinter so I could fit my bike in there since I don't need to have the bike storage underneath I can have a table height which then allows me to have the two benches in the table and I'm also low enough that when I sit up in bed I don't hit my head 

I'm five ten that was a mistake I made in the Sprinter 
I filled these windows with insulation so I had a 70 inch long bed I thought it wouldn't be a problem sleeping a little bit diagonal but it was it was not comfortable 

so in the transit I kept the insulation down to an inch and a half on each side and I've kept I kept the indent for the windows so that I this this vans got a seventy three and a half inch long bed well if I lay on the floor I have my wife measure me because I sleep on my stomach and for the top of my head the tip of my toes so they're stuck out here just sleep on your stomach I'm seventy three and a half inches long so I just fit if you always sleep on your back of your side then that's not you can you could be a taller person 

these panels are actually insulated because there's a 
one-inch rigid poly ISO Center core 
and then a quarter inch plywood on the top 
and then the indoor-outdoor carpeting on the bottom 
so this is something I haven't seen anybody else do either 

I have another set just like this and if we're traveling we just put the two sets on the back so that we could use the center the front part of the table during the day 

the way I determine this bottom edge of this cabinet was by stringing a rope across and I kept moving the rope up and in and out until I found the ideal location for the edge so that when I sit up in bed I don't I don't hit the I don't hit the cabinet yeah it's close I can feel it it's my hair but but I wanted to maximize the the amount of storage and so I wanted as low as I could have it and as far out as I could have it and still we have not hit in my head 
well you like my background is I built wine bottling lines I built stainless steel conveyors and I built some machines one of the machines I built was a case of wine case unloader and I used hydraulic cylinders to change the height of the machine to match different height the wine bottles and so you could do that in a van it's it's just it's all it could be a manual crank just four four hydraulic cylinders you could move the bed up and down since I don't need it for my use that I don't need to go to that complication 

to keep the van cool well you want airflow 
so what you do is you cut a hole in the floor back under there 
there's a four by four hole 
I have a control that can open and close that airflow air vent 
just use a lawnmower starter cord that's closed and that's open and again that's something can open-close while you're in bed you just reach over and close it by pulling off and letting it go the coolest air you can get is in the shade underneath the van and want to pull it up and out through the roof end so you get airflow through the van particularly past where you're sleeping or you can also reverse it so instead of pulling air out you can pull air in if you want air conditioning 

like an induction cooking stove it takes just a ton of electrical power and I don't have a lot 
i have the thousand watt inverted run off the engine 
and I have a thousand watt inverter that's the electrical for the house system 
lots of people put refrigerators in and they put them down on the floor you got to get down there needs to see what's in the refrigerator so I want for during her up up where you can see in the refrigerator and the refrigerator happens to be a hit refriger brand and i bought it because the compressor unit is down at the bottom at the back of the refrigerator which is not as very usable space instead of most of them have the the compressor unit up behind the freezer so the freezer ends up being small this this freezer ends up being about twice as big as the Dometic refrigerator I had in the Sprinter so then I was pleasantly surprised to find out this particular refrigerator it uses about one-third less power than the Dometic same sized refrigerator and of course I put when I put the refrigerators in 
I have another two and a half inches of insulation all the way on the sides top and bottom and add it to it and then the refrigerator doesn't have to work as hard and it doesn't use as much of your power is it made for vans it's for boats originally it's you know it's both this this particular one runs on 12-volt DC or 120 volt AC 

which gets us to the electrical system because the electrical system is also somewhat odd for what people do in RVs 
most people connect their house battery to the vehicle battery for charging 
and that is the best way to charge batteries 

what you're doing when you connect with a relay is you're connecting two different batteries together for charging and that isn't good for either of the two batteries 
RVs in general less what they do 

I've got 300 watts of solar on the roof 
and you know what they call an MPPT control which gives a 3-stage charge to the house battery 
I almost never have to charge from the engine but what I have as a backup is I have a second inverter down behind the driver seat 
and that's a thousand watt pure sine inverter what it does is takes 12 volts from the vehicle 12-volt system converts it to 120 volts AC so when the engines running I can have 120 volt power from the plug outlets 
I can heat my shower water 
and I have a little baseboard heater underneath this seat 
and on this side behind there is a big 8 D 255 amp hour battery 
and underneath the middle part of the seat is a magnum 1012 inverter charger 
transfer switch I can turn that on with a control up here 
so that takes power from the house battery and makes it into 120 volt AC power 
and I use it almost always for running a microwave 
I don't leave it on all the time because it uses a lot of energy 
even so if I want to start the inverter I just hit the switch 
now I'm inverting 
and I have power to all the duplex plugs in the van 
so whether else is up here you got two selector switches 
the top selector switch can either be off or it can be turned to the vehicle power 
which is this first inverter that's driven off the engine that gives me 120 volt power 

or I can turn it to shore power which is the cords that I showed you underneath the van 
so this I have a choice of where I get 120 volt power 
and it goes through a dual pol circuit breaker 
and it goes to the second selector switch 
the second selector switch can be off you can take power to the charger 
it can take power to the air heater 
or it can take power to heat shower water 

so but basically what you're doing you're taking 120 volt power and you're sending it back to that inverter that's underneath the table seat and it can then power your plugs 

that's a 12 volt outlet 
their electrical 
then there's a the end of an extension cord and I just kept the end and mounted it here so I have one 120 volt AC plug
there so and back if I remove the the bedding so the bed gets out of the way and I could take the bike out so you can you can see four four people at the table what's different about what I've done is it's not a one big platform that with a mattress in it that uses all the space and it's claustrophobic and I end up with during the day you can end up with the place for two people to eat and use the table to play cards and there's just you can see the two bolts on that leg so the whole thing can come out quickly take ten minutes to take the table out so the the curtains I I think the wrong place to put a curtain is behind the front seats like everybody does so I can put a curtain in four different places in this van it's just me city camping and I can have a curtain here so it it only the very this last twenty seven inches is blocked if it's my wife and I both then I can put the curtain in that location which just covers the 54 inch wide bed and another choice is just covering the back part of the van so this this is the center curtain this is just a tooth cloth on two sides and for the winter it's insulated it's got Thinsulate insulation between the two sides the answer is so far no it's it's it's it was my great idea that was gonna work in it and so far my testing says it doesn't work so I'm next winter I'll test some more so that's that's the center curtain then there's two curtains one on each side and you don't want it all one piece so you can get in and out to the bed easy and then this can also go up in front this is drive behind the front seats so that do you want to block that off if you're showering if you want to go in the very back when you try a stealth camp 
if you stick things in the windshield and have a curtain you're telling people that you're sleeping in it so if you put your curtain all the way towards the back like looking in from the front window you can't really tell your depth perception doesn't let you see that there's somebody sleeping in the back the side curtains they hang off of a piece of plywood so the sides curtains sit on each side in an overlap so you don't get any gap between them because what I do when I stealth camp is during the day I figure out where I'm gonna park that night I then park someplace legal and I'll brush my teeth and get ready for bed I'll put up the window curtains and I'll put these these curtains and then I'll drive in and park and I don't turn any lights on I have no noise so it can be quiet and then Sun comes up you leave the other thing I've done that i bought a 12-volt heating pad and I stick the 12-volt heating pad underneath the sleeping bag and I stay warm with a 12-volt heating pad I let the inside the van get cold and then in the morning I bought the optional remote start that the transit has and I push a button while I'm still in bed I start the engine and I get heat from the dashboard and I if I set it up correctly then I will also get heat from my electric heater from that inverter so I warm the van and once it's warming up then I get out of bed so I do not try to heat the van all night and the only problem that leaves your head out of the sleeping bag and so your head gets cold so you buy a snow more balaclava and you put that on your head and your head stays warm 

so everything is a sequence of learning the last time I was down some places windy this floor blew up so what I did recently is I just went watch some indoor-outdoor carpeting and I just have it laying in here so I can actually take the carpeting out and hose it down and sweep it and the floor itself the bottom layer is poly iso insulation rigid one inch thick then there's a layer of fiberglass shower wall material and then finally there's a 3/8 inch gym mat to the top of the floor 

if there is a light to going out the door lots of people with lots of lights inside a van in the transit they came with four LED lights they're just little rectangular lights leds and they had two of them in the center of the van they had two over the the rear of the van so I reused those lights but instead of having two and back I put one back here with a switch so when you're coming in the van or in the back you can turn the light on and off there I put two over the sink 

and learned that where you put the switches what counts you want to put the switch where you're standing and also that switch when I'm outside I can turn the light on to come in and then the shower the switch is up here on the wall so what you can turn the switch on and off and the only other lights 
I have in the bottom slot of this aluminum extrusion 
I have a string of LEDs on both sides 
and you put the switch where you can reach it from the aisle 
like I just did or you're in bed you can reach up and turn the lights on off in bed 
where these panels come down for the bed well that's that those are 

my window covers I took this is also window depth space so I decided to you know I'll make some pockets to store stuff in that space that was available instead of just covering it so I did that on both sides you notice there's no rack on the top almost everybody builds a rack out of the 80/20 or something else and that ends up being very visual you can see it so 

what I did is I put a rack inside the van underneath the roof because the roof is too thin 

I get roughly 18,000 dollars above the cost the van commercial 
one well this sounds 120,000 something like that 
so I've got plus two or three years of my life 

so instead of a metal latch I made it out of rubber 
so no longer rattles they don't come open like the ones I had on my Sprinter work push buttons this one you mechanically pull open the latch goes down so positive comes down and when you close it that it hits there's your latch
 it's it's this and it pushes it down automatically the only thing that I didn't build was the stainless steel water tank the gray water tank the freshwater tank the shower water tank and the shower drain pan and a couple other pieces of stainless other than that I've done everything well I should I also had the dovetail drawers made so far the system you've designed no easy the way you wanted well your basic look whatever else does and you'd pick what you think is good and get discard what you don't think is good and so takes a while you know to learn like the electrical I didn't know anything about electrical like I went up to the Sprinter fest up in Oregon and I had no idea what people were talking about her wire the ones that come through the floor down here so they come across the band and the floor you just slot the insulation put the wire in it's pretty simple you keep asking questions and you keep reading and you keep finally some of the things start making sense to you