lenny flank
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NOTE: This is a draft chapter for a book manuscript I am working on, so I welcome any comments, additions, suggestions etc etc. It is not a technical manual or installation guide, but a way for beginners to compare the pros and cons of different methods,
KEEPING WARM AND COOL IN THE VAN
When most people think of “RV camping”, they immediately picture the advertising images of people sitting in lawn chairs next to their camper, by a lake, with the sun shining and everyone gathered around a barbecue grill. In reality, of course, the weather isn’t always so idyllic; it gets hot in the summer, it gets cold in the winter, and it rains in between.
On the one hand, people in camper vans can deal with seasonal weather better than people in houses can. In a house or apartment, you are stuck year-round in one place, and have to deal with the weather as it arrives throughout the year. In a camper van, however, you are mobile, and can move to whatever weather you want. As long as you have the gas money, you can be anywhere in the country within a week. In Florida, vacationers who live in the north during the summer and who move south to spend the winter are known as “snowbirds”. RVers and van-dwellers are the ultimate snowbirds. To avoid the heat, we go north; to avoid the cold, we go south. Just like the birds.
It should also be noted that “up” and “down” are in many places just as useful as “north” and “south”. Temperatures change with altitude just as they do with latitude; that is why even mountains in tropical Africa have snow on the top. For every 1,000 feet in elevation, there is a temperature change of about 3 degrees. So in the winter you stay in the valleys to be warmer, and in the summer you head for the mountains to be cooler.
On the other hand, though, people in camper vans have disadvantages. While we can move freely and follow whatever weather we like, we still have times when it will be unseasonably hot or cold. Even in Florida, there will be stretches of winter days when it will drop below freezing at night, and even in Minnesota there will be summer days when it gets into the 90s. People in houses or apartments have air conditioners and furnaces to deal with the weather; people in campers have only what they can fit into their van.
Van dwellers who live or travel in very hot or very cold climates deal with their temperature extremes by insulating the van. This is done by lining the inside of the van compartment with spray-foam insulation and styrofoam panels from Home Depot or Lowes, and covering this with plywood panels that are screwed to the inside frame of the van. This has the added advantage of also providing some soundproofing. But since I am completely mobile and can move with the weather, I never need to face extreme cold or heat, making insulation unnecessary for me. (In general, insulation works much better for very cold conditions than it does for very hot.) And I did not want to be insulated from the outside world; one of the things I enjoy about van camping is hearing the frogs and insects at night and the birds in the morning.
To a large extent, whether one is warm or cool in a van at night depends upon one’s bed. There are a number of options for a campervan bed. Probably the most popular is to build a frame out of wooden beams with a plywood top, place some rubber foam camping pads as insulation atop that, then finish with a mattress. Add blankets and pillows, and you have a sleeping place that is not much different than an apartment bed. (Some van dwellers like to use inflatable air mattresses on their beds. These give pretty good insulation and add some warmth in the winter, but sadly, after trying a number of them, I never found one that didn’t pop a leak after a few weeks.)
Some folks like to either add some plastic milk crates under the edge of the frame, or make the frame itself out of a layer of milk crates, which gives you lots of storage space under the bed.
Another option is the ole standby, the army cot, or its modern equivalent, the futon. This has the advantage of being foldable when not in use. And there’s usually some storage space available underneath it.
Me, I always prefer the simple route (and I don’t have very many things to store), so my “bed” at first was just a foam rubber pad spread out onto the carpeted floor of the van. If I wanted to, I could roll this up and store it every morning for more space, but since I’m generally not in the van anyway except to sleep at night, I usually left it open. After a year or so, I added a foldable cot bed from Walmart, which increased the comfort level and didn’t take up any additional floor space.
Some people have tried hammocks in their vans. These have the advantage of being easily put up at night, and then easily taken down in the morning to give more free space to move around in. In my backpacking days, I always used a hammock: I lived in Pennsylvania, which is very rocky, and it was hard to find a rock-free spot on the ground big enough to pitch a tent. With a hammock, I could sleep comfortably off the ground any place where there were two trees close enough together.
But there are a few things to keep in mind if you want to use a hammock in a van. You may have a limited number of places where you can safely attach the hammock. The weight will place a constant strain on whatever it is tied to, and some parts, such as door handles or cargo gates, may not be able to handle it. The hammock itself is also under constant strain and friction, and it won’t be unusual for the ties to wear out and suddenly break in the middle of the night, dumping you onto the floor.
Hammocks are also not particularly good for cold weather. Because they hang off the floor, there is always lots of airflow underneath you. In the summer, this is nice because it makes you cooler. But in winter, it will rob you of a lot of heat. As a general rule, I view “hammocks” as potentially useful in summer, but not so good in winter. (Some people combat the cold by placing a foam mat or quilt inside their hammock to give some insulation, but I have never found this to work very well for me.)
So, how do you deal with hot days or cold nights while sleeping in a Walmart parking lot?
Let’s start with keeping cool. A camper van is essentially a metal box on wheels, which sits out in the sun all day. As you can imagine, it gets hot in there. Really hot. On a summer day when it is 90 degrees outside, the inside of a camper van can easily reach over 105 degrees during the afternoon. You can of course leave the windows open a bit to let the heated air out, or install a roof vent (or two), but these have limited effectiveness—it will still unavoidably get hot inside the van during the day. If you are not actually cooling the air, the best you can hope for is to keep the temperature inside the van equal to that outside.
The simplest way to lower the temperature inside the van, of course, is to park in the shade during the day. If you use a solar-panel electric system, however, that might not be a very good option for you.
On vans with windows in the back, I have seen some ingenious ways in which people have rigged up small household air conditioners to cool the inside of the van. These of course use an enormous amount of electricity, and require either a generator or shore power (you probably won’t be able to produce enough electricity for it with a solar panel/battery system). And there is no way to be “stealthy” with a big humming A/C hanging out the back of your van.
My solution is a simple one—I avoid the heat by not being in the van during the day. By doing all my housekeeping tasks in the morning while it’s still cool, I can be out of the van before it begins to heat up. And by not returning home until 8 o’clock or 8:30pm, I can get back to the van after it has already cooled off in the evening air. Even if it’s 95 during the day, it will usually have cooled off to 80 or so by the time the sun goes down. If it’s still warm inside the van when I get back, I use a small electric-powered fan that runs off the solar panel system: its wattage is so low that I can run it overnight if I need to, without depleting the battery too much. On really hot nights I also soak a t-shirt with water and put it on. It’s enough to stay comfortably cool while I watch TV, read, and sleep.
When it comes to staying warm, there are similar solutions. Some people use small electric space heaters in their van. But like electric A/C’s, these use a large amount of power, and you’ll probably need a generator or shore power to run them. Another option are the small propane-powered heaters intended for tent campers. These run off the same propane canister-bottles that backpacking stoves use. (You can also connect them to the larger propane tanks used by barbecue grills, though this will take up more room in the van.) They give pretty good heat and will keep you warm. But they burn through fuel rather quickly, and you’ll be constantly replacing the canisters. And they require ventilation in the van to be used safely.
You do not want to ever use a gasoline or kerosene fueled space heater, intended for a house, inside a van. They create fumes and carbon monoxide that are deadly in an enclosed space. And if you are using any combustion-type heater, such as propane, a carbon monoxide/carbon dioxide monitor is cheap and potentially life-saving.
In the wintertime, by cooking dinner in the van when I get home, I do double duty: my alcohol stove puts out enough heat while cooking to warm the interior of the van noticeably. It’s usually enough to keep me comfy until I am ready to crawl into bed and read a book or watch TV.
In many ways, the problems of staying warm in a van are the same as those of a backpacker—both of us want to warm ourselves with materials that use no fuel or electricity and don’t take up much space. So it is no surprise that the best solution can be found in the backpacking section of the sporting-goods store: the sleeping bag.
For maximum flexibility, I keep three sleeping bags in the van, each for a different temperature range. “Summer” sleeping bags are just a thin flannel blanket with a zipper. They are intended for mild summer conditions where it doesn’t get below 70 or so at night. They are also intended to be used as “liners” for heavier bags.
“Temperate” sleeping bags are usually rated down to about 55-60 degrees. (Sleeping bag ratings, btw, should be taken with a grain of salt—though everyone’s metabolism is different and everyone feels temperatures differently, I find that the rated temperatures on most sleeping bags are five or ten degrees warmer than reality—a 55-degree bag is really good for about 60-65 degrees.) For most people, these will keep you warm for most of the year, perhaps with a liner added on particularly cool nights.
Finally, I have my “cold-weather” bag, rated to 35 degrees. Cold-weather bags have improved greatly since I was a kid. Back in the 70’s when I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, winter sleeping bags were made with goose down; they were heavy, bulky, and they didn’t work if they got wet. Today, “mummy bags” made with synthetic fibers are light, thin, and weatherproof. A good cold-weather sleeping bag will keep you toasty on virtually any winter night you are likely to regularly face as a snowbird.
No matter where you are, however, there will always be winter nights when it gets exceptionally cold. One way to deal with these occasional nights is to layer a couple of sleeping bags together, one inside the other. On really cold nights, one old backpacker’s trick is to place your inner sleeping bag layer inside an ordinary extra-large plastic trash bag, with your second sleeping bag layer over that. The plastic will act as a vapor barrier to keep warmth in and cold out (although it will also keep moisture in, making it suited only for short-term use).
Some people like to use electric blankets for keeping warm at night. This of course will require plugging in to your house battery. Since I never go where temperatures usually get that low, I’ve never bothered with it.
But if it gets too cold for you to be safe, the best solution is to find a motel, wrap yourself in a nice warm blankie, turn up the heat, and watch “Game of Thrones” reruns all night.
KEEPING WARM AND COOL IN THE VAN
When most people think of “RV camping”, they immediately picture the advertising images of people sitting in lawn chairs next to their camper, by a lake, with the sun shining and everyone gathered around a barbecue grill. In reality, of course, the weather isn’t always so idyllic; it gets hot in the summer, it gets cold in the winter, and it rains in between.
On the one hand, people in camper vans can deal with seasonal weather better than people in houses can. In a house or apartment, you are stuck year-round in one place, and have to deal with the weather as it arrives throughout the year. In a camper van, however, you are mobile, and can move to whatever weather you want. As long as you have the gas money, you can be anywhere in the country within a week. In Florida, vacationers who live in the north during the summer and who move south to spend the winter are known as “snowbirds”. RVers and van-dwellers are the ultimate snowbirds. To avoid the heat, we go north; to avoid the cold, we go south. Just like the birds.
It should also be noted that “up” and “down” are in many places just as useful as “north” and “south”. Temperatures change with altitude just as they do with latitude; that is why even mountains in tropical Africa have snow on the top. For every 1,000 feet in elevation, there is a temperature change of about 3 degrees. So in the winter you stay in the valleys to be warmer, and in the summer you head for the mountains to be cooler.
On the other hand, though, people in camper vans have disadvantages. While we can move freely and follow whatever weather we like, we still have times when it will be unseasonably hot or cold. Even in Florida, there will be stretches of winter days when it will drop below freezing at night, and even in Minnesota there will be summer days when it gets into the 90s. People in houses or apartments have air conditioners and furnaces to deal with the weather; people in campers have only what they can fit into their van.
Van dwellers who live or travel in very hot or very cold climates deal with their temperature extremes by insulating the van. This is done by lining the inside of the van compartment with spray-foam insulation and styrofoam panels from Home Depot or Lowes, and covering this with plywood panels that are screwed to the inside frame of the van. This has the added advantage of also providing some soundproofing. But since I am completely mobile and can move with the weather, I never need to face extreme cold or heat, making insulation unnecessary for me. (In general, insulation works much better for very cold conditions than it does for very hot.) And I did not want to be insulated from the outside world; one of the things I enjoy about van camping is hearing the frogs and insects at night and the birds in the morning.
To a large extent, whether one is warm or cool in a van at night depends upon one’s bed. There are a number of options for a campervan bed. Probably the most popular is to build a frame out of wooden beams with a plywood top, place some rubber foam camping pads as insulation atop that, then finish with a mattress. Add blankets and pillows, and you have a sleeping place that is not much different than an apartment bed. (Some van dwellers like to use inflatable air mattresses on their beds. These give pretty good insulation and add some warmth in the winter, but sadly, after trying a number of them, I never found one that didn’t pop a leak after a few weeks.)
Some folks like to either add some plastic milk crates under the edge of the frame, or make the frame itself out of a layer of milk crates, which gives you lots of storage space under the bed.
Another option is the ole standby, the army cot, or its modern equivalent, the futon. This has the advantage of being foldable when not in use. And there’s usually some storage space available underneath it.
Me, I always prefer the simple route (and I don’t have very many things to store), so my “bed” at first was just a foam rubber pad spread out onto the carpeted floor of the van. If I wanted to, I could roll this up and store it every morning for more space, but since I’m generally not in the van anyway except to sleep at night, I usually left it open. After a year or so, I added a foldable cot bed from Walmart, which increased the comfort level and didn’t take up any additional floor space.
Some people have tried hammocks in their vans. These have the advantage of being easily put up at night, and then easily taken down in the morning to give more free space to move around in. In my backpacking days, I always used a hammock: I lived in Pennsylvania, which is very rocky, and it was hard to find a rock-free spot on the ground big enough to pitch a tent. With a hammock, I could sleep comfortably off the ground any place where there were two trees close enough together.
But there are a few things to keep in mind if you want to use a hammock in a van. You may have a limited number of places where you can safely attach the hammock. The weight will place a constant strain on whatever it is tied to, and some parts, such as door handles or cargo gates, may not be able to handle it. The hammock itself is also under constant strain and friction, and it won’t be unusual for the ties to wear out and suddenly break in the middle of the night, dumping you onto the floor.
Hammocks are also not particularly good for cold weather. Because they hang off the floor, there is always lots of airflow underneath you. In the summer, this is nice because it makes you cooler. But in winter, it will rob you of a lot of heat. As a general rule, I view “hammocks” as potentially useful in summer, but not so good in winter. (Some people combat the cold by placing a foam mat or quilt inside their hammock to give some insulation, but I have never found this to work very well for me.)
So, how do you deal with hot days or cold nights while sleeping in a Walmart parking lot?
Let’s start with keeping cool. A camper van is essentially a metal box on wheels, which sits out in the sun all day. As you can imagine, it gets hot in there. Really hot. On a summer day when it is 90 degrees outside, the inside of a camper van can easily reach over 105 degrees during the afternoon. You can of course leave the windows open a bit to let the heated air out, or install a roof vent (or two), but these have limited effectiveness—it will still unavoidably get hot inside the van during the day. If you are not actually cooling the air, the best you can hope for is to keep the temperature inside the van equal to that outside.
The simplest way to lower the temperature inside the van, of course, is to park in the shade during the day. If you use a solar-panel electric system, however, that might not be a very good option for you.
On vans with windows in the back, I have seen some ingenious ways in which people have rigged up small household air conditioners to cool the inside of the van. These of course use an enormous amount of electricity, and require either a generator or shore power (you probably won’t be able to produce enough electricity for it with a solar panel/battery system). And there is no way to be “stealthy” with a big humming A/C hanging out the back of your van.
My solution is a simple one—I avoid the heat by not being in the van during the day. By doing all my housekeeping tasks in the morning while it’s still cool, I can be out of the van before it begins to heat up. And by not returning home until 8 o’clock or 8:30pm, I can get back to the van after it has already cooled off in the evening air. Even if it’s 95 during the day, it will usually have cooled off to 80 or so by the time the sun goes down. If it’s still warm inside the van when I get back, I use a small electric-powered fan that runs off the solar panel system: its wattage is so low that I can run it overnight if I need to, without depleting the battery too much. On really hot nights I also soak a t-shirt with water and put it on. It’s enough to stay comfortably cool while I watch TV, read, and sleep.
When it comes to staying warm, there are similar solutions. Some people use small electric space heaters in their van. But like electric A/C’s, these use a large amount of power, and you’ll probably need a generator or shore power to run them. Another option are the small propane-powered heaters intended for tent campers. These run off the same propane canister-bottles that backpacking stoves use. (You can also connect them to the larger propane tanks used by barbecue grills, though this will take up more room in the van.) They give pretty good heat and will keep you warm. But they burn through fuel rather quickly, and you’ll be constantly replacing the canisters. And they require ventilation in the van to be used safely.
You do not want to ever use a gasoline or kerosene fueled space heater, intended for a house, inside a van. They create fumes and carbon monoxide that are deadly in an enclosed space. And if you are using any combustion-type heater, such as propane, a carbon monoxide/carbon dioxide monitor is cheap and potentially life-saving.
In the wintertime, by cooking dinner in the van when I get home, I do double duty: my alcohol stove puts out enough heat while cooking to warm the interior of the van noticeably. It’s usually enough to keep me comfy until I am ready to crawl into bed and read a book or watch TV.
In many ways, the problems of staying warm in a van are the same as those of a backpacker—both of us want to warm ourselves with materials that use no fuel or electricity and don’t take up much space. So it is no surprise that the best solution can be found in the backpacking section of the sporting-goods store: the sleeping bag.
For maximum flexibility, I keep three sleeping bags in the van, each for a different temperature range. “Summer” sleeping bags are just a thin flannel blanket with a zipper. They are intended for mild summer conditions where it doesn’t get below 70 or so at night. They are also intended to be used as “liners” for heavier bags.
“Temperate” sleeping bags are usually rated down to about 55-60 degrees. (Sleeping bag ratings, btw, should be taken with a grain of salt—though everyone’s metabolism is different and everyone feels temperatures differently, I find that the rated temperatures on most sleeping bags are five or ten degrees warmer than reality—a 55-degree bag is really good for about 60-65 degrees.) For most people, these will keep you warm for most of the year, perhaps with a liner added on particularly cool nights.
Finally, I have my “cold-weather” bag, rated to 35 degrees. Cold-weather bags have improved greatly since I was a kid. Back in the 70’s when I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, winter sleeping bags were made with goose down; they were heavy, bulky, and they didn’t work if they got wet. Today, “mummy bags” made with synthetic fibers are light, thin, and weatherproof. A good cold-weather sleeping bag will keep you toasty on virtually any winter night you are likely to regularly face as a snowbird.
No matter where you are, however, there will always be winter nights when it gets exceptionally cold. One way to deal with these occasional nights is to layer a couple of sleeping bags together, one inside the other. On really cold nights, one old backpacker’s trick is to place your inner sleeping bag layer inside an ordinary extra-large plastic trash bag, with your second sleeping bag layer over that. The plastic will act as a vapor barrier to keep warmth in and cold out (although it will also keep moisture in, making it suited only for short-term use).
Some people like to use electric blankets for keeping warm at night. This of course will require plugging in to your house battery. Since I never go where temperatures usually get that low, I’ve never bothered with it.
But if it gets too cold for you to be safe, the best solution is to find a motel, wrap yourself in a nice warm blankie, turn up the heat, and watch “Game of Thrones” reruns all night.
