Cheap Heat for Van Living

Hello everyone, welcome back to my next video. Today we're going to talk about heat. Now some of you that's really really important. It's November 4th, 2017 and I just saw on the news the other day that Seattle got snow and the northeast had also gotten snow up around the Great Lakes and it was going to hit New England. So some of you in the middle of November are already dealing with cold and that's kind of normal. It could be cold, it's winter. November is winter. So finding heat in your van is a really important issue for a lot of us and so we're going to do, we're going to be talking about heat. We will be doing a video on the Mr. Buddy heaters which is a standard answer for a lot of you. We will have a video with an RV using an Olympian Wave 8 catalytic heater and so we're going to talk about heat because it's really important. I spend my winters in the desert southwest. I am a snowbird so heat is less important to me than it is to a lot of you but it's still important because the desert can be surprisingly cold in the winter. It's never going to snow. I've never seen snow in the desert where I go but it can get into the teens. I have seen it into the teens and even worse I can get caught in between so I can be up in the high country. That happened to me this year. I was in Colorado in September and I got snowed on and it was cold and we had some really cold wet days. It was very unpleasant. So wherever you are you're going to have to deal with some cold and you have to have some heat. If you are for some reason forced to be in cold areas you got to have it. I mean you just got to have heat or you'll be miserable the whole time. Now so we're going to talk about the Mr. Buddy. We're going to talk about the Olympian. However there's a third option and it's one you may never have heard of. You may never have considered. You may thought was too dangerous and quite simply the third option is right here. It is a standard Coleman propane stove. This is what I use for heat. I've owned several Mr. Buddies in my life and I've gotten rid of them. I don't like the Mr. Buddy. I don't ever intend to use a Mr. Buddy in my van and I'll go through a list of reasons. So I don't use the Mr. Buddy. I love the Olympian. However there isn't room really in here. I can fit an Olympian here. Make no mistake you can fit an Olympian, the smallest Olympian in a van. If I had an RV I would for certain have an Olympian heater but I don't find that I need it. As a snowbird on the in-between times if I can't get caught in the snow in the cold country in high country I run this. I run my Coleman one burner stove. When I get to the desert there aren't that many cold days. Again if it's cold and I'm inside and it's too cold for me just to put on a sweater and maybe a light jacket I will turn this on and run my stove for the evening and that will keep me plenty warm. So that's what we're going to talk about. The cheapest, easiest, least obtrusive source of heat you can possibly have is simply a Coleman propane stove and I'm going to show you how I do it. I have been using a stove like this in my van for 10 years. It's been my essentially my only source of heat for 10 years and I think it works extraordinarily well. Let me first begin by telling you why I don't use a Mr. Buddy. The first reason is a Mr. Buddy is too hot. Even on its lowest setting which on the middle size there are three sizes of Mr. Buddies. There's the little buddy, the buddy, and the big buddy. The Mr. Buddy is too big in a van. You turn that thing on, if you have any insulation at all, in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, the van will be at 100 degrees. The second thing I don't like about them is the requirements around it. There has to be a certain amount of space around the heater, every heater, that doesn't get hot. The Mr. Buddy puts out so much heat, any of them, any of the three of them, that if something is too close, if something is four inches in front of it, it will get so hot it will literally catch fire and I know that for an absolute fact. I have seen things catch fire that were set too close to an Olympian heater. Every heater ever made will come with a list of clearances around it and you must read the clearances and obey them. If you do not, your life is at risk. You can die. So the clearances are critical and with the Mr. Buddy, it's harder to get the clearances in a van because there's just not enough space. Now this is especially a problem if you're in a car and people write me all the time and say, Bob, I live in a car, what kind of heater can I use? And I'm afraid the answer is none because they all require clearance and there's just not enough room in a car to give that heater the clearance it demands. It's life and death. So that's the two big issues. In a van they're too hot and in a car they require too much clearances. The next thing is it's expensive. It's 80 bucks for the middle sized and about 50, 60, 70 on Amazon for the small. So they're expensive. But here's the problem. It's not so much the money, it'd be worth it. They're failure prone. And I just got to tell you, I get so many letters from people saying, my buddy failed and can I fix it? And my answer is no. I have on my website a page that describes how to go through and fix them when they break and sometimes it works and usually it doesn't. They're very failure prone. I know so many people that have bought the things and then they stop working. They require a filter. And so most, the first thing I always ask is you tell me your heater is broken. I say, well, did you use a filter? Most of the time people know about them and say, yeah, I've used a filter every minute it's ever been on and it's still broken. They are failure prone. And that's all I can tell you. Too hot, too much clearance, failure prone. They're a waste of space. In other words, if you use, most of us, now if you're in a cold country, I lived in Alaska, I used a heater for five, four, five, six months out of the year. The other six months, even in Alaska, I never used it. It just took up space in the van that I never used. For most of us, you might only use a heater two or three months out of the year. The other seven or eight months a year, it just sits around. It just takes up space. So they waste space and I waste a fair amount of space. Whereas this, never you waste space because I use the stove all year. Another final reason that I'm not really recommending the Mr. Buddy is they use more fuel. This will use much less fuel just because it's low. When I put this down on simmer on low, it's just barely burning anything. So it will use less fuel in this van. So even a Mr. Buddy in a van on low still uses a lot more fuel than this will, and it's still too hot. So those are all reasons why I choose to use this. The next question is, it says right on it, not to use this indoors. That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me. If this were a natural gas stove in your house, would there be a sign on it that said, don't use this indoors? Of course not. That's silly. A natural gas stove or a propane stove in a house is this exact same thing, just in a house. I can't think of any reason whatsoever why this is unsafe here. And so I have been using one of these for the last 10 years, but let me make this very clear. I have magical powers and that's the only way I have stayed alive. If you run this in your van, you will die instantly because you don't have magical powers like I do. So I will not recommend to you that you use this in your van. I will just tell you that I have for the last 10 years and I will continue to do so until the day I die and can't live in a van anymore. As far as I can tell, this stove is exactly like the propane stove in any RV sold in America with a propane stove. I don't consider this any risk to run this for as far as carbon monoxide. I just don't think that's any risk at all. But again, use proper ventilation. You drop your two front windows a quarter of an inch, you've got all the ventilation you could possibly need. So there is a really very severe danger with doing this and that you've got an open flame. Now let me tell you what's going to happen. Let me give you a little demonstration. So I'm going to stand up and you can see the stove and this is a wall over here and I'm going to go over here and I'm going to get something and I'm going to bend over because I'm going to bend over and get my fridge out. My fridge is on the floor. I have to roll it out. It's on wheels. And what have I done? I've set my butt on fire. That's what I've done. I just set my butt on fire. The risk with this stove is like any open flame. I can drop something on it. I can, I can back up into it. I can just not be watching it and set something on fire. Fire is a huge risk with an open flame. I have devised this cool little thing. This is, what is this? This is a horribly expensive and hard, impossible to find thing. It's actually a splatter guard designed to go around one of your burners. So if you're cooking some meat and it's splattering, you put this on top of it and you can buy, you know, the mesh round splatter guards that would go on top and then it would keep all the splatters and keep your kitchens clean. Well, that's just, this is $8 on Amazon. I bought this one. I literally bought this one 10 years ago, I think. As far as I can remember, I bought this 10 years ago and I've been using it ever since. It's not very scientific, but boy, does it work. So it just sits here and it's this cheap metal and it just, I just bend it around. I bent this hinge back. Can you see that there? And it sets down over the arm and it works really, really well. I've been using this for a long, long time. Another big disadvantage to this heater, this type, using this as a heater, is now all the heat rises and pools up at the top. That's also a huge problem with the Mr. Buddy. I then, this, I devised this. This is a really fancy piece of equipment here. I'm really into fancy. This is cheap RV living. Remember that? And so running your stove for heat with a $8, this is a $40 Coleman stove on Amazon. This is $8 on Amazon and this is probably 50 cents worth of heavy duty aluminum foil. And so it's just heavy duty aluminum foil, the wide. And then I went back and forth a million times. I think this is probably 10 layers and it just goes on here, goes all around it, comes back here. You see all this? And I just squish it in and now the heat doesn't rise anymore. I mean, I can, this is not uncomfortable on my hand because the heat rise, it comes forward. Now it still rises. Hot air rises and you can't make that not happen. What I'm going to do most nights in the winter by five, it's usually dark or, or almost dark sun's gone and it's twilight. So you've got the whole evening to go without light, without heat and in the desert. And it's like that when the sun goes down, it's getting cold. I'll make a meal. And if it's going to be a really cold night, I'll make a long cook meal. By that, I might mean I'll, I'll fry hamburgers and maybe I'll make spaghetti. That means frying the hamburger, warming up the sauce, boiling the noodles. Well, that's like a 45 minute burn between those three things. It's going to be completely toasty warm in here. And then you turn it off. Normally in the evening, it might get cold again, say seven, eight o'clock, it'll get cold again. Well, maybe I'll put a pot of water on and get hot water and, uh, I'll, I'll clean up for the night or, uh, I'll make hot chocolate or tea and say it turns cold again by, say I go to bed at 10 and at 10 o'clock, it's cold again. Well, at nine 30, I'll, I'll put on another pot of hot water. I'll get a hot water bottle and fill it full of the hot water because now I'm taking that hot water to bed with me. I'm putting it in the bed. It's getting the warm bed warm. And then I'm going to go to bed with a hot water bottle at my feet. And that's really, really nice, isn't it? So I've taken the heat this thing creates and I've saved it and stored it overnight. This is a, such a multi-purpose device. If you have a car, this might very well be an option because if you do what I've done here with the, with the things around it, then your clearances are pretty good. Uh, so I really recommend this, um, for all of you with magical powers. And if you do not have magical powers, then do not do this because it breaks all the safety rules, but it has worked super well for me. Of course I couldn't run. You can't run at this at overnight. You can't run any of the Mr. Buddies. You can't run this. You have to be here aware of this. It's an open flame and open flame is a severe danger. Okay. So I think that's it. I'm going to stop there. I'm just going to say this has worked for me and I'm, I've been happy with it. If you got anything out of this, uh, like us on YouTube, subscribe to the channel and just remember you can have a whole new life. There is a super cheap way to have a whole new life and you can have it. Okay. Thanks a lot. I appreciate your watching. We'll talk to you later.