ROOF RACK, ROOF VENTS & SOLAR PANELS
Roof rack, roof vents & solar panels are all things that are going to make your life in a van a lot more comfortable, one for storage, one for ease of having power and last one for comfort inside your van. Of course you can go without all of them, but they are very desirable things to include in your van build especially if you’re going for a long term Van Life.
We’ve decided to go with all three, simply due to a fact that we’ll spend long time pretty much living full time in a van, so we knew we’ll benefit from these things. And lastly, it adds value to the van when we go to sell it and make it someone else’s home.
ROOF VENT
For roof vents we went with Maxxair fans (find them here on Amazon), as you can see on the photo to the right, we installed two of them, it is definitely not necessary, but we wanted two mainly because our van is the longest on the market, it is Mercedes Sprinter 170WB extended which measures 24 feet from front to back.
This way we can setup one of them to pull air in, and another one to push air out, and by doing that we can literally stay cool in 100 degrees temperature. You can achieve this with one of fans by cracking open one of the windows. Both of these fans have rain cover, so you can pretty much run them full speed even when it’s raining outside, pretty sure they are the only on the market that can be used while raining and while you’re driving.
Installation was pretty straight forward. Cutting into your van, into your new tiny home is a little bit nerve wrecking but you gotta do what you gotta do. Just make sure you take it slow and seal everything properly so no surprise leaks come around later, that is no fun. We used THIS sealant and it worked great, no leaks! If you want to check out how we did it, we have the whole video about it, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/1J2X4RPRM10
ROOF RACK
Roof rack is one of the things you can definitely go without, but we just couldn’t resist and needed to splurge at least on one of the things in this van build, that was a roof rack for us. It was aluminum, already van life ready, fully adjustable to accommodate our 2 roof vents, and it was a good support base to mount our solar panels and roof deck area to it. So it made a lot of sense to us to get it ready to go, instead of custom building our own from aluminum posts.
This roof rack is not cheap, but it was soo worth it. You can find it HERE on amazon. Roof rack is available for almost all other brand vans as well, and all wheelbases too, and quality is great! Besides holding our solar panels, it still has plenty of space on sides to store stuff such as surf boards, skies, snowboards or whatever else you might want to bring with you. It secures to factory mounting channels so it is super sturdy and secure, no worries about it falling off, hah!
SOLAR PANELS
Solar Panels are probably one of the best investments you can make for you van if considering van life at all, especially if you want to stay off grid and explore the nature. Solar panels will give you freedom as far as power goes, you will not depend on anyone letting you charge your van batteries. Even a small amount of daylight will charge your batteries with good quality solar panels. We went with Renogy solar premium kit , if you order it using this LINK you will literally get 10% off your whole order, no kidding, try it.
This premium kit will pretty much get you everything you need to hookup your whole system, just buy batteries and you’re ready to go.Solar panels from Renogy are the highest quality out there now, even on cloudy days they will perform very well. The whole system is plug and play, you literally cannot do it wrong, so don’t get scared, just take it slow and you will do fine!
We opted for a 4-pack 100w solar panels even though you can do fine with only 2. We knew that we wanted to stay off grid as long as possible and we had enough space on the roof due to large size of the van.
Solar panels and roof rack video: https://youtu.be/vcBOd_d7Nrc
All of my content is completely free and I’m glad if I can help, i never want the cost to stop someone from living your dream life, but if you’re feeling generous and this post helped you, you can thank me by going to any of my YOUTUBE videos and clicking THANKS button below video, and i’ll keep working towards keeping this website up and creating even more content.