Winter Is Here

A consequence of staying in Arkansas for the foreseeable future is dealing with colder weather than in Arizona. I’m putting all of my tips for staying warm to use, except for driving someplace warm, because Melissa wouldn’t be able to come with me. I didn’t originally design this van for anything colder than the Arizona desert, which doesn’t get that cold. Last night got down to 22ºF outside, beyond any cold I’ve experienced in the van before. I’m learning what works and how to make other things work.

After spending a few hours in the house for Thanksgiving dinner, the van was 45º inside when I got back. The diesel heater made short work of that, heating it up quickly inside and then sustaining a comfortable temperature at a lower setting. For the first time, I left the heater on overnight. I haven’t done it before, not because it’s unsafe, but because even on its lowest setting, it gets too hot in here. This heater pulls in, burns, and exhausts air from outside the van and doesn’t use up oxygen from the inside the way propane heaters do. Even with outside temperatures in the 20s, it stayed in the 60s inside, which is perfectly comfortable for sleeping. As far as I know, the heater remained on its lowest setting all night, which means it can pump out a lot more heat if it has to in even colder temperatures.

My biggest concern right now is my batteries. LiFePO4 batteries can not accept a charge at a temperature below freezing. You can get batteries with built-in heaters to prevent this, but I chose not to pay extra for this feature. I spent winters in the Arizona desert and never intended to camp where it would be cold enough for that to be a problem, so I figured I’d never need heated batteries.

That’s biting me in the butt right now. While the living space air is warm, the batteries showed a temperature in the high 30s. I can’t let them get colder than that, and without built-in heaters, I have to resort to other methods. My electrical stuff is in an area closed off from the rest of the van, though I used pegboard to allow ventilation. It’s on the floor, where it’s colder than closer to the roof, despite me running both roof vent fans on a low setting to blow warm air down (vents closed, of course).

The main problem is that the batteries are on the floor in an effort to keep the heaviest things in the van as low as possible. Aside from the rubber mat covering the entire floor of the van, there is no floor insulation. I didn’t need it for Arizona winters, but now the cold is getting transferred from the floor into the batteries. A couple of years ago, I picked up a perfectly good doormat left in a fire ring in California. I’m going to put that under the batteries to help insulate them from the cold floor. I can take other measures, like actual insulation around them if I need to, but this is something I can do immediately that should help. Of course, if I was buying batteries for the van today, I would absolutely get batteries with built-in heaters so I wouldn’t have to worry about this. Since the van is plugged into the house, the extra power these heaters would use is not a concern at all while parked here.

The other thing that can freeze is water. Normally, I have two or three seven-gallon water cubes filled up and just switch them out when one runs out. I only have room for one of them inside, the one I am actively using, and I can’t keep the extra ones outside if they’re going to freeze. I’ll have to cut back to only using one of them. Fortunately, we have access to water from the house, so I don’t need to carry as much with me as when I’m traveling. An extra gallon of water leftover from our last trip to visit Melissa’s family in Texas saved me from a morning without coffee, so I’ll keep that filled up as well to tide me over in case of a coffee emergency like I had this morning.

Some other minor issues exist as well. My composting toilet has stopped separating liquids from solids. This would ruin the compost if I was actually composting in it, but it is still quite an inconvenience. We can use the bathroom in the house, but that now requires a walk in the cold, which wakes you right up in the middle of the night when you’re trying to sleep. Also, my LED light strips seem to not enjoy these trips to Texas. My original ones almost completely stopped working after the first one. I replaced them, and the replacements developed the same problem on our most recent trip. I have yet another set on the way, and I plan to change the way I install them so the strips don’t bend around corners or twist in transitions between the side wall and under the shelves. The main issue is that it’s dark for so much of the day now that I either have a tiny bit of light from the few LED strips that still work, or am blinded by the white puck lights on the ceiling that I installed mainly as work lights, not the ambient hanging out lights I need most of the time.

I’m learning as I go and making what changes I can so things work better in the colder temperatures than I designed this van to handle. It’s mainly the diesel heater that’s saving me since its heat output mostly makes up for my shortcomings in insulation. None of these problems are problems that can’t be solved. It’s just a learning process.