We are KJ & James. We have been traveling around the US and Canada for the last 2+ years in our self converted camper van. On our blog, we share articles about Van Lifestyle, Van Build tutorials, and troubleshooting!
Insulating your van will be one of the first things you do in your build and it is a VERY important step in the process!
There is a vast range of options that you can use to insulate your van ranging from cheap DIY to high dollar hiring a professional. This post goes over 5 of the different insulation options available (there are more) but it will provide you with one from each price category.
When considering how you want to insulate your van, the first question you need to answer is where are you primarily going to spend your time? Will you be chasing the fair and warm weather all year long or do you plan to spend time in cold climates? And even if you plan to stay in warm weather, the evenings get chilly to near freezing in arid/dry climates. Another thing to consider is if you will be traveling with a pet. Pets do not regulate temperature the same as humans, so keep them in mind when deciding too. It is important to note that adding insulation later will be extremely difficult or impossible so spend some serious time considering your options.
An important thing to know when looking at insulation is what the heck an R-value is. An R-value is a measure of how well the insulation works at inhibiting heat transfer (heat coming into cold spaces or cold coming into warm spaces). All R values listed here are for an inch of thickness (except for Reflectix and Thinsulate).
Let’s dive into the options!
There is a vast range of options that you can use to insulate your van ranging from cheap DIY to high dollar hiring a professional. The list below is only a sampling of options available, but it will provide you with one from each price category.
For our build, we knew we were not planning to just chase warm weather so we needed to keep the van toasty in the winter and tolerable in the summer heat. To be able to keep the van warm in the winter, we needed a high R-value. Even though spray foam has the highest R-Value, we decided not to use it because we were using the van as we were building it. From our remaining options, we decided to go with a combination of three different materials: Thinsulate, EPS Foam Board, and Reflectix.
We used the EPS on our floors and then Thinsulate and Reflectix on the walls and ceiling. We estimate that we were able to achieve R7.5 for the floors and R8.0 for walls and ceiling. All of our insulating materials came to around $1,000 which seems like a lot of money to put into part of the van you will never see. However, on those cold nights or when your van is tolerable until 2 pm in the mid-summer heat, you will thank “past you” for putting in some time and money to properly insulate your van early on.
For more van related content checkout out out website Stokeloafvan
We are KJ & James. We have been traveling around the US and Canada for the last 2+ years in our self converted camper van. On our blog, we share articles about Van Lifestyle, Van Build tutorials, and troubleshooting!
More from Stoke Loaf Van
There are many options for paid places to stay (hotels, campgrounds, hostels, harvest host, Airbnb…etc) but what if you’re on a budget and want to camp for free?? The good news is there are alot of options for free camping! However, even with plenty of places to camp, after 1.5 years on the road we still find the task of finding a new free campsite every night is the most stressful/annoying part of van life. We always find a spot, but sometimes it can take some searching! Hopefully, the information we share here can help anyone new to (or interested in) life on the road find camping with less stress/anxiety!
Figuring out how to make money while traveling or living on the road is the number one hurdle for most people interested in van life. It seems impossible because we’re only taught and raised to work the standard way. However, there are alot of ways to make money remotely whether its working for yourself or a company. It takes a lot of hard work, motivation and focus to work remotely but you can absolutely do it.
When we first broke the news that we were going to be hitting the road, one of the first questions our parents asked was “How are you going to get mail?”. Personally, this is something that we weren’t too concerned about. Legit, I think we only checked our mailbox when we were expecting packages. We pay most of our bills online and all of our accounts are set to paperless billing so we didn’t think there was a huge need for a way to get physical mail. Turns out, after being out on the road for a while, we have found there are a handful of things that do require a real mailing address; voting ballots, car insurance, etc. Thankfully, there are a few options for getting mail and packages while on the road. Check out the list below to see which option we went with and why,
This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase an item through one of these links we will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. A hot topic among people getting ready to hit the road is “How will I get reliable internet on the road??”. I know it is something we were both really concerned about and we had a few things in place when we hit the road but it was surprising how many areas of the west have patchy or no service. Through some trial and error, we’ve acquired a small collection of tech gear that allows us to stay connected just about anywhere. We will share our experience and tips so you can skip the trial and error portion of figuring out the internet on the road!
Finding out how to properly insure your van is CRITICAL! You have put alot of time and money into your conversion so you want to make sure the whole thing is covered!. When we were looking to insure our van we heard a lot of conflicting information when it comes to getting insurance for converted vans. The world of vehicle insurance can be confusing, so in this post we’re going to share how we went about getting insurance on our van. This doesn’t make us experts in the field but hopefully it can help you out when you need to get insurance on your van.
Where to find drinking water to fill your tanks is a common concern both for aspiring and full time vanlifers. There is safe water out there to fill up with and there are different filters you can use to take out sediment, bacteria and viruses from the water as well. We travel in the United States so we can only speak to the availability of clean drinking water here. After living on the road for over a year, we’ve found some places consistently supply safe water and we want to share the 6 different places we always check so you can easily find safe drinking water!
Why we chose the Ford Transit for vanlifestokeloafvan. The pivotal question that is at the start of everyone’s van life dream is which van is the right van for me? Each person’s, couple’s, or families’ situation and needs are going to be unique, therefore, preferences are going to vary widely. There are many vehicles that can be converted into a tiny home on wheels like vans. school buses, box trucks, and step trucks. For this post, we are only going to be focusing on the van category and the top 3 most common makes/models: the Ford Transit, the Dodge/Ram Promaster, and the Mercedes Sprinter.