Touring the BEST Short Skoolie Conversion -- Built for Regretlyss

nothing like taking your home anywhere you want to be including my shop this is our latest and greatest and last bus conversion that we will be doing here with this team as chrome yellow and it belongs to a good friend of mine named alyssa and you might know her as regret list this is a 2003 ford e450 with the bluebird body featuring a power stroke 7.3 liter turbo diesel engine uh why is that special you know who cares right well i'll tell you why you should care this is the last year that ford and international teamed up to make this motor and it represents a pinnacle for engineering without the burden of very restrictive emissions controls and i love clean air so don't don't mistake my words here the problem is those emissions controls make these vehicles very hard to maintain when it's just you that has to maintain them and they leave a fleet so alyssa picked this up because she's very savvy it only has 66 000 miles on it now it had even less when she bought it and it truly does run and drive better than any of these that i've ever experienced the power stroke is about as good of an engine as you can get in a bus like this it's not my favorite engine ever but it's as good as it gets for a bus like this um for a short bus on a van cutaway chassis and while uh you know it it does have its flaws i would say if you were in the market for a short bus to convert it's really hard to go wrong with a 7.3 power stroke in 2004 ford came out with a 6.0 power stroke which is uh really really problematic it's got a lot of issues it has problems with the head studs and the egr cooler and a whole lot of other acronym things that are just going to bore you if i get into but there's something to be avoided and that's why these go for a lot of money because the people who know know that this is what you want and 2003 was the last year you could get them alyssa snatched this one up with the lowest miles i've ever seen on one and um by the way it drives it's evident that those are actual miles well i could go on and on about the specifics of this drivetrain but um i'm not gonna we're gonna get started on the fun part of this conversion so we started at the front you know we deleted the flashers up top threw in a very aggressive light bar which is quite handy up top you'll see the front mounted front mounted rear view camera back up camera i don't know what you'd call that it's a front camera uh looks funny but it's actually alyssa's told me been pretty useful in her tight maneuvering and nighttime surveillance operations um coming around to the side here um we've got some aftermarket dirt that we applied to give it that kind of lived in feel so we like to make our conversions you know look like they're from the road you know applied by artisans down here you can't really see much but she's got a 46 gallon gray tank with a freshly installed heater pad which we determined was important um and then this is the tank drain valve that i'm not going to pull because there is water in there uh coming farther back we've got the diesel heater yeah oh yeah geez forgot right here is the side side mounted rear view camera side view rear view camera and then we've got the exhaust for the um diesel heater which is important uh we keep going around here we've got a toyota forklift and the exhaust for the tankless suburban on demand water heater which uh has been performing quite impressively super happy with that coming farther back we've got her freshwater fill location which is this guy here schwab and then that's the vent for her freshwater tank and the last bit of kit on the back here is her shore power hookup which is something she almost never uses because this thing has an excellent off-grid energy system coming around to the back and i'll show you what we did back here so take a peek up there boom we got a pioneer 12 000 btu 120 volt mini split again we did apply some dirt to it to give it that you know lived in feel kind of keep the flashiness down a little bit next to it we've got one of our outdoor porch lights which is super handy for when alyssa needs to get back in here and it's night time up at the top you can see the weboost antenna we boost u-boost and then next to it we have the solar combiner box where the panels come together taking it in on a lower notch we blocked all of the back windows for a number of reasons security better installation and because you know there's no reason to have a window into the garage taking a look in here we've got the garage and utilities storage area so i've got a nice little light here just to the left of the door is a 120 volt outlet and there's another one up front which i'll show you and then in here we've got a power strip which is great for charging things like your milwaukee lithium iron battery packs or whatever else you might need really and if you take a look you can see she actually has a pretty decent amount of storage still in here on the left we've got the 100 gallon water tank and i'll show you on the inside but all of the electrical gear sits on a cabinet that we built on top of that so honestly really a good bit of storage back here this whole zone closes and latches and then we've got a lock so it's totally secure a lot of people have been wondering like alyssa how are you going to get out of the back door if there's a fire or something and she's not because this back door does not go into a living space her points of emergency egress she's got the front door on the right the driver's door on the left and then this bedroom window is totally big enough for even a large person like me to crawl out of so she's got those three points of egress which in in my opinion is pretty sufficient because it's a tiny bus under there we've got a smoke detector so if anything does go haywire in the electrical system she'll have ample opportunity to get out and that combined with a carbon monoxide detector mean that you know you can rest easy knowing that alyssa is going to be safe in this bus and if she's not safe she can get out of it quick so come on around oh god before we go i would be remiss to not point out the spare tire this bus didn't come with a spare tire um which is kind of funny but not uncommon and we wanted to put it underneath but they're just with the cross members and the structural things happening there that wasn't going to be possible so ty our fabricator welded up this nice mount um and we put more dirt on that and i think it really makes it look rugged don't you good rugged look grl come around this side it's not quite as exciting because most of the hookups are on that side which is kind of the convention in the rv zone even though alyssa's mostly boondocking we still try to keep all the hookups on that side because dump stations and those things that's where they want them but down here we have a propane access door this is from skoolie.com which i can't recommend their products enough honestly they have lots of solutions look at how filthy that was a tank was new two months ago but this is her propane tank yeah she's rugged um this holds 12 12.9 gallons which is the equivalent of about three barbecue tanks i think and we guess that this is gonna last here i think between i think around nine months maybe a year um so that's awesome that's really great it's not that big and um it's just right there i don't have the keys to it but this is an outdoor shower um you open it you pull it out and you take a shower it's pretty cool uh we've got a it's it's really for rio we've got another rear-view camera here for the blind spot on the side and then a couple of really sweet features that we have here so another one of those exterior outlets which is handy and then alyssa's got this it's a doorbell but it's also a camera and it gives her the ability to monitor what's happening outside of her bus 24 hours a day seven days a week from anywhere in the world because this is constantly uploading images to the cloud and sending her notifications in real time which is really cool i've seen it in action uh when we first installed this at the shop every time someone would walk in front of it she would get an alert on her phone that said human activity and then it would show a picture of me or ty or ben walking in front of the bus wrapping up the exterior portion we've got another porch light out here and then this is a residential style door it's a steel door though actually it's not wood with a foam core so it is insulated and then it features a dual pane glass window here that also has a built-in shade where is that guy right here so you can do that and then you can also uh tilt it you know so you can look through or go back up and then we went ahead and installed a keyless or keyed lock here so that all alyssa really needs is either her fingerprint or a code to get into the bus um we totally had to rebuild the opening oh hey rio come on out we totally rebuilt the opening for her to use this door we had to make it a little bigger than a little smaller and i installed a stainless steel threshold and a jam that features an automotive grade really tight ceiling rubber bead around it so that door is nice and tight no really i don't think there's any drafts in the bus are there yeah and then alyssa did this awesome cedar paneling in the step step well uh and also and continued her flooring down here and then ty made these custom bent pieces of aluminum trim to go around it so i'm really really happy with the way the door turned out i think it's one of the better entryways we've done but before we go inside i would be totally remiss if i didn't talk about the elephant in the room and that is the roof race that this bus has we didn't do the roof raise here the original plan when alyssa came was to not do a roof raise but we got to talking about how much headroom was in the bus and how much insulation we wanted to have and we realized that a roof raise was going to be the only way that we could build a bus that had the the interior dimensions that she wanted and the performance that she needed so alyssa reached out to wes lewis transcend existence if you don't know about him check him out he's on youtube um and he has a shop in wichita now called dark wolf artisans i don't know if they have a website yet but you can check out their work there she called him up and he was able to squeeze her in and they got this roof race knocked out in a week like a week from the time she left our shop to the time she came back and she got an eight inch roof raise with the slope transition and and that really enabled us to do a lot of what we did in the interior with regard to the amount of insulation we did and also the layout with the raised bed and the nice upper cabinets so that was a really crucial transformation that we didn't do but um west does great work and honestly probably one of the only shops that we would you know trust to do it right and be happy to work with aside from schooly.com good to be home you know so we're just gonna get started on the inside of this bus the way you would first experience it and i'll go through all of the wonderful quirks and features that we built into this thing with alyssa right in the front is something really cool and super useful this is just a little um cubby cabinet for lack of a better word it exists in this zone some people were concerned that there might be an airbag here but there isn't there never was an airbag so we're good um what we did though is we went ahead and we actually added an ac outlet and alyssa is using that right now for this super cute little uh record player which is nice um and actually we hit a lot of wiring and harnesses for the backup camera system underneath this panel because these panels are actually removable in here is a whole bunch of awesome storage making use of what is really typically pretty hard space to take advantage of so that's there with a crazy door um right here we have the dimmer and controls for the first set of lights um it's gonna make the lights dim it's also gonna make them flicker on the camera but they don't flicker in real life and this is also the switch for the exterior lighting and there's a light on the side here and there's a light on the back super bright but really really pretty handy as we keep going in we've got this more amazing storage we love storage around here so this lifts up and i mean this cubby it actually extends all the way this way and all the way to about here on this side top and bottom which is really cool another fantastic feature built into this is this thing hanging right here which is actually a a pull down screen for a projector and just happen to have a projector right here and one thing that's really cool about this setup aside from the fact that it takes up almost no space we'll see if this projector is charged enough this little projector it self adjusts and auto focuses so you basically just point it at it and boom you're good to go it'll see it's focusing right there and then all you need to do is be connected to the internet and it's just like watching tv you know the battery is very low but you can get the gist of what's happening here and this happens to be the perfect distance for projecting onto it um so that's really cool as you can see the backward background is loading all the apps and stuff so super fun and it's portable it's got a really good sound system built into it and we can go from movie mode to back you know ready to drive really quickly all we got to do is unhook this and boom we're back on it pretty exciting uh really happy with how that turned out if you want to come in here a little closer i'll show you what else we've got going on on the front here we have uh the list has actually got four cameras um only three are visible because the fourth one is a front-facing camera it just came with the kit so we put it there i don't know how useful it is have you used it i actually have she's using parks okay and i'm like in for the night and i'm on public land or whatever it's a great way i can see my back my stamina so you can spy so what's really cool so this monitor gives it's there's actually a remote control too it gives you a split screen so this you can't really tell too clearly probably with this top one that's her spare tire so this is the back camera this is the blind spot on the driver's side and this is the blind spot on the passenger side and these are awesome they also have night vision which is really cool so it could be totally dark out there and you can see i mean it's black and white but you can see totally fine um which is really handy uh awesome visibility visibility's awesome uh we put the old bus rear view back up because that's a great way to keep tabs on what's going on back here and that that one [Laughter] um coming across we've got um this is a map light for uh reading maps when it's dark and it's on a dimmer it's got a am i doing that right it's got a touch switch oh there we go the dims and it also can do night light function where just the button is illuminated which is really cool and then here is the switch for the night blaster which is a a really intense light bar it's but and we made jokes about it but it's actually come in handy um on more than one occasion so maybe go you know go figure there's a reason for him um this is right here this is like a little and like so all this area typically in a short bus build is usually lost unless you do the full demo and by full demo i mean like getting rid of the front caps and this there's always like a weird thing here so you get rid of all of that and that gives you the ability to unlock all this extra storage so in here we've actually got a little kind of tech zone um you can see the there's a wii boost um the indoor module there and we actually even stuck a uh right here if if it focuses there we go that is just a separate usb port that's powered off the house batteries for charging alyssa's um wi-fi router and anything else it needs to be charged and be out of the way so what's cool is you know you close this it's gone it just also happens to be the perfect size for holding vinyl records how cool is that um great little cubby and there's just an open box up here which is nice um moving into the house this is where the transition starts on our sloped cedar ceiling because alyssa has a roof raise on this bus it's really hard to see on camera because of all the patterns and how tight and nice everything turned out which still impresses me but it's really sweet so we've got some built-in shelves here that are built in they're tied into the structure of the bus actually and a couple of outlets this is for alyssa's doorbell because the bus has a doorbell and there's yeah doorbell doorbell camera 24 7 monitoring doorbell camera security okay it's actually really cool another one of those things we're like uh but it's actually cool [Laughter] here we've got more dimmer switches we try to put all of our lights on dimmers because it's really nice so if you look here these both these control the lighting for under and then above the shelf and at night really this is like all the light you need um again it's probably flickering in the camera but it doesn't in real life so that's really nice um and then moving into this zone um this is a really cool couch that um you know was the product of some serious head scratching between me and alyssa and rachel the carpenter here and it's got some sweet functionality that i'm going to try to show you first of all is this awesome table table setup so it swivels out it's it can do pretty much any you know you can do this you can go up you can go down you can go back like that so you can do all of that stuff with the table i'm going to take the table out because it's going to be easier for me to show off the rest of what happens here so bear with me you can also take it out though so now we've got the table out of the way um here's some more cool features that it has so these drawers here actually slide all the way out as you can see and this one does the same and then if you want so what this does is imagine that table is still here now you can see three maybe four people around what was once a very small table for two and then if we take this base off and put it there we can do something really clever and we'll pop this back out and set it across here and put this cushion here in this cushion there and now it's a bed big enough for two people who really love each other or one person who is normal sized but so we figured out a way to combine a bunch of storage underneath with a couch that can sleep one to two it can seat four and it can seat four in a diner dinette booth u-shaped warm and fuzzy arrangement so this is a full-size bed really close to it i mean it's a little narrow but i think it's longer though than a full-size bed so tall skinny people love this big hit oh in the back as i go to put this away so the back is actually held in place by magnets so yeah magnets here that hold this um the back of this on also yeah so there's more storage here in these funky little backrest zones um which is really cool oops there we go and then that goes there that pops up and these lat these boxes here oh i've got the cushions flipped is that right no is that right i'll go like this there we go there we go you got it i got it and so these boxes the slides are are heavy duty slides that latch it in any out position so it'll stay out which is cool and then inside there's there we go more storage and then the last place where there's a lot of storage is right here so you can see back here we've got the diesel heater um and i did a whole video with alyssa on how to install that and um there's also the gas shut off which you can't even really see but there's a propane shut off for the water heater um and we put those on all the propane appliances so that if you have an issue with the water heater or you have an issue with the stove you can isolate that appliance and still use the rest of your propane system which is nice oh we also there's an outlet yeah for plugging in your laptop i use that every day so that's it that's the couch uh do you remember who made this this table base [Music] because everyone does the uh oh crap who's that company well there's an expensive aluminum one that i bought used actually though for for my camper and then there's this steel one which to be honest i think the steel one is a little more suited for this because alyssa's table is pretty big it's a nice little glue up we did of some walnut rachel did it actually of some extra walnut she had laying around from a project um but i like this because it's it just feels feels good you know um does it feel good it just feels good dang it gosh dang it um cool next uh i would like to show you some of the um refrigeration and cooking amenities that this bus features so one of the things we were really puzzled about when we were working on the floor plan for this was how we were going to get alissa a full-size fridge and freezer and have this general layout shape we didn't want to have any tall fridge freezer units and the side-by-sides they make which we really wanted to incorporate into this were too wide because we wanted alyssa to have a really nice wide and deep kitchen sink which if you're only going to have one sink you want to be a really good one and she didn't have in her last bus a stove with an oven and the nice thing about this unit is it has an oven but the bummer is the oven takes up space below it so we don't have the ability to come into it with a wide fridge so our solution to that was to do a our solution to that was to do like a split setup where basically um we got a full size for what alyssa's needs are stand-alone below-the-counter fridge without a freezer and then alyssa picked up an awesome iceco cooler style fridge and what we did is we built a special cabinet for it that uses the slide that comes with the fridge and built that into her under the bed systems area so you just lift up on this latch here and it's got two latches it'll latch halfway open which i don't really know why but it does that or it'll latch all the way open and what's really cool about this fridge is it actually has two different compartments so if you need the extra storage space you can have them both on and if you don't need the extra storage space you can actually turn one side of it off which is really nice and because alyssa makes uh fresh dog food from scratch for rio that gives her the ability to freeze batches of that and keep it separate from her other stuff or if she doesn't need the extra capacity she can just shut that off and it's dc and because it's a cooler style it's really efficient which is nice and so that just slides back and latches into place and you know blends right in you would never know and then right above that we had extra space so we put in this really huge i mean it's huge this really really deep drawer it keeps going just a big old drawer pantry which is nice um so the other fridge the the fridge fridge not the fridge freezer but the fridge fridge is a it's actually a commercial unit which is nice because it's really heavy duty it vents out the front of the unit which is cool if you're going to build a fridge into a cabinet and it wasn't designed for that a lot of times the efficiency plummets because it's trying to exhaust the heat from the fridge into a cabinet that's sealed so it's basically stewing in its own heat and it has to cycle a lot longer than you would like it to and that's when it uses energy so the fridge turned out great um and then right above the fridge we've got this cutting board with a removable piece of phenolic resin phenolic resin is a material made from recycled paper which is cool but it's a great cutting board surface coming down we've got propane range with cool blue lights um the nice thing about this is that when it's closed like this you get your counter space back or if you want to use it you just flip it back like that and voila it's a stove um the only beef i have with this is that the glass rattles like when you're going down the road sometimes and it's like hello you made this for an rv why does it do that hello nobody knows why and then we've got the oven with a little light in there below that we have a couple more drawers of storage which is really nice and then the rounding out the kitchen side of things on the lower end is the sink with a water pump that's off a sink with a a really deep basin which is nice sorry get my thoughts on a little bit it's all good um there you go there we go uh yeah with a sink the sink has a really deep basin which is nice so it doesn't splash as much a lot of folks go with the shallow sink but like the splashes they splash and that's a bummer underneath the cabinet we did some more of our dimmable rope lighting underneath the cabinet we did some more of our dimmable rope lighting which we're really into around here because it's basically invisible and we had some extra length left over so alyssa drilled a hole and put it up here because isn't that nice that's why built-in microwave up top which is a great way to heat food it uses very little energy um and then some more storage in these uppers up here so kitchen in this bus is really awesome for how small it is it really um it really has been super functional for alyssa uh i have to talk about the ceiling of this bus because it's really cool um we did you know the cedar that everyone's doing but we uh decided to go across the width of the bus and use the thin the thinness of the cedar uh to our advantage so it would take the curve which is really cool the thing that made that challenging is because this roof raise has a transition so from here to here we lose how high did you go 12 8 so from here to here we lose 8 inches and you can almost tell but we have uh ben had a stockpile of some really beautiful straight grain cedar and we milled a little piece to cover the gap here which you probably can't even see and then we ran it down and then right here ben was able to get a nice um curved cut on the on these two pieces which i'm sure you can't see in the video either uh to take that curve out uh but really the cool thing about this ceiling um it's lightweight it was affordable it was quick to install uh you just have to you know kind of understand what the wood is going to want to do and how it's going to resist being bent and just be careful but it's totally something anybody can pull off especially if you do enough strapping that you can get enough fasteners in there the strapping is the framing that we run in the bus so turned out really great i'm super happy with it and bugs hate cedar it's moisture resistant that's awesome and i have to talk about the max air fan which boy do they have a market on the fans because i've lived with a fantastic vent and that thing sucked i mean it was fine but it kind of sucked because it was the one the rain sensor and if it rained and the sensor didn't detect it you got wet or if the sensor got wet but the rain was long gone it would not let it operate and that was obnoxious so i went to a max air and my max error worked for about two years and then it just went haywire on me one day and that sucked because it was about 350 bucks and uh but boy when it works is it good alyssa had the same freaking experience but it only took hers three months two and a half months to crap out um something goes on in the logic board we don't know but it quits it starts coming on randomly it starts beeping which is a bummer because they literally are the best and they're still not that great but they're so much better than a max air or than a fantastic vent and infinitely better than having nothing i mean alyssa's last build didn't even have a vent which in my humble opinion is inexcusable but you know we weren't the shop that built it so but uh these like i mean it's like having air conditioning in this in the spring and fall like you she's probably not going to need them any split if she's got this going so whatever you're doing max there just fix that thing you know whatever causes it to do that thing fix it please because they're this top of the line model is about 350 dollars so but it is cool because it's got a thermostat so it maintains a temperature automatically you can leave it on in the rain it's reversible so it can suck in or blow out and you can also close the lid but leave the fan on and it works as like a ceiling fan which is cool i guess i've never used that feature but it's kind of it seems cool so this guy running on high is pulling i believe it's 1200 cubic feet a minute of air uh alyssa's bus is the footprint here what are we at like 150 square feet just over 100 oh 100 square feet times we'll say the ceilings are an average of seven feet tall so say say we have 700 cubic feet of air in here it's probably much less because there's furniture and objects so that means that every minute this is changing out doing a complete change out of the air in the bus which is pretty amazing so if you have this thing exhausting and the only window open is the one by the bed you feel a heck of a breeze coming across the bed which is if you can imagine you know on a hot summer day getting into bed feeling the cool breeze i mean that's nice you know it's great almost perfect so follow me and we'll come into uh what might be one of my favorite parts of the bus which is this awesome wet bath we've done wet baths before but i think this one turned out maybe the best of all of them we've got a custom stainless shower pan that has a raised section for the nature's head composting toilet which is nice because it helps keep water from pooling around that and then alyssa picked out some really cool tile uh for the walls and um she turned us on to this new product well it's not a new product but on to using epoxy grout it just happened to be the only grout that was in the color we wanted but it is a really amazing product it um it's so much stronger and more adhesive than conventional sanded grout and um it's also more flexible and it's totally waterproof so with conventional grout you often have to seal it after you install it well with this product you just put it on and you actually have a longer working time which is cool if you've ever done regular tile you know you're wiping that tile down as fast as you put that grout on and you might only have 15 30 minutes tops with this grout i think it was two hours of uh working time which is really nice and we were able to kind of fancy and do the tile around the window here and there's a really lovely piece of custom stained glass in here that we were able to tile around and yeah it's just it's a very awesome shower it's i'm six foot one and it's totally spacious for me and it's hard to convey the depth here um available to it but it's over it's over five feet from here to the back wall there so you know it looks like this stuff will just get soaked when the shower shower's on but it really doesn't like you you really would have to try to get that wet um which is really nice it also doesn't really matter if the nature's head toilet gets wet so you know there's that um we've got the urine diverter hooked up to the nature's head and we're using a hepvo waterless trap there and there's been some discussion i've been a part of on the internet about how long those seem to last we've installed a lot of them and have not had any reports of issues but there are folks out there that say that over time with repeated exposure to urine they break down and stop working so maybe they need to drink more water or maybe it is an issue and people just aren't catching it so alyssa's gonna keep an eye on it for us and i always get to clean it with my yeah what's really handy is there's a bidet there's a bidet right here so it actually is really handy though because you can just rinse the bowl out after every use 25 bucks a year if you only get a year out of it not a big deal so back here we have um alyssa's wardrobe which has we've got a gasket around it but again because it's an overlay door it's super hard to get water in there i mean i don't think anything's gotten wet in the two months that she's been living in here so that's great and then behind these clothes you can't see is the dc fuse block for all of her dc 12 volt stuff and the ac breaker panel just like you would have in your house for the ac stuff she doesn't really ever need to get to it so kind of buried it made these cute little doors butterfly handles um but it's an awesome wet bath i i seriously think it's probably one of my favorite bathrooms that we've done because it's so functional and i mean just look at it you know it's cute it's really pretty i almost forgot there's this one mod i love doing to nature's heads and that is if if you'll notice we've got this really cute vintage knob here nature's heads don't come with any knob so to open it you got to stick your fingernails under and like lift up the lid and that's just uncomfortable and gross to me so alyssa had an extra knob and this is something i did on my bus too and i just stuck it right on the end so uh there it is love that mod and by the way these are great they're expensive but i mean they're awesome i lived with my last one for over five years and i still have it it's going in my camper and um you know you do you with your poo but um i'm super happy with them it's money well spent in my opinion to get you out of um you know doing something that doesn't have a built-in agitator or a belt-in vent fan or a built-in urine diverter so and the cool thing about that is because it's not made out of wood like some other composting toilets available it can go in a wet bath and it's totally fine to be submerged which also means that because it's plastic you can totally clean it you can clean it in a sanitary way however with composting toilets you don't want to use bleach because it kills the enzymes that break down your poop but you know if something got gnarly and you need to kind of start fresh that's something you can do so i and i'm not paid by nature's head i just like them so this is always kind of my favorite part of the build it's where all the systems are in this bus um it's something that we specialize in around here and i'm very proud of how well these uh have a tendency to work for people and since we're you know taking a tour of this bus after alyssa's been in it for a couple of months um i can tell you exactly how well it's been doing for her and the answer is very well uh so we'll just start at the top and work our way down so we're sitting here on this bed platform the uh platform the way that we generally make them um is with steel uh one by twos going across and so it's a totally clear span below which is nice it gives us a lot of flexibility for our layout and then working our way from the top down sitting right here on this top level we've got our three 24 volt lithium iron phosphate batteries these are from bigbattery.com they've got an integrated bms and the bms is the battery management system so it manages the temperature you know it'll cut the batteries on and off depending on if they're too hot or too cold um over current protection for the batteries and also over and under voltage which is great because it's going to prevent those batteries from being damaged or you know worst case you know potentially starting a fire or something next to the batteries we have alyssa's tankless water heater this is one designed for an rv we really like to use vented propane appliances the distinction between vented and ventless a ventless propane water heater will just vent the exhaust gas right into your living space so it's ventless it's not vented to the outside world whereas a vented unit like this one is totally separate all the combustion gases go to the outside and the big advantage there aside from it being safer is that all the condensation that is in the exhaust of the burning propane because anytime you burn a hydrocarbon one of the byproducts is water any of the moisture in the exhaust goes outside the bus so if she's somewhere very cold it will minimize the amount of condensation she gets on her windows right next to that we have the water pump and we try to keep this as accessible as possible because the water pump itself has a strainer on it to catch any particulate that might suck up from the tank and really all of this stuff we tried to make as accessible as possible so we've got it opened up you know in like service mode and all we have to do to get to this point is unmake the bed take the mattress off and lift this piece of plywood off the top so you don't even need tools and instantly we have total access to all of her core electrical systems and core water systems the pump the water heater and then below this is the tank which i'll talk about in a second moving on from the batteries which are you know at the heart of the electrical system we've got a complement of all victron equipment which is how we typically run so we've got our lynx distributor that handles all of our over current protection to the various devices we've got our smart solar charge controller our serbo gx and lastly the multi-plus 3000 volt amp inverter the only non victron piece in here is the sterling and that's because um you know we want to have the ability to charge off of the alternator and victron makes a product called an orion just for that however they only go up to 30 amps and the sterling goes up to 70 amps which is the equivalent of about 900 watts so melissa's driving if this is working she's getting 900 watts from the alternator which is really great because in a pinch if she needs to start the bus to charge her batteries she can do it pretty quick so all that's back here um oh the last thing i didn't mention is we also integrated a small battery charger that keeps her starting batteries topped off which is really crucial especially for a 7-3 alyssa's been able to cold start her bus down as like like 10 degrees zero degrees zero degrees she's been able to start this bus at zero degrees and that is definitely only going to be possible well you need to live a good clean life and like make a sacrifice to the bus gods but you also really need to have batteries that are fully charged and ready to go and anyone who's lived in cold weather can tell you that when these batteries starting batteries get cold their performance declines and so if you keep them topped up you're going to get the best performance out of them when things are running so anyway this is a this is something i just love showing off there the 100 gallon water tank is what all of this is sitting on top of we built you know a box a heavy duty cabinet over all of it but her hundred gallon water tank is directly below all of this so all of her big systems are just comprised of this one zone under her bed and um yeah we were very pleased with how how this all came to rest we used every every little inch that we could to make it work so we'll put this away and we'll keep on going with the tour all it takes to get this back into living mode you just drop this cover back down there it's a nice snug fit and then we've got some of this um what's this stuff called den dry den or uh yeah i think it is dendrite dendrite [Laughter] so yeah it sounds like a hair like dandruff so this is a matte this is something interesting though to show here's here's a good angle on it it's these tiny like um textured bumps that allow airflow to happen uh and it prevents the uh there's if you spend enough time online you'll see people who have uh who get moldy mattresses or mildewy mattresses because our bodies are always you know exuding moisture and a lot of times those people also have you know maybe a ventless propane heater in there or something else that's contributing lots of moisture to the air and yeah it's really gross and it's really really dangerous it's unhealthy for you so that stuff seems to work good no mold yet huh no but she's also only been in colorado where it's beautiful and dry so well this is good because some people are asking on my videos why you didn't do slacks right we don't do slats because you should do a mat don't do a slack do a map we just need the structural integrity there because we're doing a clear span so slats aren't really on the table for us cool you don't know what to do can i move you can i slide you there you go freaking dog here okay so um right here is the control zone for all of the systems on the bus what's handy is that uh you can it's easy to get to from this area or from bed so if you're in bed and you want to know what's going on with your electrical system your batteries your diesel heater just come over here and you take a look so what we've got here is our viktron classic touch 50. everybody's doing it great but it's a very easy thing to interpret and understand you don't have to really have much of an understanding of solar or off-grid energy systems to know what this is telling you and that's why we like to install them really superior to anything else available on the market right now that might change but yeah nobody can really touch it here we've got the sea level tank monitor show you the fresh level here the gray level um there is no black tank and then her propane which is pretty interesting so liz has been using this in the middle of winter like the coldest days of winter for um two months more than more than almost almost three months and she's only down to 72 percent on her propane which backs up my idea that her propane tank will last you close to a year depending on how many pies she makes and then here is a switch for the water pump because you know you want to turn it off the chinese diesel heater control is here not much to go over on that these are awkwardly made with confusing interfaces and you just have to take the time to understand how they work and then you'll be very happy with them but if you don't understand things like the fueling table where you adjust the fuel rate based on your altitude and if you don't understand the fact that you really should only run them on high or they will sit up unless you have those two things in your head you're going to probably have issues with them at least from both of our experience but this thing has been pretty dead on reliable for her the only issue it had was our fault because when she first left the shop we didn't adjust the fuel table even though i knew that we should have and it suited up and it took some finesse to bring it back online but uh i mean she was running that down into like negative 20 degrees fahrenheit um and it didn't quit she she was using anti-gel in the fuel which is essential because if your fuel gels up you're screwed but uh it was mean it was having really no trouble maintaining it like 70 75 degrees in here like as warm as she wanted to be which is amazing um i was running that every day for two and a half months yeah every day so keep it on high and keep your fuel tables specked to where you're at and you'll be a happy camper back here we have a really nice stained glass which is obviously the same one as in the bathroom and then further back here and i would get farther into bed but i'm filthy we have a little cubby so there's a dimmer here for that light and then there is an outlet with usb ports for charging and this is like you know big enough for a glass of water and your phone and whatever else you feel like which is really nice oh hi yeah and i did want to before we go from here i did want to say that so alyssa's been living in this at altitudes from between nine and ten and a half thousand feet in temperatures as literally as cold as negative 20 like sustained negative 20 for overnight and in days at a time and the only issues that we've had were the gray water lines freezing because they're outside of the bus and that didn't even happen until it was like quite cold like well below freezing um yeah it happened around zero degrees yeah zero degrees uh and we've since installed a gray water tank heater because we didn't know alyssa was gonna be so hardcore and usually people don't really have an issue um but she was like no because her last bus didn't let her get out in the same way that this one does and it really in my opinion highlights like you can do a bus and leave the stock insulation in the stock windows and you will definitely have one kind of rig you know and you can totally have a lot of fun with it or you can build one like this which is more work and more money for sure and you'll get something that is kind of insane in how in terms of how well it can provide shelter for you um during the daytime i mean so the outdoor temps you know we're hovering around zero to ten degrees and you said like just the sun on the bus was enough to keep it warm for the most part during the day and that's because of all the insulation and the steps we've taken to mitigate you know the cold getting into the bus so replacing the door doing different windows and the spray foam insulation so she's got a bust that outperforms pretty much any camper you can get for sure and uh or pre-made thing and uh it's just a totally different ball game compared to a bus conversion that leaves all that stuff um it'll be cool to see in the summer how this holds up i'm sure it's gonna be great too um and uh yeah it's just really exciting uh oh in the solar system god how could i forget this so it was a really interesting opportunity to see you know we build these solar systems and we design them to the best of our comprehension and imagination of what she's going to be experiencing but until you're out there living it's really hard to get a sense of what's going on and we noticed the you know the first week that she was gone i was able to on my phone see her energy usage even though i wasn't there which was really cool and it looked like she was having a lot like using way too much electricity uh than we were expecting and we found out that the mini split even though she wasn't using it when it's really cold it goes into a mode where it kind of like keeps itself ready to go and uses about 40 watts of energy and makes this like sound that sounds like dripping water so we thought there was a leak and that she had a battery or electrical draw that wasn't making sense until we just turned the breaker off because again the mini split was powered off as far as we could tell we actually turned the breaker off and that got rid of a 40 watt draw which 40 watts doesn't sound like much but when it's on 24 7 it's actually a lot it's over a kilowatt hour of energy usage a day which is significant that's you know she's only got 13 kilowatt hours in her battery bank and if you're using only if you're using one a day on nothing that's stupid so we troubleshooted that and we put her ice co on eco mode which we had been running it on like maximum mode and i don't know what's the difference if it's cold i don't know um we did that and then it was pretty amazing because she was on a sunny day she'll use to you know in a 24-hour period she'll use about 20 of her battery and then uh on a sunny day she'll make back like around or no do i get that backwards she uses about 10 of her battery and then on a sunny day she'll make 20 back so this is in the dead of like literally in january when the nights are the longest um so basically every day she can you know in bad conditions only bringing in maximum of about 600 watts even though she's got 12 or 1300 on the roof only 600 watts she's able to make back all of her usage plus 10 a day um which is really conserving and that's yeah she wasn't trying to do anything special so if she parks somewhere with full batteries she's got about four ish days uh before her batteries are drained but if it's sunny out um she can just maintain indefinitely easily uh and that's that's really cool that's like right where we want to be some people say um would say this battery bank is too big for the panels on the roof and i would say it doesn't matter what size battery bank you have as long as you are making more than you use it doesn't matter the batteries just help you average that out so i fail to understand that logic it's maybe someone can comment on how i'm mistaken there but i don't think i am anyway so i guess after my long-winded rant about uh solar stuff which is always how it seems to go i think i've realized i've covered um everything i wanted to talk about in this build which um it's the last full build that we'll be doing uh in this shop with this crew of people and so it's definitely um it's very special to me and you know being good friends with alyssa and just knowing how much it means to her it's you know it's been a very special project so i hope that watching this video has given you some ideas for your own build and things that you might be doing in the future and you know this is all about sharing things that we think are cool and i think this turned out really really well so thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Chuck Cassady

Views: 315,450

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Id: PQyy2jQEuaY

Length: 60min 50sec (3650 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022