Before i ever heard of these I wrapped micro bore copper pipe around my exhaust and inulated it so FREE hot water and it keeps the exhaut heat down! The water gets PIPING hot. If I fit one of these as well I will be able to fit a BATH in my van.....
Yeah we have thought about adding an EGR cooler to the exhaust to reclaim some of that heat too, but we've found it quite efficient for our setup at the moment so far. Maybe something we'll explore in the future 😛
Nice to see a couple working well together... I like your motorhome idea. You're young and will have a great future ahead of you both... together 🙏 Me 70, and my partner -2 on me..😂 Still would like to convert my LDV 400... But she says.... Probably better to buy one already made...😂 Have fun in yours. We are in Spain...so the regulations are very strict.. bummer
Thank you very much, and hope you're both able to enjoy some van adventures together whether you build one or buy one. It did take a long time to build ours so there were definitely days where we questioned what we were doing! All the best 😊
You are a very good joiner electrician plumber and stats for nerds young man .. this is a one top quality build.. I’m binge watching 2-3 a night . I find it very satisfying.
I've missed the videos recently so it's great to see you back, great job on the van tech and also on the video, really entertaining and informative. I honestly think this must be one of the best conversions I've seen on RUclips
I am always in complete awe when seeing your dedication to detail and the endless thoughts that go into your planning. And I do love Abi's sketches - those are better than most people's computer drawings (mine included). I am just so eager to see how you reclaim your water (filter, UV, etc.)... 😯 We have decided on a hot-air heat exchanger (featuring a 230V 500W heating element) with a 6 liter tank, giving us 70 degree hot water - diluted to about 35-37 degrees, enough for one person to shower comfortably. We will filter and treat all water entering the van from unknown sources to avoid contaminants. We want to keep the number of water lines, connects and (water) electrical to an absolute miimum to avoid the possibilities of any leaks as much as we can. We'll see how that turns out. 😎 Reclaiming used water was not on our list (until now), watching your videos tends to get expensive on our end. 🤣 Stay safe you two! 🚐☁🍀
Haha cheers, it is definitely easier to visualise everything with a nice pencil diagram we find 😛 Yeah we're really eager for that part too, it's great travelling around in the van but the first thing that forces off to go back to civilisation is having to empty the grey tank, so it will be great doing the recirculating upgrade. Hopefully when we find a good spot to stay for a few days and decent weather to get the tools out... been karting them round in the garage all this time 😅 Thanks for watching as always and hope you're able to make some nice progress with your van 🙂
It's been a while, but great to see you both back again. Love the build for this one, which must have given you a brain and at times. Brilliantly explained though and the fit inside that tiny space is amazing. Looking forward to the next installment
Thank you! It always ends up a lot more work than you imagine, especially because of all the tight spaces 😛 We appreciate the support and hope you enjoy the next video 😊👍
@@SelfBuiltStories Renault master, after seeing the rust on crafters and sprinter. But keeping my eye out for a transit euro 6 after seeing your complex tutorials and how great your vans looking 💯
You guys are doing real good I would suggest that you change your diverter location to after your hot water heater so you can either push the warm air from heating water into your house or outside if it's summertime. Even if you'll use the diesel heater without wanting hot water you won't lose much if your hot water system is not circulating and whatever heat does get stored in the hot water tank will eventually leak into your living space anyway.
Yeah you could do that but if the water isn't recirculating through the diverter then it'll start to boil in the small section in the exchanger. The kit shouldn't have a problem with that but it might make an annoying gurgling noise so might not be what you want it if it's somewhere audible. We don't find it a problem using it in the summer though as by the time it's passed through the exchanger most of the heat is taken out so the expelled air is only luke warm, and with the shower door closed it stays in there and goes out the top where the maxxfan is. It nicely warms the shower before you get in and saves having to drill another hole through the van skin to the outside. What's nice is that as it's all a DIY kit you can modify it exactly as you need to fit your own van 🙂👍 Happy New Year! 🥳
Glad to see you back 😊 Your videos on the self build camper van are the best I’ve seen on RUclips and I’ve watched a lot 😊 Thank you for sharing your Journey ☺️
Hallelujah! was my first thought when I saw you have posted a new video! I’ve missed watching your progress! Keep up the great job! And please, don’t go for so long? 😉
Haha thanks, yeah sorry there was a pretty big gap this time 😃 We're actually travelling around in the van at the moment and have a backlog of videos we need to get round to editing when there's some rainy days! Hopefully the next one won't be so long 🙂
top build ) i just boil kettle mix it with cold water in a bucket and drop in submersible pump ) simple, space saving and cheap but dose the job, altho it dosent speak to me lol . keep up the good work and enjoy )
Thanks! 🙂 And we were only able to fit them in flat in the space we had, but both our pumps and accumulators say they can be mounted in any orientation. We have the cold water ones mounted vertically and haven't noticed any difference between the two
Nice one guys, I am also converting an xlwb Transit and just got my bolbil vans kit. Have gone for the Air hybrid which i will be starting this Sat. Love your vids given me some great tips and ideas, hope you dont mind but stole a few lol. Think mine will be a little rougher a round the edges tha your perfection but very inspiring. Cannot wait to see the finished van, well done to you both
Awesome, and thanks! Yeah the hybrid looks like a nice bit of kit. If we weren't building a recirculating shower we'd have been a contender for us. Good luck with it 🙂
Very cool! Well, not literally of course 😏. I didn’t know such a product existed! I wonder if you may want a third air route to the outside? For when you want to heat the water but not the van.🤔
Haha yeah, we find it pretty cool 😛 We don't find that a problem actually as when the bobil kit is running quite a lot of the heat energy is taken out the air, so what comes out the shower is more warm than hot. And then we have a sliding door which seals off the shower to the rest of the van so the warm air rises inside and then is pulled out the ceiling by the maxxfan 🙂
Hi Guys. Been on the road full-time for three years. I designed a filtration/recycle/shower system. Put in a heating element in our polyprop tank. Those tanks are good for 60 deg C before softening. It was a big mistake. Where it went through the tank, that held firm, BUT above the heating element, the tank melted, so the hot water coming off the heating element did not circulate like a thermo syphon. Took the tank out and the 3-stage filtration system, and replaced with a Thermomate Flow activated gas heater. They state not to use it inside. However, I mounted ours behind the driver's seat. We have a 5kg gas bottle with a reducer on top, just push the gas hose from the Thermomate onto that. Water comes from any open water source, or a 19 litre plastic water bottle. My wife Carolyn with long hair takes 20 litres to shower, using the wet/wash/rinse system. We top up to halfway again for my shower. We have a garden hose push-fit connector under the sill of the Sprinter, and we connect the hose to that, (hard hose to prevent vacuum collapse) and then into the water bottle, or attach a hose extension with a weight and a funnel on the end to throw into the river of whatever. The funnel keeps the hose end off the bottom. We have a course pre-pump filter, and a 15 stage just before the showerhead. We binned the hot water for the sink idea, as it's so very easy to heat a pan of water on our induction hob. Hope that guides you. Best wishes. Tony and Carolyn.
Hey guys, thanks for sharing your setup. And ouch that's annoying, we'll be careful not to take the temperature up too high to start softening the tank. We only take it up briefly to high levels to periodically kill off any lurking legionella. Working great so far, and with the recirculating shower part now done we only need round 4.5l for the complete loop which is pretty cool. And yeah we've just been putting our leftover kettle water in a flask and reusing it throughout the day for washing up which is fine. Hope you're enjoying all your time on the road 🙂👍
Nice job. Very well explained. I think the circulating pump could switch on a bit quicker. Whenever the heat exchanger temp passes the water temp. it could switch on to start extracting the heat as soon as possible. That obviously dos not guarantee for water to reach target temp (if the heat exchanger never reaches target temp), but still could decrease the heat time. Also the alternative heating would be from van engine itself. I mean when you almost finish the driving you could potentially start heating the water to extract engine heat and convert it in to a hot shower. :)
Cheers! Yeah it is configurable, so you could set it lower if you want no problem. They just recommend setting it to come on around 40C so it only starts circulating when the diesel heater is definitely on, and not just from ambient hot temperature. In practice it's barely anytime once the heater is ramping up to hit that temperature so the gains would be quite marginal, but every little helps! And we actually have something like that already using the element, it works great. So if we're driving, it's heating up the water via that and the DC-DC charger on the way, so by the time we park up somewhere if the drive is long enough we can already have a hot tank ready to go, which is very nice 😀
@@SelfBuiltStories Ahh nice. Sure if we start to look in to details heating with DC might put a little more stress on alternator, but i guess that's way more easier than taking the heat out of coolant and putting additional heat exchanger pipes and valves. 🙂 I really enjoy your channel with all the details and technical stuff. Keep them coming! Cheers. 🙂
@@mr.matiss Yeah it'll work a bit harder and use a little more diesel too, but we're happy with that, worth it for nice hot water when you arrive! Cheers, we will 😀
Love the series and it's great that you're still uploading despite finishing your van. I've got this system (yet to be installed) but I'm gutted you didn't use their hybrid system with the boiler as you could have made my life easier😉 though this system is similar. Great vid as always.
Thank you! It's nice to have a bit more time to be able to finish editing them all 😛 And haha sorry, the hybrid looks like a nice bit of kit but wasn't going to work for us with the recirculating shower... good luck!
I love how you manage to explain some complex stuff so easily! Just a quick thought, might it be worth insulating any of the pipes with hot water in? If the pipe feels warm to the touch, that’s heat escaping, might save an extra for seconds when heating up the tank 😊
Thank you! We try to keep a nice balance between the technical bits and actually getting everything working 🙂 And yeah you could do that for sure, but the hot water run is so short that I'm not sure it would make much difference in practice as it makes its way into the tank really quickly and then will start rising to the top. We have insulated the tank though and tested it out a lot (which will be in the next video) and are really happy with how quickly we can heat it up!
@@SelfBuiltStories Insulating the tank makes far more sense than insulating the tiny run of piping. I should have known you'd have it well in hand! haha
Haha no worries, it would definitely do something! Not sure we'd actually be able to fit the pipes with extra insulation around them in the cupboard though 😂
Brilliant video , I’m interested in the power used to heat the water by the heat element ,what solar panel power , battery power and watts of that element could you tell me please … thanks how long can it heat for
Cheers :) So the element is 300W (or can be wired at half power for 150W), and we have 525W of solar on the roof with 200Ah of lithium batteries. 300W at 12V is 25A. So with nothing else on and our batteries 100% we could theoretically run it for 8 hours. We would never do that though, we don't run the element just on battery power, instead we have it so that it switches on only when there is excess charge when we're driving or have a lot of sun. We did some more extensive testing with how long it takes to heat the water which is at the end of the part 2 hot water video. HTH 👍
@@loony457 Yeah our heater is the Lavaner Pro, and the bobil kit is the Air XChange and element upgrade kit, details of those are on the website: www.bobilvans.co.uk/shop 👍
Looking at your drawing, you could eliminate a pump by putting a heat exchange coil in your hot water tank (or 3 in parallel) and using the pressurized cold water from that pump to run through the coils and supply your hot water. You could even vastly increase your thermal store if you put a rack of phase change material in the tank like paraffin wax in copper pipe segments.
Thanks for the comment! We have it setup with the additional pump though as our hot water kit is not on demand and not pressurised, and we recirculate the water. So we don't want to use the cold fresh tank as we'd deplete it really quickly. We have thought about doing something similar to give us some hot water for the sink though, but for now just using a kettle has worked out great for washing up 🙂
Cheers :) We don't like to mention prices in the videos really as they change a lot over time, and particularly with the Bobil kit they're constantly updating their product range as well. But we have links to everything we used in the description to get the current costs 👍
Very inspiring! I am working slowly on an old Mercedes camper and I like your DIY approach to this. Did you consider using a heat exchanger from the engine coolant in addition to those other two heat sources?
Thanks! 🙂 We did consider it briefly but we decided to prioritise air heat and wanted all the functionality that using the diesel heater for that gives with the afterburner controller. And so the bobil kit was a natural fit for what we were doing and has been working really well for us so far and has been efficient enough on its own 🙂👍
Nice job!!!! Enjoy your content. Subscribed and will watch all your other vids as i start my build. Hows the heat exchanger working out for you after a year?
Hi Guys great video, I have the same Bobil tank, I was wondering where you got the brass fitting from and size, I couldn't find them in your parts list, thank you 👍
Cheers 👍 And do you mean these ones? www.bes.co.uk/12-mm-x-1-2in-bsp-taper-brass-male-coupler-jg-speedfit-push-fit-12780/ . They were the only 12mm brass ones we found available on the whole Internet when we were looking 😛
seems like a great idea, how ever i can imagine during the summer months its a bit of a pill to run the heated air unless you may have some kind of wye bypass valve that maybe inline just after the heat exchanger, and channel the hot air out of the van. Maybe out the bottom of the van, during the summer months. I wonder if you thought of instead of using the hot air from the diesel heater using a 2 channel radiator and tie into the engines water to loop though the first channel of the radiator and your running water on the second channel. it would take approx 3 mins to get to 110 degree water from the engine and it would be at a hot 210 in less then 6 mins. so you would need a diverter valve to mix both hot and cold at same time to keep you from burning in the extreme hot water but that would be nearly an insta hot water specially if you decide to take a shower after you had been driving a while. you could even mount the radiator in front of the current vans radiator so it would take up even less room in the van it self.
It's not a problem actually as most of the heat energy is taken out of the air by the exchanger, so it's luke warm at best when it comes out the other side. And we also have a diverter so we can have even that air go into the shower room and shut the sliding door, so it just gets pulled out the roof by the fan. We used it all Summer and during a heatwave and it was fine, the van never got too hot from it 👍 We've looked briefly at using a calorifier to do something similar to that which is an interesting option (and bobil have a kit for that too as well now) but we're pretty happy with our setup at the moment, has been working well in all seasons so far 🙂
@@chrisunderhill8853 Yeah it is a cool bit of kit, and they keep upgrading it. Seen they now have a smart controller that you can hook up to control the diverter itself. And also noticed the afterburner has support for the bobil kit in the latest firmware too, so might have to have a play around with that at some point 😛
Cheers! And there is a float sensor in there so that the element can't turn on if there isn't enough water to avoid it running dry, so we can leave the element switch always on. But if you mean for filling the tank then yeah we do that manually, we quite like it that way as we vary how we put in at the moment depending on how much water we have and how full the grey tank is 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories ahh interesting about the sensor, guessing that’s because you have the heating element in particular, not so necessary on the standard Xchange I’d guess. But yeah I meant to fill the tank! I think that’s what I may do, but the only pitfall I keep thinking of is the temperate drop if you have a big valve that fills the tank too quickly….
@@TheJonnyGMusic Ah yeah, that's part of the element upgrade kit not standard with the XChange. Yeah you could have an automatic valve for that, we don't have a problem with a manual fill but the nice thing about a DIY setup is getting it just as you like it 😀
Nice setup. Did ya know there's a version of those diesel heaters designed for water heating? (keeps cars cooling system from freezing up) They use a water jacket thing built into one side of the head and the other 3 sides plus the end are still used to heat air. This used with your setup should heat water quicker.
Cheers, yeah we've seen some of the hydronic heaters and looks like there are a few of the cheaper Chinese ones available now too. We went with it this way as we wanted to prioritise the air heating and have really fine grained controller over that with the afterburner. Now that it's all insulated and fully setup it's working really well for us, only takes 10 mins or so to heat up for the shower from stone cold which we're fine with 🙂
Yeah there will be a video at some point when we get round to editing it, but probably not for a while as have a few others to do first 😛 We have a post about in on Instagram with a few photos in the meantime though 👍
Cheers 🙂 We did consider all the other options including the truma but decided against that one pretty early on to be honest. It's a nice bit of kit but because we're building a recirculating shower it wouldn't work that great for us, we wanted more of a DIY setup that we can get into to clean, and something that would fit nicely in our cupboard. We also wanted much more advanced control of the air heating with the afterburner. Having wifi and being able to control it remotely away from the van has been really nice. A fair bit cheaper than the £1800 for the truma too 😛
Hi guys - loving your videos and diagrams, they make everything so clear! I was just wondering how much ducting you used when making the system? Thanks!
Glad to hear! 🙂 And we haven't measured it exactly, but each piece you buy is generally around 50cm expandable to 100cm, and I think we used 3 pieces. So for our setup probably somewhere between 2-3m when in place. We had some that came with our heater and then picked up a bit more on eBay. HTH 👍
Hey Guys, just start watching your videos, great series. Looking at the diverter for the intake, this appears to be the wrong way. The part facing the intake from the cab should be going to the heater. The way you have it now, will block off the intake into the heater.
Well spotted! 😀 We realised after we tested it the first time and swapped it round, didn't have any video of that though. Not sure how neither of us noticed at first 😅 and thanks!
TC too close to 300w imm element should be on the other side . Temp in tank 60 Deg C to eliminate risk of Legionnaire bacteria. Good job in all other respects.
Yeah we couldn't get it any further back in the tank unfortunately because the wire for it was so skimpy, so it could only reach that corner 😛 But as the water is generally circulating throughout the tank anyway it hasn't been an issue. If heating up with only the element there is a slight temperature lag but that's fine. And yeah we take it up towards 70C from time to time which is high enough to kill legionella instantly, and the whole hot tank is dumped and refreshed after every few showers too to keep it nice and clean 👍 And thanks! 🙂
Loving your series guys. Lots of useful info here. Could I please ask who you get to insure the van whilst you are converting it. I’m struggling to find the right insurer. Thanks.
Cheers 🙂 And yeah sure, at the moment we're with Adrian Flux who are often recommended for self conversions and we've had a good experience so far. We did lots of calling around as we found some brokers had slightly different terms and prices even with the same underwriters so worth doing that. Others to try are ones like Brentacre, AIB, A Plan and Just Kampers 👍
Cheers :) and the van doesn't actually get hot when it's running, by the time the air comes out the other side of the heat exchanger a lot of the heat has been taken out of it so it's only warm. And then it just warms up the shower which is shut off from the rest of the van with a sliding door 👍 nice to get into a warm shower room too 😀
It will be more efficient that electric heating which requires a lot of energy, not sure how it would compare to gas lpg heating though. But from what we've tested it's plenty efficient enough for us, we can heat the tank in 10-15 minutes and if we did it every day for a month would only be around a fiver in diesel. There's pros and cons to each type of system, we're quite happy with this one for our setup 👍🙂
Hey, I was wondering what the set up is you have to fill the tank up? I have had this kit in the van for over 2 years now I reckon and have yet to actually use it. The tank is under bed and hard to get to to fill it up, and the last time I had it full it was slowly leaking out of the pipe joins and my entire underfloor fell victim to 20L of water ingress that I never discovered until every inch went black D: This year I really want to get using it, understand how to actually use it, and fill it up without hassle. The blue pipe and valves look ideal but I don't really know how it's been fitted :)
Hey! We fill it up from from our fresh cold water line via a manual valve on the top of the shower tank. You can see us doing it in the follow up video of this one here: ruclips.net/video/TkdUtj5v3eo/видео.htmlsi=Uf92Y_ulGw_vr0sT&t=867. So we just turn the valve and fill it up watching the gauge we added on the front, then shut it off again. We drain the tank out in a similar way with a manual valve. That's not ideal about your leak! Maybe it would be worth putting some paper towels/cloths around your tank and filling it up and then watching to see if you can notice any leak anywhere, maybe one of the connections needs tightening/fixing somewhere! Water is not a vans best friend a lot of the time. Good luck! 🙂👍
Hello. Loving your videos and currently at the plumbing stage on ours. I can't find a link to the jg brass and plastic connector to 12mm pipe. I've spent all day trying to find somehwere that does a 12mm one and i cannot find one anywhere. I'm wondering where you purchased yours from? Thanks :)
Hey, glad you're enjoying them 🙂 And do you mean this one? www.bes.co.uk/12-mm-x-1-2in-bsp-taper-brass-male-coupler-jg-speedfit-push-fit-12780/ If so then I feel your pain, I spent all day looking for it before too! It's the only one I've ever found anywhere 😎
Brilliant video and a great job done. I'm really interested in seeing how the solar heating works to heat the water too. Will that be your next video or is that a job for further down the line?
Sure! We're in the Highlands at the moment and it's pretty chilly so has been a good test of how well everything is coping in the cold. We use the heater a lot obviously and that's been working out great, especially paired with the afterburner. We control it remotely so if we're out on a walk we can start it up before we get back to the van which is nice. Must be using that 12+ hours a day with no issues. The recirculating shower we're happy with too... after a bit of experimentation to figure out how best to actually use it 😛 We tried out a few different usage patterns but have got it pretty sussed now. Essentially if we want a recirculating shower, we heat the water fairly hot ~45C and that works out to be a nice temperature when it's going through the loop and under the van. And we've learnt to park on the best angle with a slight rightwards slope to get the best drainage. Gas and oven is a dream, tank lasts forever and costs only around £20 for a few months so no complaints there! And power wise we have pretty much no solar at the moment, so are almost entirely reliant on the DC charger. And that's one area we need to improve a bit as we've found that it throttles itself pretty quickly once it starts getting even a bit warm which is annoying and reduces our charging rate quite a bit. So we need to install a fan for it to keep it cool, and might possibly add a second one as well. Fresh water great, very happy. Tank is the perfect size for us, never the first thing to run out and we wash up, shower and drink a lot of tea 😂 And the biggest tweak we want to make so far is increasing the size of our grey water tank. It's always the first thing that means we have to go and find a service area. We'll probably swap it out with something bigger and also deeper so we can have a more accurate sensor for it too. Think that pretty much covers the main systems! 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories Now that's what you call a reply...I was particularly interested in the recirculating shower system so I might pick your brains on that one at a later date if I can? I was under the impression that it's acceptable to dump grey water over a street drain? Your DC-DC system doesn't sound right. I have picked up snippets from some boating channels I sub to, They have to limit the charge rate to draw 50-80% max to stop the alternator frying ( when charging lithium 50% of alternator output capacity is preferable to 80% to extend battery life and not melt the alternator- I understand Smart alternators adjust the output by alternator temperature. ) could it be a Victron? setting you have overlooked? otherwise I don't know, or even know if Ford use dumb or smart alternators. I was watching a channel Turners Workshop where the lad made a calorifier, I was that impressed I have it on my list of to do's for the upcoming build. id like to hear what your thoughts on that one is. Look forward to the diagrams if you choose to make your own. ;-) You can never have enough hot water and "free" hot water at that ;-)
@@PtangPtangBiscuitBarrelSmith Sure, we'll probably make a video at some point with how the recirculating shower is working out, but not for a while obviously so we have chance to really test it 😛 And no not in the UK, standard road drains are only designed for rain water. I'm sure some people do but we prefer to leave no trace wherever we go. Here in the Highlands at least it's fairly easy to find places, we're parked up near one now actually. Down South a bit more few and far between so having a bigger tank would just give us some more flexibility. And yeah it's a quirk with the Orions. They're only passively not actively cooled, and they derate 3% per degree above 40C, which adds up fairly quickly! You can see it on the trend graph, after a period sitting cool for a while you get a nice big charge and then it tapers down. Fortunately there's quite a few people who've already made 3D printed bits to mount a fan to cool them down so shouldn't be too much work, but yeah a bit of a faff to have to do. Still works fine but as we want to be able to go to cold places like Norway the extra output would be nice. Don't have direct experience with a calorifier but do like the idea of it. If you move around a lot it could be a nice option, bobil actually have a calorifier kit now too i've seen. Something I'd look into more if we were starting again, but very happy with our setup 👍
Hi, just as a note. Your forward air intake diverter is not correct installed (you have changed that already), as in the lever right position it will close the air intake towards the diesel heater and would overheat (possible fire). Keep up with your good work! 👍👍
Yeah some how neither of us noticed the first time we tested it 😛 But don't worry all swapped around shortly after we filmed that bit and working great 😀 And thank you!
Cheers! And we got them both from eBay: Filler cap: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144157371031. For the hose there are various sellers, if you search for something like '40mm ID water hose'. HTH 👍
Yeah it's been working out great and we use it all the time 🙂 It doesn't take long to heat up the tank and we generally find that as long as the weather outside is mild or better then the recirculating loop can just about keep up without losing the temperature. If it's colder outsider it does start to get a bit colder if you're in the shower for a long time (as part of the loop is under the van) but it still works. What we might do at some point is add a thermostatic mixer valve as well so we can set and forget the temperature and have it consistent no matter what the weather's like 👍
Another amazing video Tim & Abi! A little off topic - how are you getting the water from the shower drain into the recirculating system? Can those 12v pumps run dry when no water is running through?
Cheers! And we're using another one of the same pumps we have for the hot and cold, which are okay to run dry. Although we imagine there should actually be a pretty consistent flow, will take a bit of experimentation to work out the right amount of water in the loop to keep it running 😛
New subscriber, really enjoying your video's thanks for sharing. Really helping me out with ideas and info which is going to be really helpful as I'm planning something similar as your conversion only in a boat not a van. One question, do you have a vent from the shower to outside the van so the heat can escape outside and not back into the van? I haven't got round to watching your shower build video yet which I probably should have before asking the question. I was just thinking how hot is it going to get inside the van with the diesel heater running and not being vented outside during the summer.
No problem, thanks for watching! 🙂 And yeah good question, so we have a sliding door that completely closes off the shower with a small air gap at the top, and right outside is our maxxfan. So with the door closed the hot air rises in the shower and then out the top of the van and it doesn't get hot inside the van if we don't want it to 👍
"Not the fairest test with the door open ...." And you only had to heat half a a tank. normally you'd have a full tank and also it would be topped up with cold water as you run the shower. But what will you do in the summer when you do not need the heater on?
Haha yeah we only did a quick test for this one as we just wanted to check it was all working before getting it all in the cabinet. But we've tested it extensively since then and can heat up 12l to 40C in 12 minutes, starting from 10C water so pretty happy with that. We don't have any cold topping it up, to use we fill it, heat it, then just drain or recirculate that same hot water. We went for a non-mixer tap in the shower so the cold isn't really used for it, you just use the hot which is at a pre-set nice shower temperature (unless we actually want a cold shower). And no problem using it in the Summer for us, when the kit is running quite a bit of heat is taken out of the air so what comes out the ducting on the other end is only warm not hot, and it's also inside our shower room which is shut off with a sliding door so the rest of the van doesn't have to heat up if you don't want it too 👍
hi guys, how do you get on with the heat exchanger? do you wish you'd gone for a 12v water heater instead or are you perfectly happy with the diesel heater needing to be on for hot water? thanks all the best
Hey, yeah it works really well, we use it all the time 👍 Wouldn't want only a 12V heater as it'd rinse our batteries and take a long time, but we do have a 12V element in the tank as well so we can heat up purely electric if we want or using both, if we have excess power. In practice we use the diesel heater 95% of the time, nice and quick to heat the tank and cheap to run too 😎
I wanted to ask: Should there be a check valve (one-way valve) after the pump and before the accumulator so water pressure doesn't leave the accumulator and head back to the pump? I am new to this so, correct my thinking since I am probably wrong about this.
We did but for us we need it lower down for our recirculating shower, as if it was too high then there might not have been enough water to sustain a continuous loop. But with the bobil pump on the water is constantly mixed so it's all near enough the same temperature anyway 👍
Hi! The bobil kit is on preorder and we are building a van that needs to be done asap. Do you recommend any other heat exchangers? We have a webasto heater we want to turn into warm water for the van.
Do you have any plans to reclaim the waste heat from the exhaust and integrate that into the build? Either to heat the air, the water or the engine block if you’re somewhere cold. Also - did you consider getting a calorifier to use waste engine heat to heat the van/water? Could get a twin coil so you could use the diesel and the electric element too. If not why didn’t you fancy that route?
We've thought briefly about adding an EGR cooler on the exhaust but if we ever did it we'd want to be able to use it in combination with the existing heat exchanger, and the extra complexity isn't something we've needed up to now. It would be cool to be making use of the wasted energy but at the moment we find the setup efficient enough. We didn't go down the calorifier route as we often parkup somewhere for a few days so again the extra complexity we didn't think was worth it for us as a lot of the time when we want hot water we haven't been driving. Bobil does make a hybrid kit now that work with a calorifier, but instead we have the 12V element so we can generate some hot water while driving indirectly if we want to, with any excess power from the DC charger. And with that we can also benefit when parked up stationary if there's plenty of excess solar too 👍
We have a sliding door which seals off the shower to the rest of the van with an air gap at the top which is right next to our maxxfan so the hot vapour rises and is pulled out through the roof. There's also a smaller fan on our toilet which extracts air out and down under the van 👍
Maybe you want a secondary heat exchanger (eg. just a coil of copper pipe in the holding tank) so that you are not running the recycled water through your Bobil unit. I know the recycled water has been cleaned up a bit, but the last thing you really want is potentially gungy water running through the Bobil.
Interesting idea, we have thought about adding a plate heat exchanger but to be able to piggyback off this and give us hot water for the sink too. We're going to have the shower have two modes so the idea is if we've been out for a walk or run or something we'll have it non-recirculating first to get rid of most of the dirt, and then turn on the recirculating part for a nice long rinse. And then yeah that water will be filtered quite a lot too. We've seen it done before using the bobil kit without needing a secondary exchanger so we'll probably try it out first like that, but yeah cheers something to keep in mind 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories Maybe overdoing it? Maybe it's because I grew up with more primitive surroundings, but for me heating a bit of water on the hob is enough for the sink. Less to go wrong.
@@SelfBuiltStories Yup, I understand the challenge - being a sw engineer etc myself. Sometime we just can't help ourselves over-teching things! I'm surprised I haven't seen the van grow some raspberry pis... or is that still coming?
Yep very true! Hmm it was on the cards at one point to run Venus OS but couldn't get hold of any pis 😛 Still managing to geek out with other things though!
Yeah so we decided to put that in so we can choose whether to recirculate the air from inside the house part, or take it from the cab (or a mixture). The idea behind it was that recirculating the air is a lot more efficient as the same air is continually warming up so the van heats up faster, but might carry more moisture and potentially more condensation. Because our bulkhead is heavily insulated the cab air feels quite different (and noticeably different temperature). We figured it might be a bit fresher as some air can be pulled from the outside through the vents and seals so the diverter let's us decide depending on the conditions 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories ah okay! We have a mk8 transit we've converted as well and I've also fitted a bobil heater to a 2kw heater. Our intake is from behind the drivers seat (through our bulkhead). I don't think you'll find much appreciable difference between the cab air and the van air in practice but interesting to see your thoughts once you're using it. On a separate note, do you plan to insulate the tank? I put a 300w element in ours and while it works well as a solar dump/ when charging from the alternator it takes about 3-4 hours to get to 70degrees from room temp and you'll lose a lot of heat / it will take a lot longer if it's not insulated.
@@Amiziras Ah cool :) Yeah we've actually found a noticeable difference in how quickly the van heats up between the two inlets, slower if drawing from the cab side. Haven't measured it more scientifically yet but probably will at some point! And if there is any difference in humidity etc. And yeah we have the tank insulated, we were able to heat up 18l to 40C in a little over 2 hours with the element. We tested everything out a lot more for the next video (though to 40C not 70C). We've been using it for a few months now and are really happy with how efficient the kit is, very cool
Yep, the kit is rated up to 70C and at around 65C almost all (99.9%) of bacteria is killed in ~5 minutes. So we take it up high periodically to get rid of any traces of legionella 👍
I use the same kit which I bought almost 2 years ago and recently upgraded the pump and added the dual controller. I had problems getting the pump to kick in until I moved the positive pump lead to position 8 from position 7. Did yours work as per the diagram?
Cool, yeah we had ours kicking around for a while! In fact they've upgraded the design a bit since we bought ours too 😛 We did find there were a few small mistakes on the paper instructions we had (like the temperature sensors were the wrong way around) but we found the instructions on the website up-to-date and matching our controller so didn't have any issues after that 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories I'm glad it wasn't just me. I figured it out in the end though and I have to say, the dual heat exchanger we both have is very resilient. I've just uploaded a video to my channel showing a service of the exchanger as well as a pump upgrade, it was a journey for sure.
If youve got a carbon monoxide meter check it works put it near the exhaust and see if the alarm goes off i had to get a new one i had a leak and at 200 ppm it still didn't set the alarm offi woke up to find smoke everywhere it could of been a different result if i hadn't of woken up to go to the toilet
Cheers, yeah we have a combined CO and smoke alarm. We read that it's not advised to test them with exhaust though as the combined heat and humidity can damage the sensor. But thanks for reminding us we need to test it again! Yeah CO can be scary, glad you're ok!
Do you use 3 sensors. You have 1 sensor for the heat exchange air temperature, 1 sensor for the water temperature. And then do you have a 3rd sensor to check that water is in the tank for the heating element? Or does the water temperature sensor also do the water level check? Thanks.
Hiya, yep exactly there is a thermocouple to measure the tank water temperature and a float level sensor in the side of the tank, we put those in here: ruclips.net/video/zgaRlmYyLpk/видео.htmlsi=Txos1aIYDuiV4t1u&t=485. And then there is a second thermocouple that monitors the air temperature at the exchanger here: ruclips.net/video/zgaRlmYyLpk/видео.htmlsi=UwaKOIZSi1bth8oK&t=1484 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories thanks so much. I'm not sure how I missed that bit of your video. Thanks for confirming. I have the bobil kit and will be adding the solar heating to it. You guys are doing an amazing conversion.
Is your bubble heater lower than your hot water tank? I’ve been watching a lot of thermosiphon videos and I’m wondering if you turn off the pump and will it begin to continue to circulate hot water? I’m thinking of hitting the junkyard and picking up a car radiator and mounting it close to my exhaust pipe. Aiming to get hot water while driving?
The pump sits lower than the tank as it can't run dry, but there is no circulating through the exchanger without the pump running. We do get hot water while driving if we want though from the excess charge from the alternator that powers the 300W element in the tank 👍
Is the o-ring supposed to go in the tank? I would think that the o-ring should go on the outside because there will be a spiral leak path because of the nut.
Just one thing I don't really get. Why does the pomp only start working when the air temperature is more than 40 degrees? Wouldn't it be smarter to already start pumping once it warmer then the water temperature?
You can set the activation temperature to anything you like with the controller so you could have it lower so it starts pumping straight away if you wanted. The reason for having it higher at 40C is so that it is only pumping when the heater is actually running. If you had it lower below ambient temperature then the pump would be cycling non-stop when not in use, unless you turned off the whole system. We want to leave it on though so that the element can heat the water when the conditions allow it, so yeah personal preference really 👍
Yep, well in the worst case when the water is cold. It might already be hot straight away if we've used the solar element while driving, and always has some retained heat anyway as the tank is insulated so in practice it doesn't usually start from cold unless we've just refilled the tank. But even in the worst case it's more than quick enough for us 👍
if there is a way you could get water to flow through the actual combustion block without actually water going into the combustion chamber, this whole setup could be far more simpler and far more effective.
What you're talking about sounds like a hydronic diesel heater? That's another nice option, pro's and con's with each. We went with this one as we prioritise our air heating with hot water the secondary, and with this setup we can have a controller with really fine grained control on that. But we find it pretty simple to use too, just took a few uses to figure out what settings work best for us. More than one way to do it but so far we're really happy with this setup 👍
If you buy an EGR heat exchanger. Run the heater exhaust through it. Loop the water circuit into the pipes from the Bobilvans, and you'll harvest waste heat from the heater exhaust too. Have seen David McLuckie's channel..? An absolute goldmine of info around diesel heaters. and ingenious ways to harvest heat from them. www.youtube.com/@DavidMcLuckie/videos
Hey, yeah we've watched a few of his videos actually! His teardown on the Lavaner Pro was one of the reasons we went for that heater. Haven't seen that one though... food for thought 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories Not sure if that idea came from Davids channel, but I have seen it around, also running the exhaust through a standard household radiator, and using a diesel heater with a tumble dryer. It’s a wacky world lol. Personally I intend to use 2 separate diesel heaters for heating (which will be forced air, and underfloor) and hot water, giving me redundancy. (If one fails, the other can be repurposed) I think it would be a simpler solution for me, and showering in the summer, where you want hot water but no heating is a plus. I will also be installing a calorifier coil in the tank, hooked into the heater hoses coming from the engine. Utilising heat that would be dissipated to atmosphere through the radiator, for instant hot water when travelling. Good luck mate, will be following this build…
Yeah redundancy is never a bad thing, when we take the van up to Norway and we're quite dependent on the heater we think we might just take a spare diesel heater and parts. We don't find it a problem actually to have the heater runner for the hot water and not warming the van, as so much of the heat energy is taken out by the exchanger that with the shower door closed the van doesn't really warm up if we don't want it to. And yeah lots of wacky things for sure, could definitely get lost down the rabbit hole of modifications... 😛 cheers!
We had it on the go for around 2 years but with some big gaps in between where we weren't working on it, and then filming and editing it probably made it at least 3x longer 😀
All the different bits of kit and products we used in the video should be linked in the description, thanks for watching! 🙂
Before i ever heard of these I wrapped micro bore copper pipe around my exhaust and inulated it so FREE hot water and it keeps the exhaut heat down! The water gets PIPING hot. If I fit one of these as well I will be able to fit a BATH in my van.....
Yeah we have thought about adding an EGR cooler to the exhaust to reclaim some of that heat too, but we've found it quite efficient for our setup at the moment so far. Maybe something we'll explore in the future 😛
Nice to see a couple working well together...
I like your motorhome idea.
You're young and will have a great future ahead of you both... together 🙏
Me 70, and my partner -2 on me..😂
Still would like to convert my LDV 400...
But she says.... Probably better to buy one already made...😂
Have fun in yours.
We are in Spain...so the regulations are very strict.. bummer
Thank you very much, and hope you're both able to enjoy some van adventures together whether you build one or buy one. It did take a long time to build ours so there were definitely days where we questioned what we were doing! All the best 😊
Your van build is amazing, this is where people should come and see how a conversion should be done.
Well done on a very impressive van conversion. 👍👍
Thank you very much! We're happy with how it's all come together 🙂
This was a really good video, looking forward to watching the next ones
Cheers, glad you liked it! 👍
You are a very good joiner electrician plumber and stats for nerds young man .. this is a one top quality build.. I’m binge watching 2-3 a night . I find it very satisfying.
Haha cheers, you definitely have to wear many hats and learn a lot of different skills during a van build! Glad you're enjoying them 😎
I've missed the videos recently so it's great to see you back, great job on the van tech and also on the video, really entertaining and informative. I honestly think this must be one of the best conversions I've seen on RUclips
Thanks so much Pete! That's very kind of you to say, we're really glad you've enjoyed following our videos 😊
You have been nominated for the 2023 YTBCBA ( RUclips Best come back award )
Haha, cheers🏅
I’m glad you figured out (Timelapse at the end), that you installed the air intake diverter in the wrong way👍
Haha yeah, somehow neither of us noticed at first. Fortunately realised before we put all the cabinets back 😆
We constantly keep coming back to this heater 😮 can’t wait to hear what it’s like!
We've put it through its paces quite a bit now and are really happy with it 😃
@@SelfBuiltStories haha we just finished watching, really thought you were going for that 88 🤣
Haha I did want to, but sadly 70C is the maximum the tank is rated for! ...maybe a quick test above can't hurt 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories who knows when you might end up 😂
@@justtraveltogether Where we're going, we just need roads 😁
Thought of everything. Not sure if you’re going camping or living off grid.
Am a engineer so love watching this .
Cheers, glad you enjoyed it! We're living in it for extended periods, sometimes campsites but mostly off-grid 🙂
Guys, this is incredible.
Haha, cheers! 😀
I am always in complete awe when seeing your dedication to detail and the endless thoughts that go into your planning. And I do love Abi's sketches - those are better than most people's computer drawings (mine included). I am just so eager to see how you reclaim your water (filter, UV, etc.)... 😯
We have decided on a hot-air heat exchanger (featuring a 230V 500W heating element) with a 6 liter tank, giving us 70 degree hot water - diluted to about 35-37 degrees, enough for one person to shower comfortably. We will filter and treat all water entering the van from unknown sources to avoid contaminants.
We want to keep the number of water lines, connects and (water) electrical to an absolute miimum to avoid the possibilities of any leaks as much as we can. We'll see how that turns out. 😎
Reclaiming used water was not on our list (until now), watching your videos tends to get expensive on our end. 🤣
Stay safe you two! 🚐☁🍀
Haha cheers, it is definitely easier to visualise everything with a nice pencil diagram we find 😛 Yeah we're really eager for that part too, it's great travelling around in the van but the first thing that forces off to go back to civilisation is having to empty the grey tank, so it will be great doing the recirculating upgrade. Hopefully when we find a good spot to stay for a few days and decent weather to get the tools out... been karting them round in the garage all this time 😅 Thanks for watching as always and hope you're able to make some nice progress with your van 🙂
What a great job, can't wait to see next video.
Thank you very much! 🙂👍
It's been a while, but great to see you both back again. Love the build for this one, which must have given you a brain and at times. Brilliantly explained though and the fit inside that tiny space is amazing.
Looking forward to the next installment
Thank you! It always ends up a lot more work than you imagine, especially because of all the tight spaces 😛 We appreciate the support and hope you enjoy the next video 😊👍
This is really great
Thanks! 🙂
I was wondering to myself where you guys have been....!! Glad to see the van coming along nicely. Top job...👏 👏 👏
Cheers! And we've been spending some time exploring the Cornish coast so got a bit behind with the videos 😀
It’s looking fantastic looking forward to the next video
Cheers! Hopefully there won't be such a big gap this time before the next one 😅
What team work. Great to see this system. Great build cant wait to see more👍💯
Thank you! 🙂
Both definitely inspiring my 1st campervan build.
@@laurenceclarke7186 Awesome, what van are you going for? 🙂
@@SelfBuiltStories Renault master, after seeing the rust on crafters and sprinter. But keeping my eye out for a transit euro 6 after seeing your complex tutorials and how great your vans looking 💯
@@laurenceclarke7186 Cool, good luck with the search then! It took us a while to find ours, and thanks :)
SBS, Thanks for posting this informative video. Good work. Will be using some of your ideas.
Cheers! And no problem, good luck with your build 👍🏻
You guys are doing real good I would suggest that you change your diverter location to after your hot water heater so you can either push the warm air from heating water into your house or outside if it's summertime. Even if you'll use the diesel heater without wanting hot water you won't lose much if your hot water system is not circulating and whatever heat does get stored in the hot water tank will eventually leak into your living space anyway.
Yeah you could do that but if the water isn't recirculating through the diverter then it'll start to boil in the small section in the exchanger. The kit shouldn't have a problem with that but it might make an annoying gurgling noise so might not be what you want it if it's somewhere audible. We don't find it a problem using it in the summer though as by the time it's passed through the exchanger most of the heat is taken out so the expelled air is only luke warm, and with the shower door closed it stays in there and goes out the top where the maxxfan is. It nicely warms the shower before you get in and saves having to drill another hole through the van skin to the outside. What's nice is that as it's all a DIY kit you can modify it exactly as you need to fit your own van 🙂👍 Happy New Year! 🥳
Glad to see you back 😊 Your videos on the self build camper van are the best I’ve seen on RUclips and I’ve watched a lot 😊 Thank you for sharing your Journey ☺️
You're welcome and wow thanks, that's quite the accolade, glad you've enjoyed watching them! 🙂
Ahhhhh ❤ im delighted to see this. I have the same kit n its on the install list very soon. Love you guys n your super help to me since the beginning
Hey! 👋 That's cool, good luck with the install! Thanks for following along for so long and glad they've been helpful 🙂
Great work. You made a complex task sound straight forward - thanks :) The van is looking like a little home now.
You're welcome, and thanks. It does feel nice and cosy 😊
Great work guys, as always. All them drawings need to go in the a book 😉
Cheers guys! Haha yeah, we've built up quite a collection now 😀
PERFECTION..................
Haha cheers 👍
Off topic, but I must say, your little bottom shelf that protrudes from the small window is an amazing touch. I'm stealing that idea, sorry.
Haha cheers and no worries, it's the little touches that make a build, if they do take a bit of work 🙂👍
Hallelujah! was my first thought when I saw you have posted a new video! I’ve missed watching your progress! Keep up the great job! And please, don’t go for so long? 😉
Haha thanks, yeah sorry there was a pretty big gap this time 😃 We're actually travelling around in the van at the moment and have a backlog of videos we need to get round to editing when there's some rainy days! Hopefully the next one won't be so long 🙂
Who needs CAD when you've got Abi 👍
Yep, I've got lots of Cool Abi Designs! 😄
You guys are awesome! Love your channel.
Thank you very much! 😊
top build ) i just boil kettle mix it with cold water in a bucket and drop in submersible pump ) simple, space saving and cheap but dose the job, altho it dosent speak to me lol . keep up the good work and enjoy )
Cheers! Yeah nothing wrong with that setup if it does the job for you, we were thinking of something along those lines for the sink actually 😀
Great job! I’m thinking about doing something similar with my old PC radiator.
Cheers! Hope it goes well 👍
Awesome 😃 didn’t know this existed so thanks for sharing 👏🏻👏🏻
You're welcome, it's a cool bit of kit! 👍
really cool ... gives me some ideas ... I like the team work
Thank you very much! 😊
Great video, nice install.. just heads up your water pumps, keep them upright rather laying them flat.
Thanks! 🙂 And we were only able to fit them in flat in the space we had, but both our pumps and accumulators say they can be mounted in any orientation. We have the cold water ones mounted vertically and haven't noticed any difference between the two
Nice one guys, I am also converting an xlwb Transit and just got my bolbil vans kit. Have gone for the Air hybrid which i will be starting this Sat. Love your vids given me some great tips and ideas, hope you dont mind but stole a few lol. Think mine will be a little rougher a round the edges tha your perfection but very inspiring. Cannot wait to see the finished van, well done to you both
Awesome, and thanks! Yeah the hybrid looks like a nice bit of kit. If we weren't building a recirculating shower we'd have been a contender for us. Good luck with it 🙂
another amazing video guys, looking forward to doing ours. looking forward to your next video.
Thanks a lot and good luck with yours! 😀
Very cool! Well, not literally of course 😏. I didn’t know such a product existed! I wonder if you may want a third air route to the outside? For when you want to heat the water but not the van.🤔
Haha yeah, we find it pretty cool 😛 We don't find that a problem actually as when the bobil kit is running quite a lot of the heat energy is taken out the air, so what comes out the shower is more warm than hot. And then we have a sliding door which seals off the shower to the rest of the van so the warm air rises inside and then is pulled out the ceiling by the maxxfan 🙂
@@SelfBuiltStories it's pretty impressive. I really enjoy the videos. You motivate me to keep working on my van :)
@@diezmon Thank you! It's a big project but rewarding at the end, good luck with yours 🙂
Hi Guys. Been on the road full-time for three years. I designed a filtration/recycle/shower system. Put in a heating element in our polyprop tank. Those tanks are good for 60 deg C before softening. It was a big mistake. Where it went through the tank, that held firm, BUT above the heating element, the tank melted, so the hot water coming off the heating element did not circulate like a thermo syphon. Took the tank out and the 3-stage filtration system, and replaced with a Thermomate Flow activated gas heater. They state not to use it inside. However, I mounted ours behind the driver's seat. We have a 5kg gas bottle with a reducer on top, just push the gas hose from the Thermomate onto that. Water comes from any open water source, or a 19 litre plastic water bottle. My wife Carolyn with long hair takes 20 litres to shower, using the wet/wash/rinse system. We top up to halfway again for my shower. We have a garden hose push-fit connector under the sill of the Sprinter, and we connect the hose to that, (hard hose to prevent vacuum collapse) and then into the water bottle, or attach a hose extension with a weight and a funnel on the end to throw into the river of whatever. The funnel keeps the hose end off the bottom. We have a course pre-pump filter, and a 15 stage just before the showerhead. We binned the hot water for the sink idea, as it's so very easy to heat a pan of water on our induction hob. Hope that guides you. Best wishes. Tony and Carolyn.
Hey guys, thanks for sharing your setup. And ouch that's annoying, we'll be careful not to take the temperature up too high to start softening the tank. We only take it up briefly to high levels to periodically kill off any lurking legionella. Working great so far, and with the recirculating shower part now done we only need round 4.5l for the complete loop which is pretty cool. And yeah we've just been putting our leftover kettle water in a flask and reusing it throughout the day for washing up which is fine. Hope you're enjoying all your time on the road 🙂👍
You my friend are a genius good to see a young man knowing his stuff well done lad
Cheers, definitely a team effort though, we do every project together 🙂
Nice job. Very well explained.
I think the circulating pump could switch on a bit quicker. Whenever the heat exchanger temp passes the water temp. it could switch on to start extracting the heat as soon as possible. That obviously dos not guarantee for water to reach target temp (if the heat exchanger never reaches target temp), but still could decrease the heat time. Also the alternative heating would be from van engine itself. I mean when you almost finish the driving you could potentially start heating the water to extract engine heat and convert it in to a hot shower. :)
Cheers! Yeah it is configurable, so you could set it lower if you want no problem. They just recommend setting it to come on around 40C so it only starts circulating when the diesel heater is definitely on, and not just from ambient hot temperature. In practice it's barely anytime once the heater is ramping up to hit that temperature so the gains would be quite marginal, but every little helps! And we actually have something like that already using the element, it works great. So if we're driving, it's heating up the water via that and the DC-DC charger on the way, so by the time we park up somewhere if the drive is long enough we can already have a hot tank ready to go, which is very nice 😀
@@SelfBuiltStories Ahh nice. Sure if we start to look in to details heating with DC might put a little more stress on alternator, but i guess that's way more easier than taking the heat out of coolant and putting additional heat exchanger pipes and valves. 🙂
I really enjoy your channel with all the details and technical stuff. Keep them coming! Cheers. 🙂
@@mr.matiss Yeah it'll work a bit harder and use a little more diesel too, but we're happy with that, worth it for nice hot water when you arrive! Cheers, we will 😀
Another great video and really informative. Love seeing the progress
Thank you very much! 🙂
Love the series and it's great that you're still uploading despite finishing your van. I've got this system (yet to be installed) but I'm gutted you didn't use their hybrid system with the boiler as you could have made my life easier😉 though this system is similar. Great vid as always.
Thank you! It's nice to have a bit more time to be able to finish editing them all 😛 And haha sorry, the hybrid looks like a nice bit of kit but wasn't going to work for us with the recirculating shower... good luck!
nice job.
Thanks! 🙂
I love how you manage to explain some complex stuff so easily!
Just a quick thought, might it be worth insulating any of the pipes with hot water in? If the pipe feels warm to the touch, that’s heat escaping, might save an extra for seconds when heating up the tank 😊
Thank you! We try to keep a nice balance between the technical bits and actually getting everything working 🙂 And yeah you could do that for sure, but the hot water run is so short that I'm not sure it would make much difference in practice as it makes its way into the tank really quickly and then will start rising to the top. We have insulated the tank though and tested it out a lot (which will be in the next video) and are really happy with how quickly we can heat it up!
@@SelfBuiltStories Insulating the tank makes far more sense than insulating the tiny run of piping. I should have known you'd have it well in hand! haha
Haha no worries, it would definitely do something! Not sure we'd actually be able to fit the pipes with extra insulation around them in the cupboard though 😂
Brilliant video , I’m interested in the power used to heat the water by the heat element ,what solar panel power , battery power and watts of that element could you tell me please … thanks how long can it heat for
Cheers :) So the element is 300W (or can be wired at half power for 150W), and we have 525W of solar on the roof with 200Ah of lithium batteries. 300W at 12V is 25A. So with nothing else on and our batteries 100% we could theoretically run it for 8 hours. We would never do that though, we don't run the element just on battery power, instead we have it so that it switches on only when there is excess charge when we're driving or have a lot of sun. We did some more extensive testing with how long it takes to heat the water which is at the end of the part 2 hot water video. HTH 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories ok Thankyou. Do you have full details of the heater you , used and the kits used to make what was shown. in your videos
@@loony457 Yeah our heater is the Lavaner Pro, and the bobil kit is the Air XChange and element upgrade kit, details of those are on the website: www.bobilvans.co.uk/shop 👍
Looking at your drawing, you could eliminate a pump by putting a heat exchange coil in your hot water tank (or 3 in parallel) and using the pressurized cold water from that pump to run through the coils and supply your hot water.
You could even vastly increase your thermal store if you put a rack of phase change material in the tank like paraffin wax in copper pipe segments.
Thanks for the comment! We have it setup with the additional pump though as our hot water kit is not on demand and not pressurised, and we recirculate the water. So we don't want to use the cold fresh tank as we'd deplete it really quickly. We have thought about doing something similar to give us some hot water for the sink though, but for now just using a kettle has worked out great for washing up 🙂
Love your video but one thing could you include rough pricing on cost products.
Great job
Cheers :) We don't like to mention prices in the videos really as they change a lot over time, and particularly with the Bobil kit they're constantly updating their product range as well. But we have links to everything we used in the description to get the current costs 👍
I haven’t seen you videos before, I’m about to buy a Bobil Kit, I just wanted to say how brilliant Abbey’s (sorry if wrong spelling) diagram is!
Ah thanks so much! Hope the Bobil kit works out well for you!
Very inspiring! I am working slowly on an old Mercedes camper and I like your DIY approach to this.
Did you consider using a heat exchanger from the engine coolant in addition to those other two heat sources?
Thanks! 🙂 We did consider it briefly but we decided to prioritise air heat and wanted all the functionality that using the diesel heater for that gives with the afterburner controller. And so the bobil kit was a natural fit for what we were doing and has been working really well for us so far and has been efficient enough on its own 🙂👍
Nice job!!!! Enjoy your content. Subscribed and will watch all your other vids as i start my build. Hows the heat exchanger working out for you after a year?
Cheers, glad you're enjoying it 🙂 And it's working great, no issues at all. In fact we're using it right now! 👍😎
I want a shower in My van and this system looks good 😊
We're really happy with it! We've used it quite a bit now and having a hot shower in the van is really nice 🙂
Hi Guys great video, I have the same Bobil tank, I was wondering where you got the brass fitting from and size, I couldn't find them in your parts list, thank you 👍
Cheers 👍 And do you mean these ones? www.bes.co.uk/12-mm-x-1-2in-bsp-taper-brass-male-coupler-jg-speedfit-push-fit-12780/ . They were the only 12mm brass ones we found available on the whole Internet when we were looking 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories thanks for the link, and what where the brass fittings you used through the tank, thanks again
@@swattergeezer the bulkhead fittings? Those are just the ones that came with the bobil kit 👍
Great idea, thinking of doing this myself. What are the interior dimensions of your shower? Length and width? Thanks!
Cheers! And the rectangle part inside the shower not considering the angled or wheel arch bits is roughly 76x60cm 👍
seems like a great idea, how ever i can imagine during the summer months its a bit of a pill to run the heated air unless you may have some kind of wye bypass valve that maybe inline just after the heat exchanger, and channel the hot air out of the van. Maybe out the bottom of the van, during the summer months. I wonder if you thought of instead of using the hot air from the diesel heater using a 2 channel radiator and tie into the engines water to loop though the first channel of the radiator and your running water on the second channel. it would take approx 3 mins to get to 110 degree water from the engine and it would be at a hot 210 in less then 6 mins. so you would need a diverter valve to mix both hot and cold at same time to keep you from burning in the extreme hot water but that would be nearly an insta hot water specially if you decide to take a shower after you had been driving a while. you could even mount the radiator in front of the current vans radiator so it would take up even less room in the van it self.
It's not a problem actually as most of the heat energy is taken out of the air by the exchanger, so it's luke warm at best when it comes out the other side. And we also have a diverter so we can have even that air go into the shower room and shut the sliding door, so it just gets pulled out the roof by the fan. We used it all Summer and during a heatwave and it was fine, the van never got too hot from it 👍 We've looked briefly at using a calorifier to do something similar to that which is an interesting option (and bobil have a kit for that too as well now) but we're pretty happy with our setup at the moment, has been working well in all seasons so far 🙂
@SelfBuiltStories awesome! I may have to give it a try. I am putting a diesel heater set up in my conversion trailer I am building.
@@chrisunderhill8853 Yeah it is a cool bit of kit, and they keep upgrading it. Seen they now have a smart controller that you can hook up to control the diverter itself. And also noticed the afterburner has support for the bobil kit in the latest firmware too, so might have to have a play around with that at some point 😛
Great video!
Curious though, had you thought about using a float valve for the hot water tank instead of a manual on / off switch?
Cheers! And there is a float sensor in there so that the element can't turn on if there isn't enough water to avoid it running dry, so we can leave the element switch always on. But if you mean for filling the tank then yeah we do that manually, we quite like it that way as we vary how we put in at the moment depending on how much water we have and how full the grey tank is 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories ahh interesting about the sensor, guessing that’s because you have the heating element in particular, not so necessary on the standard Xchange I’d guess.
But yeah I meant to fill the tank! I think that’s what I may do, but the only pitfall I keep thinking of is the temperate drop if you have a big valve that fills the tank too quickly….
@@TheJonnyGMusic Ah yeah, that's part of the element upgrade kit not standard with the XChange. Yeah you could have an automatic valve for that, we don't have a problem with a manual fill but the nice thing about a DIY setup is getting it just as you like it 😀
Nice setup. Did ya know there's a version of those diesel heaters designed for water heating? (keeps cars cooling system from freezing up)
They use a water jacket thing built into one side of the head and the other 3 sides plus the end are still used to heat air. This used with your setup should heat water quicker.
Cheers, yeah we've seen some of the hydronic heaters and looks like there are a few of the cheaper Chinese ones available now too. We went with it this way as we wanted to prioritise the air heating and have really fine grained controller over that with the afterburner. Now that it's all insulated and fully setup it's working really well for us, only takes 10 mins or so to heat up for the shower from stone cold which we're fine with 🙂
I would be interested to know more about the recycling system - is this covered in a different video?
Yeah there will be a video at some point when we get round to editing it, but probably not for a while as have a few others to do first 😛 We have a post about in on Instagram with a few photos in the meantime though 👍
Good video 👍would have been so much less hassle to fit a truma D4E though. Less connections to leak and a more compact all inone unit.
Cheers 🙂 We did consider all the other options including the truma but decided against that one pretty early on to be honest. It's a nice bit of kit but because we're building a recirculating shower it wouldn't work that great for us, we wanted more of a DIY setup that we can get into to clean, and something that would fit nicely in our cupboard. We also wanted much more advanced control of the air heating with the afterburner. Having wifi and being able to control it remotely away from the van has been really nice. A fair bit cheaper than the £1800 for the truma too 😛
Hi guys - loving your videos and diagrams, they make everything so clear! I was just wondering how much ducting you used when making the system? Thanks!
Glad to hear! 🙂 And we haven't measured it exactly, but each piece you buy is generally around 50cm expandable to 100cm, and I think we used 3 pieces. So for our setup probably somewhere between 2-3m when in place. We had some that came with our heater and then picked up a bit more on eBay. HTH 👍
Hey Guys, just start watching your videos, great series.
Looking at the diverter for the intake, this appears to be the wrong way. The part facing the intake from the cab should be going to the heater. The way you have it now, will block off the intake into the heater.
Well spotted! 😀 We realised after we tested it the first time and swapped it round, didn't have any video of that though. Not sure how neither of us noticed at first 😅 and thanks!
TC too close to 300w imm element should be on the other side . Temp in tank 60 Deg C to eliminate risk of Legionnaire bacteria. Good job in all other respects.
Yeah we couldn't get it any further back in the tank unfortunately because the wire for it was so skimpy, so it could only reach that corner 😛 But as the water is generally circulating throughout the tank anyway it hasn't been an issue. If heating up with only the element there is a slight temperature lag but that's fine. And yeah we take it up towards 70C from time to time which is high enough to kill legionella instantly, and the whole hot tank is dumped and refreshed after every few showers too to keep it nice and clean 👍 And thanks! 🙂
Consider heating the water above 50degC- prevention of things like legionnaires etc.
Cheers, yeah that's why we wanted to test it to 70C. We'll take it up to that periodically to help take care of any nasties in the tank 🙂
@15:56 the intake Splitter is turned to its side so you will block it off now or take air from the cab.
Cheers yeah don't worry it's the correct way now, we realised after and swapped it round but didn't get it on film 🙂👍
Loving your series guys. Lots of useful info here. Could I please ask who you get to insure the van whilst you are converting it. I’m struggling to find the right insurer. Thanks.
Cheers 🙂 And yeah sure, at the moment we're with Adrian Flux who are often recommended for self conversions and we've had a good experience so far. We did lots of calling around as we found some brokers had slightly different terms and prices even with the same underwriters so worth doing that. Others to try are ones like Brentacre, AIB, A Plan and Just Kampers 👍
Your back! Great video as always 👍 do you have any way of heating the water without having the heater heating the van also? 🤔
Cheers :) and the van doesn't actually get hot when it's running, by the time the air comes out the other side of the heat exchanger a lot of the heat has been taken out of it so it's only warm. And then it just warms up the shower which is shut off from the rest of the van with a sliding door 👍 nice to get into a warm shower room too 😀
@@SelfBuiltStories Okay very interesting. Would you say its more efficient to heat that way over other more conventional methods? :)
It will be more efficient that electric heating which requires a lot of energy, not sure how it would compare to gas lpg heating though. But from what we've tested it's plenty efficient enough for us, we can heat the tank in 10-15 minutes and if we did it every day for a month would only be around a fiver in diesel. There's pros and cons to each type of system, we're quite happy with this one for our setup 👍🙂
Hey, I was wondering what the set up is you have to fill the tank up? I have had this kit in the van for over 2 years now I reckon and have yet to actually use it. The tank is under bed and hard to get to to fill it up, and the last time I had it full it was slowly leaking out of the pipe joins and my entire underfloor fell victim to 20L of water ingress that I never discovered until every inch went black D: This year I really want to get using it, understand how to actually use it, and fill it up without hassle. The blue pipe and valves look ideal but I don't really know how it's been fitted :)
Hey! We fill it up from from our fresh cold water line via a manual valve on the top of the shower tank. You can see us doing it in the follow up video of this one here: ruclips.net/video/TkdUtj5v3eo/видео.htmlsi=Uf92Y_ulGw_vr0sT&t=867. So we just turn the valve and fill it up watching the gauge we added on the front, then shut it off again. We drain the tank out in a similar way with a manual valve. That's not ideal about your leak! Maybe it would be worth putting some paper towels/cloths around your tank and filling it up and then watching to see if you can notice any leak anywhere, maybe one of the connections needs tightening/fixing somewhere! Water is not a vans best friend a lot of the time. Good luck! 🙂👍
Hello. Loving your videos and currently at the plumbing stage on ours. I can't find a link to the jg brass and plastic connector to 12mm pipe. I've spent all day trying to find somehwere that does a 12mm one and i cannot find one anywhere. I'm wondering where you purchased yours from? Thanks :)
Hey, glad you're enjoying them 🙂 And do you mean this one? www.bes.co.uk/12-mm-x-1-2in-bsp-taper-brass-male-coupler-jg-speedfit-push-fit-12780/ If so then I feel your pain, I spent all day looking for it before too! It's the only one I've ever found anywhere 😎
Brilliant video and a great job done. I'm really interested in seeing how the solar heating works to heat the water too. Will that be your next video or is that a job for further down the line?
Cheers :) And yep, that will be in the next video. We tested the whole setup fairly extensively 😛
It’s been a year how’s the heater hot water going well done both thank you 👍👍👍🏴🏴🇬🇧🇨🇦🦢
Working great! Coming up to 2 years now and we use it every time we have a shower, haven't had a single issue with it in that time 👍🙂
it would be interesting to get your thoughts on this and other systems in your van now you have been using it in anger, any tweaks ? fails ?
Sure! We're in the Highlands at the moment and it's pretty chilly so has been a good test of how well everything is coping in the cold. We use the heater a lot obviously and that's been working out great, especially paired with the afterburner. We control it remotely so if we're out on a walk we can start it up before we get back to the van which is nice. Must be using that 12+ hours a day with no issues.
The recirculating shower we're happy with too... after a bit of experimentation to figure out how best to actually use it 😛 We tried out a few different usage patterns but have got it pretty sussed now. Essentially if we want a recirculating shower, we heat the water fairly hot ~45C and that works out to be a nice temperature when it's going through the loop and under the van. And we've learnt to park on the best angle with a slight rightwards slope to get the best drainage.
Gas and oven is a dream, tank lasts forever and costs only around £20 for a few months so no complaints there! And power wise we have pretty much no solar at the moment, so are almost entirely reliant on the DC charger. And that's one area we need to improve a bit as we've found that it throttles itself pretty quickly once it starts getting even a bit warm which is annoying and reduces our charging rate quite a bit. So we need to install a fan for it to keep it cool, and might possibly add a second one as well.
Fresh water great, very happy. Tank is the perfect size for us, never the first thing to run out and we wash up, shower and drink a lot of tea 😂
And the biggest tweak we want to make so far is increasing the size of our grey water tank. It's always the first thing that means we have to go and find a service area. We'll probably swap it out with something bigger and also deeper so we can have a more accurate sensor for it too.
Think that pretty much covers the main systems! 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories Now that's what you call a reply...I was particularly interested in the recirculating shower system so I might pick your brains on that one at a later date if I can? I was under the impression that it's acceptable to dump grey water over a street drain? Your DC-DC system doesn't sound right. I have picked up snippets from some boating channels I sub to, They have to limit the charge rate to draw 50-80% max to stop the alternator frying ( when charging lithium 50% of alternator output capacity is preferable to 80% to extend battery life and not melt the alternator- I understand Smart alternators adjust the output by alternator temperature. ) could it be a Victron? setting you have overlooked? otherwise I don't know, or even know if Ford use dumb or smart alternators. I was watching a channel Turners Workshop where the lad made a calorifier, I was that impressed I have it on my list of to do's for the upcoming build. id like to hear what your thoughts on that one is. Look forward to the diagrams if you choose to make your own. ;-) You can never have enough hot water and "free" hot water at that ;-)
@@PtangPtangBiscuitBarrelSmith Sure, we'll probably make a video at some point with how the recirculating shower is working out, but not for a while obviously so we have chance to really test it 😛 And no not in the UK, standard road drains are only designed for rain water. I'm sure some people do but we prefer to leave no trace wherever we go. Here in the Highlands at least it's fairly easy to find places, we're parked up near one now actually. Down South a bit more few and far between so having a bigger tank would just give us some more flexibility.
And yeah it's a quirk with the Orions. They're only passively not actively cooled, and they derate 3% per degree above 40C, which adds up fairly quickly! You can see it on the trend graph, after a period sitting cool for a while you get a nice big charge and then it tapers down. Fortunately there's quite a few people who've already made 3D printed bits to mount a fan to cool them down so shouldn't be too much work, but yeah a bit of a faff to have to do. Still works fine but as we want to be able to go to cold places like Norway the extra output would be nice.
Don't have direct experience with a calorifier but do like the idea of it. If you move around a lot it could be a nice option, bobil actually have a calorifier kit now too i've seen. Something I'd look into more if we were starting again, but very happy with our setup 👍
That's convinced me to bite the bullet and install a high output alternator. Thanks very much ;-)
@@PtangPtangBiscuitBarrelSmith Haha no problem 😛
Hi, just as a note. Your forward air intake diverter is not correct installed (you have changed that already), as in the lever right position it will close the air intake towards the diesel heater and would overheat (possible fire).
Keep up with your good work! 👍👍
Yeah some how neither of us noticed the first time we tested it 😛 But don't worry all swapped around shortly after we filmed that bit and working great 😀 And thank you!
Hi guys! Question: Are you using an extra pump to bring the water from the shower drain back to the tank? Thanks
Hiya, yeah we have another one of the same pumps that will pull the water back out the drain when the recirculating part is turned on 👍
Super build.... random question, where did you get your water fill cap and hose ?
Cheers! And we got them both from eBay: Filler cap: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144157371031. For the hose there are various sellers, if you search for something like '40mm ID water hose'. HTH 👍
Wondering about an update, a year later, how did the water heater work. Were you able to get enough air heat to keep the water hot.
Yeah it's been working out great and we use it all the time 🙂 It doesn't take long to heat up the tank and we generally find that as long as the weather outside is mild or better then the recirculating loop can just about keep up without losing the temperature. If it's colder outsider it does start to get a bit colder if you're in the shower for a long time (as part of the loop is under the van) but it still works. What we might do at some point is add a thermostatic mixer valve as well so we can set and forget the temperature and have it consistent no matter what the weather's like 👍
Another amazing video Tim & Abi! A little off topic - how are you getting the water from the shower drain into the recirculating system? Can those 12v pumps run dry when no water is running through?
Cheers! And we're using another one of the same pumps we have for the hot and cold, which are okay to run dry. Although we imagine there should actually be a pretty consistent flow, will take a bit of experimentation to work out the right amount of water in the loop to keep it running 😛
@@SelfBuiltStoriesexcited to see the next video! Keep it up 😊
@@kieransudbury1 Thanks! :)
New subscriber, really enjoying your video's thanks for sharing. Really helping me out with ideas and info which is going to be really helpful as I'm planning something similar as your conversion only in a boat not a van. One question, do you have a vent from the shower to outside the van so the heat can escape outside and not back into the van? I haven't got round to watching your shower build video yet which I probably should have before asking the question. I was just thinking how hot is it going to get inside the van with the diesel heater running and not being vented outside during the summer.
No problem, thanks for watching! 🙂 And yeah good question, so we have a sliding door that completely closes off the shower with a small air gap at the top, and right outside is our maxxfan. So with the door closed the hot air rises in the shower and then out the top of the van and it doesn't get hot inside the van if we don't want it to 👍
"Not the fairest test with the door open ...." And you only had to heat half a a tank. normally you'd have a full tank and also it would be topped up with cold water as you run the shower. But what will you do in the summer when you do not need the heater on?
Haha yeah we only did a quick test for this one as we just wanted to check it was all working before getting it all in the cabinet. But we've tested it extensively since then and can heat up 12l to 40C in 12 minutes, starting from 10C water so pretty happy with that. We don't have any cold topping it up, to use we fill it, heat it, then just drain or recirculate that same hot water. We went for a non-mixer tap in the shower so the cold isn't really used for it, you just use the hot which is at a pre-set nice shower temperature (unless we actually want a cold shower). And no problem using it in the Summer for us, when the kit is running quite a bit of heat is taken out of the air so what comes out the ducting on the other end is only warm not hot, and it's also inside our shower room which is shut off with a sliding door so the rest of the van doesn't have to heat up if you don't want it too 👍
hi guys, how do you get on with the heat exchanger? do you wish you'd gone for a 12v water heater instead or are you perfectly happy with the diesel heater needing to be on for hot water? thanks all the best
Hey, yeah it works really well, we use it all the time 👍 Wouldn't want only a 12V heater as it'd rinse our batteries and take a long time, but we do have a 12V element in the tank as well so we can heat up purely electric if we want or using both, if we have excess power. In practice we use the diesel heater 95% of the time, nice and quick to heat the tank and cheap to run too 😎
I wanted to ask: Should there be a check valve (one-way valve) after the pump and before the accumulator so water pressure doesn't leave the accumulator and head back to the pump? I am new to this so, correct my thinking since I am probably wrong about this.
It shouldn't be necessary for a diaphragm pump as they have a check valve built in by their design and water can only flow one way through them 👍🏻
Did you consider leaving the water outlet above the heating element?
We did but for us we need it lower down for our recirculating shower, as if it was too high then there might not have been enough water to sustain a continuous loop. But with the bobil pump on the water is constantly mixed so it's all near enough the same temperature anyway 👍
Hi! The bobil kit is on preorder and we are building a van that needs to be done asap. Do you recommend any other heat exchangers? We have a webasto heater we want to turn into warm water for the van.
Hey! The bobil kit is the only one we have experience with so can't really comment on others I'm afraid, good luck! 👍
Notification squad 😊✌🏻
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Do you have any plans to reclaim the waste heat from the exhaust and integrate that into the build? Either to heat the air, the water or the engine block if you’re somewhere cold.
Also - did you consider getting a calorifier to use waste engine heat to heat the van/water? Could get a twin coil so you could use the diesel and the electric element too. If not why didn’t you fancy that route?
We've thought briefly about adding an EGR cooler on the exhaust but if we ever did it we'd want to be able to use it in combination with the existing heat exchanger, and the extra complexity isn't something we've needed up to now. It would be cool to be making use of the wasted energy but at the moment we find the setup efficient enough.
We didn't go down the calorifier route as we often parkup somewhere for a few days so again the extra complexity we didn't think was worth it for us as a lot of the time when we want hot water we haven't been driving. Bobil does make a hybrid kit now that work with a calorifier, but instead we have the 12V element so we can generate some hot water while driving indirectly if we want to, with any excess power from the DC charger. And with that we can also benefit when parked up stationary if there's plenty of excess solar too 👍
Do you have a vent in the shower roof to let out moisture especially if you are going to use it for drying
We have a sliding door which seals off the shower to the rest of the van with an air gap at the top which is right next to our maxxfan so the hot vapour rises and is pulled out through the roof. There's also a smaller fan on our toilet which extracts air out and down under the van 👍
Maybe you want a secondary heat exchanger (eg. just a coil of copper pipe in the holding tank) so that you are not running the recycled water through your Bobil unit. I know the recycled water has been cleaned up a bit, but the last thing you really want is potentially gungy water running through the Bobil.
Interesting idea, we have thought about adding a plate heat exchanger but to be able to piggyback off this and give us hot water for the sink too. We're going to have the shower have two modes so the idea is if we've been out for a walk or run or something we'll have it non-recirculating first to get rid of most of the dirt, and then turn on the recirculating part for a nice long rinse. And then yeah that water will be filtered quite a lot too. We've seen it done before using the bobil kit without needing a secondary exchanger so we'll probably try it out first like that, but yeah cheers something to keep in mind 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories Maybe overdoing it? Maybe it's because I grew up with more primitive surroundings, but for me heating a bit of water on the hob is enough for the sink. Less to go wrong.
@@cccmmm1234 Haha maybe, but I like the technical challenge. We haven't needed it so far but it would be a fun project 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories Yup, I understand the challenge - being a sw engineer etc myself. Sometime we just can't help ourselves over-teching things!
I'm surprised I haven't seen the van grow some raspberry pis... or is that still coming?
Yep very true! Hmm it was on the cards at one point to run Venus OS but couldn't get hold of any pis 😛 Still managing to geek out with other things though!
Are you ever going to do a cost analysis on your build?
Possibly at some point after all the build videos 👍
What is the thinking behind the diverter for the air intake? I don't get why you would want to change where the air comes from?
Yeah so we decided to put that in so we can choose whether to recirculate the air from inside the house part, or take it from the cab (or a mixture). The idea behind it was that recirculating the air is a lot more efficient as the same air is continually warming up so the van heats up faster, but might carry more moisture and potentially more condensation. Because our bulkhead is heavily insulated the cab air feels quite different (and noticeably different temperature). We figured it might be a bit fresher as some air can be pulled from the outside through the vents and seals so the diverter let's us decide depending on the conditions 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories ah okay! We have a mk8 transit we've converted as well and I've also fitted a bobil heater to a 2kw heater. Our intake is from behind the drivers seat (through our bulkhead). I don't think you'll find much appreciable difference between the cab air and the van air in practice but interesting to see your thoughts once you're using it.
On a separate note, do you plan to insulate the tank? I put a 300w element in ours and while it works well as a solar dump/ when charging from the alternator it takes about 3-4 hours to get to 70degrees from room temp and you'll lose a lot of heat / it will take a lot longer if it's not insulated.
@@Amiziras Ah cool :) Yeah we've actually found a noticeable difference in how quickly the van heats up between the two inlets, slower if drawing from the cab side. Haven't measured it more scientifically yet but probably will at some point! And if there is any difference in humidity etc. And yeah we have the tank insulated, we were able to heat up 18l to 40C in a little over 2 hours with the element. We tested everything out a lot more for the next video (though to 40C not 70C). We've been using it for a few months now and are really happy with how efficient the kit is, very cool
How does the hot water tank know when to stop filling itself?
It's a manual fill so we just turn it off when it's at the level we want 👍
Does it get hot enough to kill bacteria?
Yep, the kit is rated up to 70C and at around 65C almost all (99.9%) of bacteria is killed in ~5 minutes. So we take it up high periodically to get rid of any traces of legionella 👍
I use the same kit which I bought almost 2 years ago and recently upgraded the pump and added the dual controller. I had problems getting the pump to kick in until I moved the positive pump lead to position 8 from position 7. Did yours work as per the diagram?
Cool, yeah we had ours kicking around for a while! In fact they've upgraded the design a bit since we bought ours too 😛 We did find there were a few small mistakes on the paper instructions we had (like the temperature sensors were the wrong way around) but we found the instructions on the website up-to-date and matching our controller so didn't have any issues after that 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories I'm glad it wasn't just me. I figured it out in the end though and I have to say, the dual heat exchanger we both have is very resilient. I've just uploaded a video to my channel showing a service of the exchanger as well as a pump upgrade, it was a journey for sure.
@@AMGMANIAC Cool, nice one. Yeah we're pretty impressed with it so far👍
If youve got a carbon monoxide meter check it works put it near the exhaust and see if the alarm goes off i had to get a new one i had a leak and at 200 ppm it still didn't set the alarm offi woke up to find smoke everywhere it could of been a different result if i hadn't of woken up to go to the toilet
Cheers, yeah we have a combined CO and smoke alarm. We read that it's not advised to test them with exhaust though as the combined heat and humidity can damage the sensor. But thanks for reminding us we need to test it again! Yeah CO can be scary, glad you're ok!
Do you use 3 sensors. You have 1 sensor for the heat exchange air temperature, 1 sensor for the water temperature. And then do you have a 3rd sensor to check that water is in the tank for the heating element?
Or does the water temperature sensor also do the water level check?
Thanks.
Hiya, yep exactly there is a thermocouple to measure the tank water temperature and a float level sensor in the side of the tank, we put those in here: ruclips.net/video/zgaRlmYyLpk/видео.htmlsi=Txos1aIYDuiV4t1u&t=485. And then there is a second thermocouple that monitors the air temperature at the exchanger here: ruclips.net/video/zgaRlmYyLpk/видео.htmlsi=UwaKOIZSi1bth8oK&t=1484 👍
@@SelfBuiltStories thanks so much. I'm not sure how I missed that bit of your video. Thanks for confirming. I have the bobil kit and will be adding the solar heating to it. You guys are doing an amazing conversion.
@@17bArawata No problem 👍and thanks 🙂
Is your bubble heater lower than your hot water tank? I’ve been watching a lot of thermosiphon videos and I’m wondering if you turn off the pump and will it begin to continue to circulate hot water?
I’m thinking of hitting the junkyard and picking up a car radiator and mounting it close to my exhaust pipe. Aiming to get hot water while driving?
The pump sits lower than the tank as it can't run dry, but there is no circulating through the exchanger without the pump running. We do get hot water while driving if we want though from the excess charge from the alternator that powers the 300W element in the tank 👍
Is the o-ring supposed to go in the tank? I would think that the o-ring should go on the outside because there will be a spiral leak path because of the nut.
Hiya, if you mean for the brass bulkhead connectors then they had two rubber O rings, we used one on each side of the tank 👍
gotcha
@@SelfBuiltStories
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Just one thing I don't really get. Why does the pomp only start working when the air temperature is more than 40 degrees? Wouldn't it be smarter to already start pumping once it warmer then the water temperature?
You can set the activation temperature to anything you like with the controller so you could have it lower so it starts pumping straight away if you wanted. The reason for having it higher at 40C is so that it is only pumping when the heater is actually running. If you had it lower below ambient temperature then the pump would be cycling non-stop when not in use, unless you turned off the whole system. We want to leave it on though so that the element can heat the water when the conditions allow it, so yeah personal preference really 👍
So you have to wait 5-10 minutes to use hot water. Not very optimum but works
Yep, well in the worst case when the water is cold. It might already be hot straight away if we've used the solar element while driving, and always has some retained heat anyway as the tank is insulated so in practice it doesn't usually start from cold unless we've just refilled the tank. But even in the worst case it's more than quick enough for us 👍
if there is a way you could get water to flow through the actual combustion block without actually water going into the combustion chamber, this whole setup could be far more simpler and far more effective.
What you're talking about sounds like a hydronic diesel heater? That's another nice option, pro's and con's with each. We went with this one as we prioritise our air heating with hot water the secondary, and with this setup we can have a controller with really fine grained control on that. But we find it pretty simple to use too, just took a few uses to figure out what settings work best for us. More than one way to do it but so far we're really happy with this setup 👍
If you buy an EGR heat exchanger. Run the heater exhaust through it. Loop the water circuit into the pipes from the Bobilvans, and you'll harvest waste heat from the heater exhaust too.
Have seen David McLuckie's channel..?
An absolute goldmine of info around diesel heaters. and ingenious ways to harvest heat from them.
www.youtube.com/@DavidMcLuckie/videos
Hey, yeah we've watched a few of his videos actually! His teardown on the Lavaner Pro was one of the reasons we went for that heater. Haven't seen that one though... food for thought 😛
@@SelfBuiltStories Not sure if that idea came from Davids channel, but I have seen it around, also running the exhaust through a standard household radiator, and using a diesel heater with a tumble dryer. It’s a wacky world lol.
Personally I intend to use 2 separate diesel heaters for heating (which will be forced air, and underfloor) and hot water, giving me redundancy. (If one fails, the other can be repurposed) I think it would be a simpler solution for me, and showering in the summer, where you want hot water but no heating is a plus.
I will also be installing a calorifier coil in the tank, hooked into the heater hoses coming from the engine. Utilising heat that would be dissipated to atmosphere through the radiator, for instant hot water when travelling.
Good luck mate, will be following this build…
Yeah redundancy is never a bad thing, when we take the van up to Norway and we're quite dependent on the heater we think we might just take a spare diesel heater and parts. We don't find it a problem actually to have the heater runner for the hot water and not warming the van, as so much of the heat energy is taken out by the exchanger that with the shower door closed the van doesn't really warm up if we don't want it to. And yeah lots of wacky things for sure, could definitely get lost down the rabbit hole of modifications... 😛 cheers!
How long did it take you from start to finish to do the build?
We had it on the go for around 2 years but with some big gaps in between where we weren't working on it, and then filming and editing it probably made it at least 3x longer 😀
@@SelfBuiltStories awesome, looks amazing
@@sarahsmith5273 thanks! :)