Adding Heat & Light to My Small 4x4 Van Build

so i've invited you here with the best of intentions and i know we don't know each other and i know that we may not get along but for the next couple of days you're gonna have to prove yourself you have to work with me not give me any problems and do exactly as i say and then i believe that together we will have a long and prosperous future all right enough for that this is video number three in a short series which follows my progress as i convert my mitsubishi delica into a weekend campervan in video one i fitted the floor and built the aluminium furniture in video number two last week i built all of my cupboards hatches latches doors locks and tabletops and today i'll be completing the interior of the van with power lighting and heating so stay tuned if you like to watch grown men cry the first job is to put in the diesel heater and this is the job that i have been dreading the most this is what's made me most anxious and what i'm least confident about i cannot emphasize enough how outside how far outside of my comfort zone all of this is but as they will tell you in every self-help program out there the further outside of your comfort zone you are the more you grow [Music] [Music] [Music] my first diesel spillage and my first this is this is one of the major downsides with having your diesel tank inside your van and this is exactly why i want to put my diesel tank right at the back of my van actually i want to build something that basically means i can slide it out so if that happens again it doesn't go inside the van it goes on the floor uh but yeah lesson learned lesson learned oh god it's taking me about half an hour to clean this up and i've got to put it all hold the back door back together again and pray to god that it doesn't smell at the minute it doesn't smell i think i got it all pretty quickly you know paper towels soap and water spray all that kind of thing and we think we got away with that [Music] sir it's not as bad as it looks so the diesel heater is in although it's not in properly i've still got to tidy up all the wiring i still gotta get a rubber grommet for the fuel line that's going through the floor and i still need to bolt it down and silicone all around it to make it nice and sort of airtight i suppose okay right we have heat we have hot air and we have clean fumes from the exhaust there is very little smoke when i first did a bench test with this diesel heater man i was absolutely terrified i've never seen so much smoke and what it was was i primed the fuel filter and all of this excess diesel needed burning off which was all the smoke this time i primed the fuel filter but i didn't plug my fuel line into the diesel heater whilst it primed i left it into a plastic bottle the result means that the burn chamber is not full of diesel therefore you get no smoke anyway long story short it's noisy because i've not put the silencer on nothing's bolted down but it's working we have lovely warm air and you know what it's not even that noisy i know the noise that you can probably hear at the minute is the exhaust outside i've got a silencer for that inside here the pump is nice and quiet cause i've got it suspended on cable ties and the fan the fan isn't running too loud either so oh what i'm gonna do now montage of everything being tided up and properly installed then we'll talk about the battery and how i'm powering it and then we can do the fun stuff which is a light ink basically [Music] [Music] um [Music] now three days three days is how long it's taken me to install that diesel heater i'd rather be cold i'm not even joking three days from the beginning of day one when i drilled my first hole we are now at the end of day three and it's finished the reason it took so long is a i've never done anything like this before b this van's awkward and you know the positioning of the diesel heater had to be inch perfect and i had to rebuild the housing so i had to shift the diesel heater six inches closer towards the front of the van because of my rear air conditioning pipe um i had to modify a lot of the brackets and stuff that came with the diesel heater so that i could fit to the underside of my van without too much damage i had to take off a plate from underneath the van modify that so the exhaust could run through it and pop the plate back on and all yeah it's just been a long few days but it's done now so there you go um right now it's been a long night it's been a long day long few days but i am going to try and explain power i want to talk about this i want to talk about how i'm powering the diesel heater also i know people are going to sort of question this in the comments why i went for a chinese diesel heater it's really simple i pr i was going to get a wabasto or a bespacker but they're about 800 pounds 6 7 800 pounds right which to be honest i don't mind spending cause i do think quality and all that kind of stuff but i've never fitted a diesel heater before and the way i'm powering it is a bit different and with a diesel heater if it loses power halfway through a cycle or on startup or whatever then it's it it's pretty much knackered um so there were too many opportunities for me to damage an 800 pound heater so i thought i'd buy a cheap one this one i've got two kilowatt heater 90 quid i thought okay if it goes wrong yeah 90 quid okay fair enough and i thought well what if i install it perfect and then it doesn't work very well or it's noisy well then i've already installed one so i've been more confident on spending the money on the more expensive heater but i've got to say it's absolutely spot on it runs perfectly it's quiet it's nice it's warm it's yeah no problems at all so i'll keep it for the time being all right let me talk about power please stick with me so i'm powering the diesel heater unconventionally i do not have a traditional leisure battery in this fan i don't want a traditional leisure battery i had a traditional leisure battery in my old van i had three of them because they kept dying the reason they kept dying is because i found it difficult to look after them keep them topped up keep them charged my van is parked in the shade all day so the solar panel didn't charge the batteries i found it very difficult to plug my old van into the power to keep the battery topped up so if i went away for a couple of weeks on a on a trip somewhere on a photography trip then the leisure battery would die especially in the winter and then it would be knackered and i didn't i i needed something i could understand something that was easy something that was plug and play something i could take out of the van take into my office plug into the wall keep it nice and warm and topped up so that's what we have here we have a max oak eb240 it's essentially a massive power bank it's the same with the jackeries and the gold zeroes and that kind of thing this one is 2 400 watt hours right that's means it's got a lot of capacity a lot of capacity this thing's fully charged i am confident it'll do me five days as complete guess actually no experience but it would do me a long trip before it needed topping up it's got two 240 volt sockets at the back it's got lots of power at the front it's got a mppt charge controller solar charge controller in it so you just get any solar panel plug it in bosch no messing around it's got fuses it's safe it shuts down if there's too much power it's it's just good you know it's good nice and easy that's what i wanted because i am not an electrician as i'm sure you'll find out as this video goes on the 12 volt port at the front of the battery that is going to be used to power all of my accessories such as lights and things like that but not the diesel heater the reason not the diesel heater the 12 volt port at the front when it gets up to 100 oh my god are you clicking off the video yet the 12 volt port at the front of the battery when that hits 110 watts so when the accessories pull 110 watts from the battery it cuts off it's a safety feature and so it should that's good problem is with the diesel heater although they are very efficient and they run at about i don't know maybe 20 30 watts something like that 35 watts when they start up they spike so they hit about 110 watts for about 30 seconds and then drop down with this battery that would mean as it's starting up the chances are the battery is going to cut out if that happens with the diesel heater and it cuts out the diesel heat is knackered also i'd have to turn all my lights off all the accessories off and fire up the diesel heater that is no good so what i'm doing is i'm running the diesel heater off the two 40 volt sockets at the back of the battery are you with me to do that i need to get that 240 bolt and i need to transform it to 12 volt for that i have a transformer and it's simple you just plug the transformer in and it takes 240 volts and manages it down to 12 volts that's what the diesel heater is running off so it's got its own power supply the 240 volt sockets of the back they won't cut off until a thousand watts is hit so much more capacity at the back of the battery the great thing with the transformer it's got two outlets one for the diesel heater i've also got a spare if i need any more accessories so that is how i am powering the diesel heater i hope that made sense if not i hope you skipped forward oh god right right that's it i'm going to bed i'm going to bed and uh pressure's on now so i'm going to go to bed and then i think we'll do some soldering [Music] this week's performance [Applause] [Music] so you've just seen me soldering a positive and negative wire onto the end of led strips you can cut those strips into any length and then place them anywhere in the van and link them with a positive and negative wire now i am not an electrician in fact three months ago i didn't know anything about electrics but what this fan build has given me is the opportunity to learn some basic skills so i've been in the garage i've made mistakes i've made short circuits and now i finally feel ready to add lighting and electrics to this van but i am not qualified so i won't be showing any kind of great detail of what i'm doing so those led strips they are self-adhesive which is very handy it means i can stick them straight onto the profile if i want to or i can actually stick them inside the channel of the aluminium profile that's really smart they'll be really hidden and then the lights gonna glow from the uh aluminium um and i'll be doing both of those but also i'll be using this method this is like a little 45 degree aluminium light bar you stick your led light strip on the back there you put this diffuser on and then you've got a nice either up lighter or down lighter [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh god no ah oh kill me now uh we're gonna we're gonna glue these down put a double-sided adhesive look really nice stay until [Music] one place to go [Music] wait till this helps so [Music] um [Music] the only thing that's left so there's a bit of confusion in my last video um about my footwear you see sometimes when i'm pottering around the house i like to wear socks and sandals it's a nice it's nice you know and what happens is when i climb in and out of the van so many times sometimes my sandal will get caught on something and i'll lose one so i've got one sock one sandal in it yeah nothing unusual about that only in last week's video i was wearing sandal socks that socks with the sandal printed on them and i've lost the sandal so when you look down at my feet we've got one sock with a sandal and another sock with a sandal but one's just a sock the others are sucked with a sandal i've not done the same thing today very confusing and i think i believe it may have broken a few uh a few processes you know a few hard drives a few mines may have exploded or yeah anyway that's what i'm wearing now [Music] [Applause] [Music] so my next door neighbor's getting a bit of maintenance work done on this house so there's been a noise if you can excuse that now no 4x4 off-road extreme landscape photography vehicle for one would be complete without an inside outside temperature gauge oh yeah [Music] some girls reach for the stars fancy clothes and big shiny cars here please read my short list it's quite simple to just sleep in [Music] and wake up in your arms to the sound of the rain on my window [Music] well that was a hard fought battle way harder than i thought it was ever gonna be and you know you may as well pause the video and get a cup of tea because we've got a lot to talk about i've made a list we've got we're going to talk about the electrics the power the battery and the question i'm sure most of you are asking where's the fridge so yeah that's what we're going to talk about so the van is complete the inside of the van is complete obviously there's no stuff in here i need some nice cushions and everything to make it more comfortable to make it look nice but it is complete uh the fridge let's address that i do need a fridge i do want a fridge um but it's not i'm not gonna get a fixed fridge like in my old van i'm just gonna get a portable 12-volt fridge like a cool box type thing you know a compressor fridge but a portable one and am i either going to stick it in between the driver in the passenger seat or in the passenger foot well um and it's just going to be 12 volt and i can just run a 12 volt plug socket from my fuse box to somewhere like underneath the passenger seat would be a good location i can hide all of the wires not a problem but they're so expensive i haven't done any research i don't even know my measurements yet of where it's going to go so you know i if you have any comments any suggestions about good fridges economic fridges that are very efficient and that don't cost an arm and a leg because it's a hard pill to swallow dropping 600 quid on a fridge let me tell you that uh but yeah the fridge that's just basically a 12-volt accessory that i'm going to take in and out of the van so let's talk about how the power works basically i've got my big battery i've got one 12 volt plug you know like a cigarette lighter socket that plug socket runs to the back of the van to a fuse box which isn't in the location i thought it was first going to be it's actually in a sub floor about to make like a false bottom of a cupboard because that fuse box needed to be accessible and where i originally was going to put it it was totally inaccessible so it would have been impossible for me to wire your accessories into the fuse box i've got six fuses i'm only using four of them at the minute for all of these lights so i do have two spare fuses one of those will go to a fridge and i think the other one is gonna go to some external spotlights that'll be like porch lighting after that i'd have to buy a bigger fuse box so my lighting in here as you've seen obviously it's all led i've got these really nice reading lights so when the main lights are off and i want a bit of stealth i can just hey look at that yeah i've got these couple of reading lights ones really so i can see what i'm doing on the desk and the other one uh is here so you know this is probably where i'm gonna chill out most of the time right at the back there and that's a handy little reading light to read obviously or or whatever i decided to put my main lights on a dimmer switch let me just turn these off yeah i'll just put my main lights on a dimmer switch oh again so i can you know control the ambient lighting in here uh it's all kind of very very soft warm lighting it's there's nothing in my face nothing as you can see because it's quite dark so this is how my lights are going to be for 90 percent of the time soft subtle stealth one might say and then if i need big lights well i've got my internal van lights i replaced the bulbs with little led little led pads that are super energy efficient um but these two lights here and here they run off the van battery so i'm not really keen on using these it's more going to be a case of oh where did where did i put my lens cloth put the lights on and uh yeah find my lens cloth actually we'll we'll put them on for filming i think it's probably a good idea right let's talk about um power because for me with this van build number one priority over everything was power so that battery that i'm using that max oak eb240 oh my god suits my needs perfectly so at the back you know i've already said it's got two plug sockets um those two plug sockets one goes to this double socket with usb that i've got here on the side panel that all works perfectly the other plug socket goes to a transformer where i've got my diesel heater plugged in and my thermometer plugged in i've also installed a carbon monoxide detector those rear sockets have a max draw of 1000 watts diesel heater and my thermometer are not going to pull 1000 watts in fact i'd struggle to pull 1000 watts the socket at the front that have all my lights plugged in that has a max draw of 110 watts so what i did was i turned everything on diesel heater on full blast all the lights on even the internal covered lights everything on so everything full beans total draw was 120 volts not volts that's quite a lot 120 watts what that means is with this battery fully charged i could have the whole van diesel heater everything full beans for 20 hours that's how long it would last in theory 20 hours and i'm never going to have everything on no way that scenario would have happened if you think about that in real terms well work it out a few hours diesel heater lights an hour in the evening maybe a couple of hours so on and so forth that battery is going to last forever but just in case there is a solar charge controller in it that is going to be the next video solar panels and whatnot just like to remind everyone as well this is not a van life channel this is a landscape photography channel so hello to all the new subscribers going there's a playlist in my description that links to all my on location videos i'm gonna say on location it's in the field photography traveling hiking all sorts really lots of nice photography well that's subjective but you get my drift i installed cupboard lights as a bit of a luxury um the the cupboard lights you know when you're rooting around for stuff in the cupboards and it's dark so i thought it'd be quite nice to have some cupboard lights uh that was a little treat and i'm really happy with them i also installed an external rear light so that you know i do a lot of my photography pre-sunrise so i'll get my bag out and i want to be able to see what i'm doing and you know maybe i need to change some lenses or fix some accessories whatever well there's a nice light at the back of the van that lights up my little work area so i bought a new tank for my diesel heater a new little fuel tank i think it's leaking i think there's seepage in the join there's like a join in the uh in the tank and there's a tiny bit of seepage so i probably need to buy myself a new diesel tank that's really disappointing but you know buying cheap stuff up ebay is always a risk so that looks like a bit of seepage me that's the van i hope you like it i hope you've uh enjoyed it this isn't this isn't a tutorial because i don't know what i'm doing with electrics i don't know what i'm doing van building this is more just entertainment and hopefully give you some ideas about how your van could possibly be if you have a small event as small as this and this is a tiny tiny van i am banging on like no man's business so i'm going to end it here if you've enjoyed the videos give it a thumbs up massive help if you are new here consider subscribing usually i'm out doing photography you'll be seeing a lot of the van out in the field and obviously i'll be camping and sleeping in it ah that's all to come so yeah cheers guys and until next time until next time bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Thomas Heaton

Views: 192,288

Rating: 4.9699349 out of 5

Keywords: landscape photography, outdoor photography, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography in the field, photography tips, best photo locations, how to landscape photography, hiking, outdoors

Id: 6-xq5H2Jvqc

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021