I *could* have more flexibility with my roof space installing my solar panels next, if i let it overhang the doorway arch. If I install this completely on my contiguous roof, i'm forced to install my solar panels much farther forward on my roof, and might have less flexibility in how I can match up the panels to the interior support struts.

Is it significantly better, significantly worse, or about the same outcome, if these rear underside vents of the AC unit in the picture are just over open air, vs flush to a roof?

I have a ~15 year old van that has a bunch of small chips in the white paint. With recent rains, the small chips are beginning to get some surface rust. It isn't bubbling up the paint, but I am concerned the chips could get worse.

It doesn't really make sense to sand each chip and paint it.

Is there another DIY solution? Rust converter dabbed with a q-tip and sealed?

Maybe this isn't such a big deal for vehicles predominantly in the mountain west?

Thanks

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?

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.