Winter Van Life Staying Warm in a Car, Van or RV

everyone welcome back to my next video i want to talk to you today about heat and it's not going to be in my normal video about heat normally we just talk about propane heaters don't we and i know a lot of you cannot use propane heaters there are a number of reasons that propane won't work for you i know people who are actually allergic to it and other people who are simply afraid of it and they do not want it in their vehicle so for you you need an alternative to propane heat i also know people who are in their cars or suvs and you don't have the clearances clear uh propane heaters have to have a certain amount of space around them sides front and above and in a car you may just simply can't get enough clearance and if you don't have enough clearance you're at a severe risk of fire um you can just get vent for carbon monoxide that's not a problem but fire risk from clearances is a severe problem and uh beyond beyond that it's the space they take up so the small space doesn't allow clearances and you just don't have room in a car or suv to carry around a propane tank or green bottles and and and the heater itself there just isn't room it's not it's not a practical solution and even in a larger vehicle they're expensive you know even if you're in a van you have the room uh and the clearances but another issue is their expense they're expensive you know any the cheapest of any of the mr little buddy heaters are like 70 bucks that's about the cheapest you can get one and then you have to buy propane if you buy them in the green bottles the green bottles is a minimum three four dollars and up to eight ten ten dollars you can pay for those things in certain places so to buy it and then to run it and you're going to need really the only cheap way to do it is to buy a bulk bottle and then you've got a bulk bottle you're buying um and the smart is the more expensive it is bizarrely 70 80 100 bucks for some of the small bottles um the middle the middle size 20 pound bottles are usually going to be about 40 but even that's kind of expensive it takes up a lot of space it has a smell an odor it's risky and a lot of you just don't want propane these are alternatives to propane no propane heat to be discussed today so uh first and i'm just going to do this is an overview today of what we're going to talk about in the series and because i can't talk about them all in once first we're going to talk about how to kind of create heat you um you're in your car i'll use a car as a specific example uh and you don't want to just keep driving starting the engine and running the heater all the time that gets expensive it wears out your engine so what do you do well first we'll look at ways to create heat in your car and i have uh three ways here in front of me this is a this is a 110 volt um [Music] electric blanket it's we're going to test to see how much solar it requires to see if you have enough solar and enough battery and then the next one is uh this is a 12 volt cigarette lighter plug blanket we're going to compare three of these against each other we're going to see how much they draw how about do they give out a practical amount of heat can you practically use one of these to stay warm uh and so we'll test those and we'll we'll see we'll find out everything we can as best we can and then finally a third source of heat is candles so i have three different types of candle here this is an emergency candle um this is a stansport and they they make big ones you know and we have some big ones did i bring those out i didn't bring those out but i have some big ones we're going to test we're going to see how cost effective are they i mean the candles are expensive this one this little candle was uh ten dollars and it runs up to eighteen hours so that might be if we ran up four hours a day and one of these was enough uh four four sixteen you would get about four days out of this ten dollars that's um 250 a day and is is gonna get any practical amount of heat out of this thing i don't know we're gonna find out that's what we're gonna test another thing we're gonna test is a uh yuko is the brand name they're pretty famous and well known they make candle heaters uh specifically candle heaters and so we're gonna test this candle heater um you'll and this one's actually the lantern but it puts out the same amount of heat and so uh you've probably seen these or heard of these it's a little candle lantern and it comes with three different candles and we're going to test this and they make these that are designed to be heaters that are designed uh like with three different candles going at once there are a lot of videos online about people who use these heaters candle heaters you can always do your there's a do-it-yourself one where you do the terra cotta pots and you put a hole through the bottom and you do bolts and and you know they're pretty elaborate uh and they might work and there there are videos online of people that say they do work and so to the best of my reasonable ability we're going to test them another four source of heat these are for chafing dish these is this is made by gas one which um you know a lot of us are using gas one the little butane heaters so these are made by gas one uh should be good quality they claim that each one of these will run for six hours and they cost a little over two dollars so if you ran one of these every night that would cost you about two dollars a day for heat uh over over a month if you use it one a day every day for a month that'd be about sixty dollars so 60 70 something like that that's not cheap but uh which might make your life so much better than the uh than being without it that you might be worth 70 dollars to you you're not paying 700 a month for rent if you so have to spend seventy dollars for heat that's still not a bad deal in fact in your house where you're paying seven hundred a thousand fifteen hundred dollar a month for your rent uh you're probably already paying hundreds of dollars in the winter for heat a lot of you are and so you know when you think about in that term those terms spending 70 dollars to to heat with a candle starts to seem more more reasonable if it works and it may or may not work uh we'll find that out so these are sources of things we're going to look at that create heat and you're you'll have more heat at the end of the night than you would have had if you hadn't used these okay now next we're going to talk about if you're not creating heat how do you stay as warm as you possibly can inside your car your suv your van even particularly a minivan or even a van how do you stay warm in there if you're not creating heat in some method well you have to keep it close to you part of that will be i if you can you want to try and make a tent and i'm hoping to do an experiment with creating a tent so that you can find the space and then i think you might want to combine different methods so we're going to look at different blankets because different blankets now i'm assuming you all have your own blank blankets your own bedding i would encourage all of you when you leave your home to start van dwelling just take the blankets you have at home they're fine you don't need to go and buy anything else but chances are they you know they're designed for a house that stays above 68 70 degrees all the time they're not really going to be warm enough so you might think about getting better blankets now i'm not talking about keeping warm at night i'm assuming you're just going to pile on blankets or you're going to buy a quality sleeping bag that's a topic for another another video that's not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is when the sun goes down in the winter it's going to go down by five 5 30 at the latest depending on on the on your if you're in daylight savings or not 4 30 if you're on daylight savings and 5 30 when you're off and so you got to go till 10 30. most of us are going to stay up until 10 30. you got to be in your rig for about five or six hours every night uh and and stay warm in your rig i don't want to just sit in there bundled up in my sleeping bag because that's the only way i can be warm we're looking for a way to get away from that by creating heat the ways we just talked about and by bundling up in different blankets so the first uh first blanket we'll look at is wool probably not many of you have a real wool blanket this is a fairly well we're not going to talk about them now but this is a wool blanket and wool keeps you warm when it's damp and it does a remarkably good job of that it's really a good heat source and so when you're just you're not adding heat you're just keeping your own heat close so we're going to actually test a wool blanket is it better not exactly sure how i can do that that's not subjective i'll just tell you when i grew up in alaska i lived all my life in alaska and we moved there when i was six years old and i slept in cold places it was just routine um and so we always had wool blankets well back then it was this was 1961. i grew up until i lived at home you know until the 70s and then we always had a wool blanket on our beds and they were heavy and i really loved the feeling of that heaviness and they are warm they're fantastically warm for the weight and uh so we're gonna test what a blanket this is a puffy blanket i'm gonna oh do we'll do a test on it so this is a down this is not down it's a down alternative but it also uh has snaps so it's a throw it's really not a blanket as such it's a blanket you wrap it around you and has snaps and you can wear it as a poncho and that might work out really well in those dark cold evenings at night while you're waiting to go to bed so there are two types of blankets we're going to test but that's where this might go in conjunction with your candles so the candles aren't going to keep your van at 70 degrees or even 68 degrees you'd be lucky if on a cold night it kept it at 50 anywhere in the 50s so these two will be working together mostly i believe you're going to want to add some heat but if not and then of course normally you're going to have to wear a hat you're going to have to wear a hoodie and you're going to uh we'll also talk about down booties because you can't keep your feet warm and so down booties will keep your feet warm we'll talk about that and then one more thing i want to talk about that goes in conjunction with this because this is only retaining your own body heat i'm not counting a lot out of candles we'll see something else you might think about and we're going to test are hot water bottles and these are both a different kinds of hot water bottle these are the cheap ones this was 10 bucks it comes what you're seeing here is it comes with its own cover so that when you lay it on you or you're laying on it it's not that hot uh fabric uh usually these are kind of a plastic pvc type thing and it's not right up against your skin this is a much higher quality one we're gonna do an unboxing later um and unbagging and uh it's actually rubber but it still comes with its cover so that you're gonna be much more comfortable it's not gonna be directly on you so i think that might be something to do really well so when you get your water hot and you put it in here uh then you're going to be adding some heat into your rig so you're not going to run it for a long time because in a in a car particularly in a car an suv you don't want to run that for hours at a time to keep you warm although it would definitely do it but flame open flame inside um a rig is a really risky things you just got to run it for a while you're going to fill these full of water you're going to put them on you maybe one on your chest one on your feet and then you're going to cover up with these blankets and so that might be a combination that will keep you pretty darn comfortable a little bit of heat added by warming up the water and then the this on you and then i would if or me and i were going to use this i would dump that water out then i wouldn't dump it outside i'd put it in a container warm up water in another container and you just keep reusing the water over and over again because we don't that's a lot of water if you just throw it out every night so that's kind of the idea we're looking at we're scr we're going to kind of scavenge together heat in different sources maybe from a candle and a hot water bottle and and better blankets and we'll just see if all of them together can work and be a replacement for uh for that propane because a lot of you don't want propane you can't have propane for whatever reason so i i hope this will work i know it's important to a lot of you to figure this out so i'm going to make it as as a scientific and experiment eliminate as many variables as i can and i've got a limited amount of time and energy and resources and capabilities so i'll just do my best uh all along the way so i hope you come back and you watch some of these videos and and see how they work out and um these are all things for you to consider and i'll do the testing first to hopefully find out the ones that i just think don't work at all or hey this worked surprisingly well or this one seemed like a good idea it was a terrible idea so we'll just find out together okay so if you got anything out of this video like us on youtube subscribe to the channel hit that thumbs up button and we'll talk to you later bye now you

Channel: CheapRVliving

Views: 87,071

Keywords: car, van, RV, Full-time, nomad, camper, camp, boondock, travel, caravan, tiny, house, RTR, Bob Wells, Nomadland, CheapRVLiving, Cheap RV Living, vanlife, van life, how to live in a van, van dwelling, van tour, van conversion, living in a van, camper van, van build, diy van build, sprinter van, van living, #vanlife, van dweller, campervan, vandwelling, diy camper van, RV Life, Living in an RV, Class B, Class C, Truck Living, Living in a car, boondocking, Living in a RV

Id: Te4cxt_Adv0

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022