During the week I’ve been busy planning the bathroom, it’s been quite the undertaking and has required a fair amount of research and comparison to what others have done and what we could do in the space allocated. After purchasing Gandalf and in our initial discussions over our plans we knew that we’d need to plan a space for a bathroom in. This was an important consideration for us as we hope to spend most of our time off grid…
Hi everyone! I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year! This is just a quick update to thank you for your continued support of the blog, it’s always very nice to hear that you are looking forward to new posts. I have updated the website incorporating a new look and feel, which I hope you like! The comments sections under each post is working again now, and you can even rate each blog post! The problems with the…
Welcome to the pre-Christmas catch up! Unfortunately, not much work has been able to be done on the van over the past few months with everything going on. We do hope to get back out there soon and perhaps do a ‘lock in’ and work on the electrics inside. For now though, we do still have some updates! MOT Time… This month was rather tense with the build up to Gandalf’s MOT, he’s a 2009 van and with his noble…
Following on from our last post. April seems to have rolled by, albeit rather slowly. As the world attempts to pick up the pieces from the virus and with travel uncertainty still and issue, we are still in good spirits to finish the van. We are looking forward to having a week away in the van in the UK, in order to test things out before venturing further afield. There is a very nice scenic drive called the NC500 in…
Hi everyone, I hope you are all keeping well, just a quick update from us. I have a bunch of posts to upload documenting progress on the van hopefully these will go live shortly. I’ve been busy in the background preparing some new sections for the site that will become available later, in particular a hugely detailed section explaining and documenting our exciting electrical system complete with two Tesla batteries is to come. As for now, I know there have…
Having had luck on our side and the water tanks arriving within the week, we decided to get on and tackle the installation. Little did we know that this weekend would be talked about for months to come… Setting Up Before the installation could begin we felt that we needed to make a few adjustments to the grey water tank. We’d noticed when looking at the kit that there were some drawbacks that would be relatively simple to improve upon….
Having chosen and installed the Truma heater and hot water system it was time to turn our attention to the storage and supply side of things. Heating Water Over the past few months we’ve been debating our options for water storage. We are at a point where this would now be a good task to get ticked off the list. We intend to travel for a while and are hoping to stay off grid for the most part, with that…
Fully recovered from the last session of van work, we were ready to kick off with another lingering task: Security. With Gandalf filling out with various bits of equipment it was defiantly time to protect all the work that’s gone into it so far. After having had a good research around we finally settle on some locks for the doors, let’s find out how we did. Security Security has always been on our mind when it comes to the van,…
On a roll from yesterdays progress we headed out early to start day two of the bumper weekend. The Solution One of our big hopes this weekend was to install the shore power sockets on the van. Although we are not completing the rest of the electrical install just at the moment, we wanted to get the hole cut and fit the sockets ahead of time. I am mid-way through writing a fairly comprehensive guide to our electrics, which will…
With a couple of really successful weekends of work and Christmas behind us we hoped to follow up with another bumper weekend. We came ready with an ambitious plan to install both the Truma heater and the Smart plugs for the Shore Power. Did we succeed? Read on to find out! Truma Heater It was quite a drizzly weekend the three of us were all wrapped up and ready for work. Heading out to make a start on the long…