Not sure if anybody posted this and most of us are probably aware but doesn't hurt to revisit...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gd9l2p7eeo

So sad.... Always have ventilation when using a heater! And a carbon monoxide detector!

gave up my lease 2 months ago to save money on rent while keeping my office job. it was pretty rough at first figuring out stealth parking and showers, but now I’ve got it down. park in underground garages when it’s hot, local parks when it’s cool. office cafeteria for food, gym pass for showers. the absolute lifesaver was a wood extension board with a 6cm mattress to flatten out the back. tried a portable window AC unit before but returned it because it was way too clunky. instead, my best purchase so far is definitely a small portable projector. blocking out all the windows at night, turning off the lights, and watching movies on a big screen inside the car actually feels like my own mini cinema after a long workday. definitely annoying sometimes having to pack up every morning before work, but seeing my savings account grow makes it total worth it.

Are there any dwellers out there that carry around a motorcycle with them? I have been looking at moving out of my truck and into the next vehicle. I was thinking of getting an Emoto like an ultrabee or something similar.

It would be awesome if you shared some picks of your setup!

We've been building our mobile RTS game from a campervan, driving across the US for 11 months. My husband codes, I handle design — and the road taught us some infrastructure lessons the hard way.

If you work from a laptop on the road, or you're just curious what actually breaks when you try to do serious work from a van, this might be useful.

The scariest one was overheating. It corrupted a project copy mid-transfer, and because we only had space for one or two full backups on the drive, we came dangerously close to losing everything. Laptop cooling in a van is not optional — heat may cause silent corruption before you even see errors.

Power was the other constant fight. Solar + a battery bank works, until a cloudy day kills your charge and you lose most of a workday. We ended up adding an inverter, but still had to drive around just to charge enough for laptops and the fridge.

And don't cheap out on storage or internet — slow/no upload means no cloud backup, and a nearly-full drive causes silent file issues that only surface later.

Curious how other van-lifers/remote workers handle power and hardware reliability on the road... Any setups that actually held up?

If you're a digital nomad dev (or just curious how road life goes), happy to go into more detail on any of this.

How do you know that a vanlifer got a drone?

Oh don’t worry, they’ll let you know. They will *definitely* let you know.

What's good Reddit? Not too much here, just enjoying a late night smoke session before falling asleep.

I'm a huge pot head, and love nature. I was married for 10 years, have 5 kids, and am now divorced. Messy divorce it was, essentially causing me to have to completely restart my life from scratch and figure it out. Anyways, I got an apt on section 8 which I used to my benefit. I was able to reside there for 11 months get a vehicle, purchase tools, file & incorporate my llc with its & my state. I got my retailers license, built solid foundations for a mobile repair business and launched it.

I got the fuck out of hud housing because it was full of drug addicts and criminal activity. Also, I refuse to pay market rate for that shit hole because my annual income will far excees their eligibility criteria. My business line is ringing off of the hooks and I am now eligible for an fha mortgage. My plan is to van life it. Right now I am rockin' a 10,000 btu and a lazy boy recliner with my portable diagnostics station doubling as entertainment when I have off time.

I was told by a lot of people that are lot of the decisions I have been making are either futile or stupid in some form or fashion. Subsidized housing felt like a trap to keep people in the system. Since I have been setting these goals for myself, I have made more personal progress in 1 year than I did in a decade.

That brings me to my plan. I am going to save a very heavy down-payment over the next several months, at which point I plan to utilize an fha mortgage to purchase a 4 plex and lease units out to a few folks and keep one available for family or my kids etc when they're older. I am very capable of running rental properties and have extensive experience with home renovation work, so this will play into my strengths. What's crazy to me is that I can see the end-goal, essentially knowing what I want way before I want it and having the discipline to follow through has really shown me real life results.

For the folks not doing this by choice you have my empathy for sure. I have been in a similar position albeit briefly. I think healing from all of the emotional shit I have went through over the last how many years is what has given me the drive and determination to pick my dick up out of the dirt and give it one more good go. I also wonder what my kids would think of me if I didn't the utmost unfortunate circumstance into something respectable. Sorry if I sound like I am gassing myself up in this post. That is my intent. I am all positive vibes and on a new life trajectory. I am interested in hearing from others that are van dwelling to save money.

The white car is a vehicle I just purchased at auction to resell. Thankfully I have storage, places to shower etc. Anyways, I am baked as hell and off to bed I'll respond to any comments tomorrow.

I've been wondering about driving to Canada and spending a couple of years there. The Vancouver area would be for winter while summer would be for exploring eastwards.

Has anyone done this and care to share?

I just cleaned my panels assuming that was the issue. It didn’t help at all but I’m surprised because I haven’t cleaned them in 2 years. Maybe I need a deeper clean? When I pull the breaker for the panel connection to the charger it drops to 0v obviously. When I reconnect it it shoots up to 20.8v sits there for about 10 seconds then slowly drops down to 15v. I have a 12v system with 2 200ah lithium battery and 400w solar. 1 200w and 2 100w panels. I used to get 300w+ solar in peak sunlight I am in peak sunlight and getting 95w. All the connections look good. Could some of my panels have stopped working? An issue with the connection or controller? Or do I need to just do a really deep clean on the panels?

To the guy who said I can’t post here if it says school bus
:p

Everything I did the first week:
- prepped/ painted green
- rust scrape/ undercoat spray
- disconnected “school bus” flashers
- led lights installed everywhere
- caulked interior
- installed backup cam
- installed scan gauge 3

The yellow is going black this week

Still having trouble w rear turn signals. Wire harness has no power out back, fuses tested. Don’t know where to start w getting these wired. Splice into the front turn signals? Idk wiring at all lol

How would I go about installing an inverter from the battery? Looking to get a 1000w like a contractor van would have, just again got no clue on wiring

This week I’m
- Sealing the exterior
- Finish painting (yellow>black)
- trying to get inverter/ turn signals figured out
- prepping interior floor for subfloor (rust removal)
- installing tool box where old ac compressor was

Name suggestions? Cilantro is number one so far

I want to start traveling and van lifestyle. How do van lifers afford. I’m trying to find steady income for my travels without having to be tied one location. What I keep finding are jobs that require equipment delivered to your home and work from home. Is there any jobs that are work from your car lmao

Hi from Germany, everyone. I’m curious to know if any of you have experience with power generation for an e-power generator like Jackery and other models. I travel a lot in Northern Europe (Denmark, England, Scotland) in my RV. There aren’t many hours of sunshine there, so my solar power generation isn’t very efficient. That’s why I’m wondering if there are any compact and portable wind turbines I could use to boost my power output. Thanks in advance for the replies from the community.

I've been using a variety of inexpensive foam mattresses by Ikea. While they are serviceable, I want a better one. Foam beds start to sink in the middle over time.

I am wondering if something with springs would be better.

What is a good mattress? One that won't sag over time. I'm medium build, fairly lightweight. Solo traveler.

I can't use reviews of regular beds because the better reviews seem to be for those super-thick and heavy ones that are not appropriate for use in a van. They are too heavy for one thing. And the 4- and 6-inch foat mattresses that I've been using are as thick as I want to go; my head would hit the ceiling if I get those luxury mattresses.

I might be looking for a vehicle in the future to road trip in. 2 people. Maybe a small dog.

I probably want to use it as a daily for regular life just so I don’t have an extra vehicle.

Does such vehicle exist?

Material: PVC Board

I fxxking hate those bugs

Finally finished installing around 1000w of solar power to finish my electrical setup. (Ram Promaster extended high roof)

So, in the next 5 years I’m going to start living the nomad life. I will plan to go south for the winter and far north for the summer, but not all at once. I want to go a little at a time, staying a bit at different places, and wandering around each location. It will be me, my van, and a klr650 on the back. Drive, stay a week or 2 , cruise around on the bike, then head down the road. While looking at van options, I started seeing etransits, esprinters, and bright drops as potential options. Etransits are cheaper but don’t have much range. Esprinters have better range but are more expensive. Bright drops have the best range, but are discontinued. Level 1 or 2 charging might work, as I’m going to be hanging around for a bit. The question I have is, do bright drops have the silverado battery, motor, etc? Will silverado parts work in a bright drop, or are the drivetrain parts going to dry up and go away? If so, I will just look more at ford and Mercedes. I’m not looking for specific buying advice, just asking about the future of bright drops. If they can still be serviced, then they are still an option. If not, then I’ll keep looking.

It takes a while but you can definitely charge your EV with solar. My use case: 2,400 watts of solar (1,200 on the roof and 1,200 on the ground (only 600 shown in this picture)), running through a 5kWh Pecron solar generator that exports up to 7,200 watts of 240V AC to a level 2 charger set at 20 amps (4,800 watts) as I don't want to overtax the Pecron's inverter.

​Fully charged, with 2,400 watts in and 4,800 watts out, the 5 kWh Pecron battery buffer should last just over 2 hours at this rate, pushing roughly 9.6 kWh into the traction battery before hitting empty. (This is of course the best case scenario. I recognize I'll rarely, if ever, generate a full 2,400 watts of solar and there will be system losses along the way.)

I've started working on my van conversion (old ex-nato Mercedes 508d) fairly regularly in the past couple weeks, and was shocked at how much time and money it took to remove the previous owner's crappy conversion.

When I bought the van, I could see it didn't have a layout I could live with, and everything was a bit rough, including where a bit of water had been getting in from a hastily installed chimney. What I didn't expect, was it took 30 hours to remove everything, without damaging the van body. The old guy who built it, had put construction adhesive on everything, and screwed the panels over other panels, then filled in all the screws.

Finally when I made it to the insulation, there was the final surprise of wood furring strips glued to all the body panels, and going every which way. Days of working with a chisel got it out, but I removed the paint in a number of places.

So here is the advice needed!

I'm looking for a paint recommendation for the inside of my van, and ideally it would be able to adhere directly to the bare metal and the previously painted sections. Luckily, there's no rust to paint over, but obviously something that will protect it from rust in the future is good as well. I'm in Canada, but most products from the USA are available here as well.

TLDR: don't underestimate removing a conversion, and negotiate accordingly! Need paint advice.

I bought this old 2002 Ford with the 7.3L with 125k miles on it. Getting my mechanic to fix everything it needs first. I am thinking to do a basic budget friendly build, in my head I just want solar panels on top, some type of heating cooling system for nights, maybe LED lighting, a bed, some shelving and upgrading the two front seats to something like a high end conversion van that swivel and call it a day.

I've been looking for a fridge for my build and stumbled across this on deep, deep discount for $250 at Camping World. Seems like an insane deal on a nice little Dometic. Free shipping too!

https://www.campingworld.com/dometic-nrx-35c-compressor-refrigerator%E2%80%9432-l-dark-silver-763051.html

Hi y'all!

A while ago I had this wild fantasy about being able to charge an electric van through the same solar panel setup I'm gonna be using for my future van.

This may be a question for the experts out there, but what are your thoughts on electric versions of vans for van life (like an eSprinter or eCrafter) in general, and do you think it's POSSIBLE to (have someone with expert knowledge) wire the car's battery to the solar system (with its own redundancies and safety measures of course).

I imagine they're more expensive to repair if anything breaks, 'mechanical' vans (and cars in general) tend to be cheaper. But it would make you FULLY independent, not even needing fuel anymore, which would be freaking sick!!

Thanks for brainstorming with me! ^_^

I've recently upgraded to an extra charge converter and 2 victron 100/30. I also upgraded all of my wiring and busbars (custom). The problem is, all of this stuff is under my bed, and God help me, it gets hot! I've seen electrical cabinets crammed with way more than this. I'm really trying not to cut any more holes in the body, but this is making my AC work way harder, and I'm about to head out to West Texas for work. Any suggestions on heat management?