$3,000 Ambulance Camper Conversion Tour

[Music] So this is Bo she's a 2008 GMC c4500 top kick and she's got a 6.6 Duramax lmm diesel engine arguably the best D-Max you could get. we scooped her up on kind of a whim she's a retired ambulance out of Tallahassee Florida and we got her for three grand. all she really needed was a $25 U-joint to reattach the drive shaft. when we bought her she had 196 000 miles on her and since then about a year of traveling we've put another 15K. so Bo measures at 24 feet long the Box itself is 14 feet long and eight feet wide inside. we have six foot one headspace which is good because we're both over 5 10. and the interior space is well under a hundred square feet. this closet right here leads to a wall. the inside it used to be an indoor outdoor closet but the inside Space is used for our fridge so the outside space is now our sticker wall and we have a scratch and sniff map courtesy of Christina. I guess we're gonna have to draw Baja down here. down here we have our Pit Boss pellet grill tabletop version. it requires pellets and electricity but honestly it's our most efficient cooking appliance and we love smoking and Grilling Meats foreign this is the door that leads inside. doorbell camera. this is our storage shed and AC closet. this is our AC window unit and we put foam here and a vent so that we can actually use the AC while the door's shut it's not its most efficient mode but it works on those really hot days when we need to flash cool the inside for the cats while driving. other than that we have camping gear camping Essentials Adventure Gear and miscellaneous house cleaning items. [Music] moving aft we have a crap ton of Lights these come standard with all ambulances. Unfortunately they cut a lot of the wires to most of the fun lights when we got the ambulance but we have used the two big Reds and the big whites to aide in our reverse and brake lights and we hope to use the ambers and some of the other lights as hazard lights or party lights in the future so this is our DIY bike rack and we created this while on the road we realized we were missing out on a bunch of opportunities by not having bikes and so it's not the prettiest or the sturdiest but it's been hanging in there for a year and about 10K miles so far and then we have the smart plug this is a 30 amp Shore power for when we are plugged into campground on a rare occasion or we have attachments that allow us to plug into our friends and family houses when we're mood stocking moving right along this is our tool shed yes an entire space dedicated tools we have six rigid tool boxes full of parts and accessories liquids uh two 12-ton jack stands this is the 10 liter diesel tank that goes with our diesel heater let me show you we'll talk more about the diesel heater inside and this is the exhaust vent for the diesel heater speaking of diesel this is our diesel fill and our big bow holds 40 gallons which gets us about 360 miles that's with us a couple miles in reserve and it's it's good for us I mean even out here in the Sonoran Desert in Baja California there's a stretch where there's 260 miles without a fuel station and we can easily go that and feel safe these two cowlings are original to the ambulance we've repurposed them we use bilge blowers inside and it vents out our kitchen and our bathroom now if you ever noticed there's a ton of exterior storage on this rig and this closet here is our water closet it's a low-tech solution that consists mostly of jugs these two six gallon water jugs they came off of our last boat our previous boat this seven gallon jug here is the gray water jug the sink drains into which this is the sinks basin we have these two five gallon collapsible water jugs we don't have an interior shower but what we do have is this rinse kit which serves as a portable shower that we use with our pop-up tent that's located back behind the rig it wasn't always heated but I recently added rinse Kit's heating element that screws into the top here and that allows us to take you know hot showers whenever we want this is how we shower whenever we're not plugged in at a campground obviously and to charge and Heat this it just plugs into a 12-volt outlet that I have routed right here foreign this is the this is our blue Eddie Power Station it's pretty much like a mini generator and both of these we bought for our 22 foot boat but it just so happened that they would both end up sitting so we decided we would bring them along and we found out that the blue Eddy particularly serves a wide range of purposes to include powering fans and electronics in the tent to powering a small portable heater that we have whenever our diesel heater isn't running and the list goes on so I'm so glad that we brought them down below you'll see our yellow tank now the tank obviously isn't yellow but I didn't want to confuse you since it's gray with our gray water tank that's blue the tank is yellow because it's for urine it's a 21 gallon portable tank that we found on Amazon and the urine drains into here and it's portable meaning that we have to pull it out to dump it so the process isn't as pretty and pleasant as the typical RV dumping process but it gets us by just fine now we'll move along to the shock box aka the electrical closet so this closet houses cat carriers bags with seasonal clothes we also put cat food kitty litter in here but its main purpose being the source of power for the house the stuff can be pretty complex if you don't know what you're looking at so I'm going to try to make it as painless as possible this big blue box here is the inverter and what it does is it receives and distributes the standard grid 110 volt or the RV's Standard 12 volt battery systems and it distributes power to both our 12v systems and our 110 systems this guy here just links all of the 12 volt systems together to the house batteries this here along with that in the back it's for our 1335 watt solar system and these two guys here what they do is they provide 60 amps of charging power from the engine's alternator whenever it's running hopefully that wasn't too bad because I've saved the shocking details for last a battery is a homemade that's right they're not real batteries but they're not fake either what they are are eight three volt lithium cells that I wire together to become two 12 volt batteries that have 560 amp hours of capacity and that's essentially for the capacity of five to six deep cycle batteries but with the deep cycle batteries you can only use 50 of their capacity safely with the lithium batteries we can use over 80 of our capacity and speaking of 80 percent that's about how much money we save from piecing together our own batteries instead of buying popular retail options [Music] foreign what this system does is it allows us to sustain ourselves off grid almost indefinitely there are a few ifs ands or buts about that but just know that we haven't plugged in in at least six months and Bo hasn't missed her electrical umbilical cord yet with the exception of a couple times when there was multiple days of heavy rain and clouds but that situation in itself is rare and we're not new to this whole digital Nomad lifestyle as people like to call it I like to call it what it is which is high-class hobos out here trying to live our best life on a budget and that means that sometimes you have to rough it so with that we know that sometimes we'll have to scale back our power consumption to match you know inclement weather conditions but thankfully that's only happened a couple times so fun fact before we lived on the road we actually lived on the water for five years and all of this almost obsolete technology actually came from our boat so what we did was attach it to a 20-foot telescoping pole and what we have here is our red port Wi-Fi extender which is good for boosting like a home or a public Wi-Fi signal and then we have our wiiboost cell or hot spot booster which is great because inside this big metal box it would be a dead zone otherwise so I say it's obsolete because honestly SpaceX has saved the day the first day that starlink came out for RVs we bought it and until now we've been just using the stand and placing it on the ground but about a week ago we bought this nice melt and this is its new home so at the front of the rig we also have a roof rack and cargo bag Amazon special and inside we host our water sports gear like inflatable paddle board and our Uber kayak also on this side are our cheap tracks we call them that their traction boards we bought at Overland Expo Mountain West and we bought them in hopes of never having to use them as a recovery gear but I guess in the event that you have nothing else it's better than nothing for those of you who saw our little incident on trail Mater's YouTube channel you'll know that these tracks were really no match when big bows butt was stuck in a rut I guess that about wraps it up for the exterior let's head inside and see how we live [Music] [Music] some of you might have seen rigs on Instagram and Tick Tock you know the beautiful ones that the peoplefroller through yet they show no signs of life on the inside well you don't have to worry about that and because it's clear that somebody lives in this bad boy any Dumb and Dumber or fans in here yeah there's everywhere come on in [Music] now you can tell from the sounds of the slamming doors that this thing is built like a tank it sounds like closing the doors of an armored truck I don't know if they're making regular RVs out of these days but when you hear their door slam it sounds like a toilet lid slamming now hey look I know it's 20 23 and we've all been through some stuff and many of us don't like jokes anymore but I can't let go of the past so RV owners please don't cancel this dress yet just a little jokey joke all right let me show you our toilet this is a Nature's hair composting toilet it separates the liquids and the solid to removing the biohazards and the smell you fill the solids Bend with either coconut husk or peat moss and with time what it does is it breaks down the solids to compost I think I was one of Nature's head's biggest Skeptics when it came to the no smell thing and it took me almost two months to use it but I promise it's the real deal the only real downside to it is that it came with the jug for the liquids that requires being emptied out every day or two which is why we've never used it as you've seen the yellow tank we ran a hose down to it that allows us to go weeks without emptying the liquids and we can go well over a month of full-time use without having to dump the solids the only other downside is that it requires you to pee sitting down which when we show you inside the fridge you'll see that I drink those fruity cells with things so I was open to the concept of peeing sitting down or at least so I thought I did it once and I learned that midnight PP squats and the dark when you're half asleep but just not from me so we added a p funnel and now we both pee standing up conducting any sort of business in this tiny space is difficult enough each limb has a very specific task to make it happen and the P funnel just makes it a tad easier for us we have this retractable privacy door and that gives us privacy even when we're parked somewhere with the doors flung wide open like the Outer Banks waiting on a ferry so no one's looking at you do your business [Music] this door here leads to the cockpit the command station whatever you want to call it it looks like a sliding door that's because it used to be but when I had to put in all the toilet Hardware we had to uh undo it and make it swing did I mention that there was no cat designed for this we thought skipping it would save us some time foreign happens from coast to coast from sea level to 12 000 feet of elevation Bohol is like a freaking boss and if we catch you running slow we just might run you down figuratively of course but seriously I'm so impressed with the way that this thing handles at over two thousand two hundred thousand miles it's given us almost no problems except for a couple self-inflicted setbacks it's a class 5 medium duty truck so it comes equipped with an exhaust brake which means that it practically stops on its own I just lightly tap the brakes so it illuminates the lights to let the people behind me know that we're stopping and steep Mountain grades are no biggie downshifting is not a thing for us and overheating brakes are unfathomable and I love it when building it we pretty much gut at the interior and that includes the cap and from there we installed various types of Dynamat insulation to cut down the road noise and the Heat I guess I'll go from top to bottom with all the different systems that we have in here this is the tire pressure monitoring system screen so this is a front-facing camera for our RVs Road monitoring system which this is the display for what it does is it records all driving angles we have two blind spot monitoring cameras as well as a rear view camera so that I can glance down at the screen to make sure that it's clear for me to change lanes and just monitor my Lane positioning right here what this is It's a GoPro Mount because you know kids these days freaking YouTubers can't have any moments in life without capturing it and sharing it with strangers so that's why that's there and this here is the H3 vehicle monitoring doohickey it just you know records all the trucks vitals and we can see them at a glance it plugs right into the OBD2 reader so it has diagnostic capabilities as well right here this is an Alpine double din radio hedge in it and I'm going to geek out on this for a second because I used to sell this stuff like 15 years ago and this head unit is so shallow that it has a small But Mighty amplifier attached to the back and it fits in the same footprint as a traditional double DIN so with this our Rockford Fosgate tweeters and component speakers as well as our power kicker subwoofer that's under my seat the system will blow your freaking socks off if you let it and it was only about a thousand dollars back in the day you could barely get the Hedge unit four thousand dollars so so much has changed in car audio and it has completely changed our Driving Experience I'm sitting on purple cushions that were a birthday gifts for my mother-in-law and let me tell you these things made all the difference in the world my body is almost twice my age thanks to living young hard and fast in my early days especially thanks to Uncle Sam's core Marines so my back it can barely take two hours of driving before I'm stiff and in pain well with these cushions I can go up to six hours comfortably and that's about as far as we want to drive in a day anyways so total game changer thank you moving along we have this cheap husky box to store our starlink we have some privacy Shades we have a 20 ton bottle Jack in a box a tire pump and some other Road Accessories in here and this space is where the cats like to hang out whenever we're parked and it also serves as Kitty jail whenever the boys interrupt our Slumber because they think they're going to miss a meal this here is the collapsible um cat prison pin and if we haven't told you yet we have two cats in here and I'm gonna I'm gonna let's let's take let's go meet the cats where you going boy up here right here [Music] you don't like my glasses let's take the glasses off everybody look at turbo diesel we should have called him turbo lag look at this boy does he look like he misses meals huh look at him well he swears at least two times a day that it's gonna happen foreign [Music] 's going to show you the kitchen we cook like three feet from where we poop but wait it gets worse all right I guess I'll show you what he's talking about we've received a few comments about how utterly disgusting is that we house our silverware so close to where our trash receptacle is and where the cats do their dirty work ah it's literally literally I mean let's be honest people you don't buy an old ambulance for the amazing sanitary qualities I'm pretty sure there was blood in this cabinet when we first got it for cooking we use our ninja foodie 12 in one or the electric skillet that we plug in we also have an electric kettle to use for heating water or I've even heated canned veggies in there I don't know it works here we have our banana hammock it's empty right now we're going on day five in the desert y'all here we have a paper towel holder that doesn't unravel while you're driving we have a foot pedal operated sink options of cold or cold water we have a bilge blower which operates as our kitchen vent these cabinets are actually original to the ambulance we just put some Frost tint on the window so you couldn't see all of our junk inside but it is nice that we're able to house everything including our dish rack and the kettle so that it doesn't go flying everywhere when we're in motion as you can see we have plates and tea and food storage on this side this side is our spices and our Tupperware and you can also access things by doing this with the built-in locks inside this here is a Residential Refrigerator we got from Home Depot for about four hundred dollars it has an ample amount of freezer and storage space it's actually much bigger than any fridge we've had on our boats in the past and honestly we don't eat out much so this houses enough food for us for at least two weeks without having to restock this here we call the cold seat it's actually a part of the ambulance and it's all one big piece believe it or not that we learned that when trying to demo the thing apart really the only thing we changed was the upholstery on most of the vinyl we changed it to White to get rid of the emergency blue Vibes we had going on here we have our carbon monoxide alarm our victron Energy Systems monitor our diesel heater monitor it's in military time because that's the only option and our 12 volt house systems the switches for them over here is the red Port router and for the Wi-Fi extender on a swivel Mount we have a 27 inch Samsung Smart monitor we can use it to connect our laptops when working or we can stream from whatever we want we basically just watch YouTube down here is where the diesel heater pumps out the Heat and under the seat above the wheel well is actually where the diesel heater lives over here are the his and hers closets his hers this is where we store the bulk of our personal effects such as clothing shoes and whatnot I call this area organized chaos because it pretty much is foreign stuff out it all stays together without needing to be refolded this is a boot camp life hack y'all must seen a drill instructor would be so happy to know I've got my cities and skivvies all wounded up in boot bands and it goes back in easy peasy as you can see we have these dividers to break it off into sections and it works we added these pouches to the doors because we didn't have enough space for our junk so now we're gonna have more junk over here you can see that we have these two 12 volt fans and on the door whenever it's closed we also have a table that folds out and it doubles as a cat perch and when it's not in use it folds down for maximum storage here you can see the window AC from the front side from a full battery if we ran this thing all day non-stop with no solar we can run it for about a day and a half with the other household appliances running as well before we run out of power but we just rented an energy savings mode and if it's going to be on for more than 20 to 30 minutes we just have the door open because it's more efficient thank you we store bags and stuff over here and when they're not here which is pretty much never the hooks fold up we also added this swivel table which you know works for us whenever we're using it and we can move it out of the way for the cats to sit up here and look out of the door this table along with the one on the door was a Maryland Edition that we added and we used scrap plywood from her dad's [ __ ] up here is my gizmos and gadgets charging station Tiff told me she's tired of the crap taking up cooking space on the counter so I mounted them up here on the wall which as you can see wall space is also at quite a premium whenever your house is under 100 square feet so the theme for this build was budget so we used as much scrap material as possible to include the AC wall that we took free wood and routed each piece to make it look like shiplap honestly we could have just spent a couple hundred bucks at the store and had that week of our life back [Laughter] now what that's over with the bed is actually also made out of scrap material well the only thing we paid for was the mattress and the bedding and what we did was take a queen mattress and cut it so that it can be a two-piece couch and slat bed and then it pulls out to actually be a sectional in day mode excuse me oh and the cushions underneath can actually go on top but it doubles as a built-in cat Suite so there's actually two cat Suites but whenever we turn the engine on they both scatter and pile on top of each other in one cat Suite or find the most uncomfortable spot they can choose which is on the wheel well on the dirty laundry bag I mean they're cast after all above the bed is actually another original cabinet on this side we House books multiple junk bins and on this side cleaning supplies alcohol we put a little key hook here and a shoe rack here and there's the door so with something like this cost as it sits I don't know maybe you know I'm in the leg but in our case it only costs about seven months I've been doing hard labor and maybe about forty thousand dollars as we went along with the build but I am glad the way that things worked out because we had the googly eyes for a brand new forty thousand dollar fifth wheel but the post pandemic pricing priced this out of that and I'm not mad because my life would look so much different with one of those things in tow with the exception of a few gifts from friends and family there were no free handouts or heavily discounted items no one that we reached out to wanted to work with us and to be fair I only reached out to one company but once was enough of me sitting around begging for free stuff when there was so much work to be done if you've made it this far in the video okay you're in the right place consider subscribing or if not leave a thumbs up and a comment before you go and remember the world is yours to explore so get out and get lost while you still can and maybe we'll see you out there [Music]

Channel: Team Wiff

Views: 206,526

Keywords: ambulance conversion, ambulance conversion camper, ambulance conversion tour, ambulance conversion with bathroom, ambulance conversion build, van conversion camper, diy camper conversion build, off grid camper, off grid living, budget van conversion, van life couple, full time travel, full time van life, budget friendly camper, camping with cats, traveling with cats, van conversion camper budget, rv camping with cats, solar powered camper, tiny home tours, campulance

Id: 2tBokI5lw1w

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023