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,…
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…
Following on from a great couple of days progress with the van, we decided to tidy up the work we’d started on the solar cables. Day 3 In our post a few weeks ago, we had undertaken the massive job of re-wiring the larger solar panels. Unfortunately, at the time we’d not been able to post the cables back through the van due to the junction box that was in-situ being far too small and allowing only four cables to…
Yesterday’s hard work and the resulting success seemed to almost propel us forward with the remaining tasks planned for today. We were really hoping to be able to make a start on some of the internals, specifically the kitchen area. With the hob exhaust in place it was now time to implement an elegant solution for our fridge. Day 2 We’d been discussing with John for sometime how to go about creating a heavy duty sliding drawer for the fridge….
After a busy Christmas period for our business and some great family time, we decided to get back into the swing of van work with a cheeky session between Christmas and the New Year. Thanks to a number of days of hard work from myself, Ben and John, we’ve made another good step forward, managing to tackle one of the bigger jobs that had been looming over us. Day 1 We’d hoped to get the heater install finished up this…