Tour this ROOF-RAISED, SOLAR-POWERED, OFF-GRID SKOOLIE CONVERSION | the ULTIMATE TINY HOME ON WHEELS

you know they just grow up so dang fast don't they i feel like it was just yesterday i was driving this home from the school district parking lot and by yesterday i mean two years ago this is our second to last bus to leave the shop here and it is a 2001 thomas built front engined 37 foot long full-size school bus it's got the cummins 24 valve 5.9 liter turbo diesel engine that you all love and an allison md 3060 overdrive automatic transmission it's about as good as it gets you know in a lot of ways i'm out here today because the owners of this bus will be here in three hours to pick it up drive it all the way down to florida put it on a ferry unload it in puerto rico and then live on it full time on an off-grid piece of land they have down there wow you know amazing but before they come and since this is a bus i'm especially proud of i thought y'all would like to see what i've been up to in there with the crew of talented people working here at chrome yellow to turn this into what you see before you which is a super functional multi-purpose multi-seasonal off-grid home on wheels let's uh take a walk around and we'll work our way in like layers of an onion show you what we've been up to starting at the front you'll notice this bus no longer has a front door for the kiddos to get on and you're right it doesn't we skinned over this during the roof race and got rid of the front stairs and in its place we've installed a custom-made watertight door from skully.com thanks luke to access what is now a very really a pretty sizable um storage area and better yet opened up this whole passenger side area next to the driver for some seating front row mind you working our way back we've got our under mount outdoor section for our mini split heat pump and then on the other side of this door which we'll talk about in a second we've got access again from school.com to our propane tank the door is a custom-made door just to fit this opening with a custom-made stairwell and fold out rv stairs because that's just nice and a beautiful gorgeous stairwell to enter this bus but we're not going to go inside of yet we got to finish talking about all the rest of the fun stuff happening on the outside of this bus rounding out the passenger side of the bus we've got an exterior storage box pretty handy there we wanted to go full depth but there is a diesel tank here and this bus has i believe a 100 gallon diesel tank which is very nice and then right here we have the outdoor portion of their 10 gallon exothermic propane electric hot water heater and i'm a big fan of these because they're electric if you got extra power and they're propane if you don't and that's very nice and the exothermic part refers to the fact that it actually heats the water up to about 150 degrees and then tempers it with incoming water to bring it down to about 125 degrees so this 10 gallon tank of extremely hot water it's actually going to get you about 16 gallons of the temperature water you can actually use we have to talk about what's going on upstairs we've got a full complement of rigid led uh i don't know what you'd call them just cute little lights across the top here on both sides and across the front up there and i'll get a picture of that you know once things get a little darker across the bottom there's you can't see them some underglow rigid lights and then we have an unbelievably powerful upper light bar and of course a lower light bar all of the lights on the bus have been converted to led and those are rigid led headlights as well this thing practically glows in the dark coming around to the back and the surprises just keep coming if you'll notice we've extended the back bumper about 14 inches from its original position and that gives us room for a nice landing pad upon which to put this custom made ladder which goes up to the rooftop deck it's fun up there let me tell you over here we've got a trailer hitch and into that we have stuck a set of stairs and you know those stairs are made for walking on walking on to where well right back here which if you believe it is actually the doctor's office can you believe this i can't it's quite hard to capture how neat and efficient this office is but i mean it really you could work down here and you've even got windows out the back door which is nice got little pockets and drawers galore and of course we've got our own hvac with a vent to the outside world beautiful puck lights and then also a little rope rope light action it's very small in here and then a little desk with a little drawer isn't that cute mind blown above it we've got a vent for that space a backup camera and another one of those cool rigid bright lights coming down the driver's side and the fun doesn't stop up here we've got our water inlet and a vent stainless steel and 30 amp shore power power inlet however i don't think they're going to be using much of that because this thing is very capable off-grid we've got another under body truck toolbox right here and down in this quarter we've got our diesel heater and our gray water tank and you should take a look at this inside this underbelly toolbox we've installed a spartan diesel heater by a company called wallace and these are typically used in the marine world they're big in boats but what's nice is that this is a diesel fired central heat style furnace unlike maybe a wabasto or an eberspacher or a chinese diesel heater where it's just kind of point of use you know you don't really branch it off into too many circuits this is actually meant to run multiple lines out of its plenum and be ducted across the entire bus so we've mounted it outside because quite frankly we didn't have room inside and to make a little easier to service it's inside this weather type box which is really nice because these are not cheap and it does a great job of keeping up with extreme cold we've had several cold snaps here all the way down to i think negative five and this is done a fine job of keeping it warm inside it's a great heater just in front of that we've got our great tank and the gray tank dump valve which is right here nothing too special there but it's good to have one oh and everyone wants their outdoor shower you know okay i know i know look it would be wrong to go on and not talk about the 16-inch elephant in the room which is the roof race we put on this bus 16 inches straight up all the way from the back to the front and uh well gosh i almost forget to talk about them because it's just so commonplace around these parts but let me just tell you again it makes a big difference yeah sure does well i think that wraps up all the things i care to show you about the outside once it gets dark i'll turn on those bright things for you and we'll see how that works that's cool i haven't done that yet actually go figure anyway let's hop inside this thing and i'll show you all of the amazing features we've packed right inside i'm not sure if it gets much nicer than this to be honest with you we've got what i think is a wonderful combination of clean lines a sort of modern aesthetic but mostly something that's just i think tasteful and timeless and hopefully ages a lot better you know than some of those rvs i see out there to be honest with you i'm not even sure where to begin but uh i guess we'll just start at the front and work our way back up here we've got two awesome speakers a car audio bluetooth receiver which is really nice you can just plug in and jam the tunes we've got three large overhead bin storage areas we also have a storage spot for a computer that connects to a projector output that we installed right here above these shelves which is really sweet this is a front engine bus and you're probably asking charlie how are they going to work on that engine with this big couch built over it don't worry about that okay boom this whole zone opens up and it allows you to fully open the doghouse which is really nice and it's not much trouble at all just one piece gotta love that behind the couch we've got storage which is really cool on both sides and then we also have storage under this front section here the seat is brand new and it is cush let me tell you it's got this like kneading massage pattern a guy could just sit in that and i do right here we've got a little more storage and in this area i'm not going to go to trouble of setting it up is a table that actually sets down right here so that the whole family can sit around and have a meal this chair even swivels which is very nice and enjoy themselves pretty good huh take a look around we've got typical puck lights in the ceiling we've got a shelf over here another shelf over here with some more advanced bookshelves down here these shelves actually each have a capacity of over 150 pounds tons and tons of nice lighting details we've got hidden lights behind the lips of the shelves we also put in a row of red led light strips so that you can operate those lights at night maybe when you're going down the road without straining your eyes too bad say somebody's driving let me turn on the reds here which one is it there we go i don't know if it's turning up but we got some red lights there pretty clever though to be honest because it is nice to have lights but you don't want to dr blind the driver when you're going down the road working our way back on this side we have this side of the kitchen sink aren't they lovely awesome awesome big storage up here inside this believe it or not we've got a custom built drying rack that actually drips out the bottom of this upper cabinet right into the sink that was a good day huh lots of awesome storage here i mean i could go on for days um we've got over 30 drawers alone in this bus pretty special right here we've got a pop-out pantry and why not another one you know and of course we've got our clever little berkey system here these berkey water filters can be a real bear to mount but this one it's not going anywhere and you just pull a string and it fills it up which is really nice you've got a side glass on both the top and the bottom so you can't overfill it and i think that's a really nice little thing that we do for people it really is oh and of course a full-size fridge refrigerator compartment on the top and then two drawers i believe this one's a freezer or this one's a freezer and this one's maybe also a freezer i don't know but it's cold and this bus has been running up and alive for uh about eight months on its own power just hanging out waiting to be lived in boy rounding out the kitchen on this side we've got a nice peninsula countertop here with our 24 inch propane range and oven and then below here believe it or not we've actually got a little dog kennel how fun is that um and then a beautiful uh 42 inch wide double pane rv window to gaze out of while you you know simmer and it would be totally wrong of me to move out of this section without talking about all of the toe kick cabinets we also included i mean it just goes on and on and on oh my gosh and on oh my wow but hey they're there get back and you know it wouldn't be complete without a control center so here we've got our victron touch 50 clearly mapping out everything that's happening in the electrical world up above it we have our sea level tank monitor and water pump control showing our lpg gray fresh and 12 volt system voltages and then over here is the thermostat for the wallace diesel furnace and then right above it is the electric and gas elements for the dometic water heater it's a big bust but it gets a little tight in here so we're gonna have to go into selfie mode forgive me so i can talk about this amazing bathroom that we've built it's split in half and then also go on and talk about these really clever bunks a in-suite washer and dryer and of course the master bedroom that's hard to do you know we got to start here in the bathroom with the shower and it's just like most of the showers that we make we start with a custom stainless steel pan with a nice tile flange across the bottom you can see that runs all the way around and then we go up with the uh you know clients tile of choice in this case they did a two pattern setup which you know i think it looks pretty sweet and then we put in one of these really fancy van life doors gosh what's the name it's escaping me right now it's got like a futuristic sounding name though like millennium or something anyway nice door coming across to the other side we've got our nature's head again with the hepfo um going right down into our gray water system nice little window with uh some shelves around and then right here we've got a um it's a surface mount sink basin a couple big drawers um and yeah another toe kick drawer with rope lights here and you know puck lights in the ceiling and then we've also got a pretty cool little slide open i'm parked on a crazy slope right now um that's nice and then you know this kind of faucet pump pump style well pump i don't know so there's the bathroom and so we come across another uh pocket door which takes us into the bedroom or should i say the bunk room i guess this bunk room is really special so we've got two twin size bunks and if you'll notice their feet actually go into a little cubby behind the shower we've got nice shelves and reading lights for each bunk and those shelf lights are dimmable and then under this bunk wouldn't you know it a bunch of storage nice custom-made ladder and railing and then over here we've got something really exciting and that's our all-in-one washer dryer a little storage for brooms and all the washer stuff here and then gosh more doors and wardrobes and drawers and you can shake a stick at that's our ac main breaker panel one of our two dc fuse blocks and of course a 24 volt to 12 volt step down converter closet rod and a mofi that means that this bus has its own wi-fi network pretty cool and then a whole row of drawers coming down into the systems world we've got the back side of our gas electric water heater 100 gallon fresh water tank nearly empty 13 kilowatt hours of lithium ion battery storage on the roof we've got 2600 watts of solar coming into a smart solar charge controller then we've got a victron orion which we actually use for keeping the starting batteries topped off there's our lynx distributor and then our victron 3000 volt amp inverter for running all the ac systems and then of course that's our sterling energy 12 volt dc to 24 volt dc battery charger for charging off the starting battery and the buses alternator to get into the master bed it's a little more exciting because we needed all the storage below so we actually installed a little step up and you come up into here and we've got a perimeter bookshelf and for the headboard that actually flips up and we've got a reading lamp on each side not a bad place to hang out if i do say so you know i almost get tired reliving all the work that we put into this just going over it with y'all but i think that's going to wrap it up for the tour on this bus it's something i'm really proud of and i think it's a unique look something that you don't see a lot of in this community and i hope some of the cool things we packed into this give you ideas for your own build or at least i was entertaining while you ate that delicious pizza that you ordered well 40 minutes ago anyway thanks for watching make sure you hit that subscribe button so you can stay up to date and see the newest videos i'm putting out and we'll see you next time here at the shop you

Channel: Chuck Cassady

Views: 227,905

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Id: NForbBYf6n4

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2022