Van Insulation with Havelock Wool | Van Build Series

so today is a very exciting day for our van bill because I'm tackling my first project by myself so autumn flew back to Seattle yesterday after tackling a few days on our first weekend with the van he got the fan install you got some of the windows in so thank you ahem I couldn't have done it without you and my dad thank you Dad we'll be saying thanks to my dad a lot so yeah today I'm tackling my first project really excited I'm kind of nervous I'm choosing to tackle installation by myself something that's really easy to do without a lot of skills you don't need tools so hopefully it hopefully it goes ok so as you may notice I am sitting on a bunch of wall and it's all over my pants now and the van kind of smells like a petting zoo but um it's gonna be awesome when I'm done with this so basically insulation is one of probably that the most controversial confusing topics of van life and Van building so when we were researching insulation you see so many different options and everyone does it a little differently and you hear this one's bad and someone's like no it's good so it's just really confusing out there so we kind of looked at all the options we tried tons of resources and we ended up going with sheep wolf specifically Havelock wool which is a company based out of the Tahoe area and they've built their own vans with their own wool which is really cool so this hole is from sheep in New Zealand which is pretty awesome it's like pure wool they just spray with a little bit of stuff so there's no insect problems um we bought the two inch bats which is like these little like little strips of well they also have a loose fill but we thought the bats way better because you can rip it off and make your own loose foe with it um there's a few reasons why we chose half block wool at the end of the day so one it's really easy to install we don't need that special equipment I don't have to wear like any protection to it is not toxic so basically we don't have to worry about any toxins getting in the air from our insulation it's you know good for you to breathe in and it's totally ok 3 it's warm so obviously that's the reason why we're doing this you know be warm when we need to and stay cool when we need to and it's also you know easy to install like I said but like you can shove it into little crevices easy or you don't like cut stuff it's also good with moisture and so basically condensation is inevitable in the van that's what we've learned instead of trying to like remove it or try to avoid it um you should just try to manage it so basically from our understanding wall works really well for sure because when the humidity is up to 65% or when it goes over I'm sorry over 65 percent relative humidity it absorbs the moisture and the one who goes back down underneath that the moisture dissolves so we won't need to worry about like pools of water in the van that could cause problems down the line so it's really good with moisture management and then lastly it's also give a sound so it's supposed to be a good sound dampener you may notice we don't have any rattle trap in here which it seems like most people do it and we've tried to research it and at the end of the day we just decide not to go with it we talk to the guys that have long wool they told us that basically you know if we want to spend the extra money on it we could but they have this in their van and it it's like driving in a cloud as I think how they described it so we're not gonna do it I know this might be controversial and maybe we'll regret it I don't know I hope not um but we're gonna go for it so at least they took all these bats out of the bag so they kind of like shrink-wrap it to ship it to you and so I pellet them around a little bit um now I'm just gonna start tearing it apart I think the first thing I'm gonna do is just start shoving it in all the holes because I think once all the holes are filled then I can start putting it in some of the bigger areas so I think that's what I'm gonna tackle first and hopefully I dunno kate job I'm gonna make my mom and my dad like go through my check all the all the little holes and stuff later but wish me luck possible pro tip I brought out a marker so I can shove the wool into spots that my fingers can't reach without like getting all cut up I've seen some other people doing it sound like a good idea so we'll try it out [Music] when you look at the van it's very clear that there's like tons of holes in little spots but you don't really realize until you start shoving wall into everything you're like wow there are way more spots than I thought they're gonna be so I'm about done stuffing the driver's-side nooks and crannies I've cut up my hands a little bit trying to shove stuff in there so think I did a good job I'll probably have someone double-check it now I'm gonna start on the passenger side which is actually even better because there's less like nooks and crannies on the sites we have it the whole door and we're gonna install a window there on Friday hopefully um so yeah I'm gonna just keep trucking along um and then after I fill all the nooks and crannies I'm gonna start putting in like the bigger like more about the actual bats in the other spaces so the goal tonight is to finish the walls um little ambitious but I've got a lot done so far and then tomorrow I'm going to tackle the ceiling in the headliner we're gonna do the floor we do need to order more wool for that and we're also gonna do a subfloor so that'll likely be a different video because we'll probably explorable subfloor process and everything um yeah it's going pretty well this is fun it's so soft so I kind of keep like shoving it around my hand before I shove it in somewhere that way I don't get my hands cut up to that but it's really soft um the sheep petting zoo smells I'm adjusting to it oh I have a sheep all over me I'm basically a sheet now so day 1 of installation is done I almost got as much done as I wanted to I'm kind of struggling to figure out how to get the insulation on like the window imprints there's just not as much space to like shove the corners into or the sides I'm to hold it up so I'm debating between string but I try that and I really struggled it all fell down so debating between trying that again tomorrow or just taping it I'm not really sure I'm hoping my dad will help me tomorrow because it's definitely not a two-hand job I mean like I need two more hands can I have someone hold it out the other person like strapped it down somehow so here's a little glimpse at what I did today I've got all these little guys filled in except the window ones alright looking pretty good um happy thoughts going so far proud of myself for doing it so we'll get going again tomorrow and hopefully we can get the ceiling and the rest the walls done I still have a good amount left so I think we should be good but we'll see alright its installation day two my dad and I spent a lot of time today kind of strategizing our plan for the day so our main goal is to get the ceiling done and then if we have time hopefully the headliner done as well so for the ceiling our plan is to basically put up all the bats and then you strain to kind of create like a big net that suctions them up to the to the ceiling so they don't like droop or fall down or anything and we're also gonna hopefully get all these little um little tunnels on the ceiling filled with insulation as well I watched a video where someone uses like a vacuum cleaner to do that so that's my first task is to see if that will work I hope it does um and if not I'll have a have to figure out a plan B for the headliner it's basically just removing it's the hard part and then just shoving it with insulation a couple other decisions that we made today was to not fill these like window imprints as I'm calling them with insulation right now um so I'm only here a couple more days and I go back to Seattle and then when I come back we'll probably start making like some framing for the walls and stuff and then we'll work on that then so we're not gonna do that in this video but do know that we will insulate those we just don't think there's a huge rush right now because we're not putting the walls up quite yet and we're probably gonna end up taping them up and we just just we just think we can wait a little bit so that's kind of the story behind that and then for the wheel wells we kind of discussed potentially rattle trapping those I know I said yesterday we work in a rattle trap but we want to make sure that there's no like loud sounds coming from the wheel well area but what we think we're gonna do instead is just build the benches as you can kind of see with our layout around the wheel well and then create like another box around them and shove it with insulation um how flock wool has like a 90 percent sound absorption so we feel pretty confident that that'll help reduce the sound a lot it'll also insulate that area so we'll be doing that farther down the line as well but I just thought I'd give an update it's only on like five hours to get this done so I better I better get started I guess okay so I lied we are not insulating the headliner today we're actually gonna do a shelf underneath it no way we can store stuff above our heads while we're driving especially our backpacking gear and stuff and so we're gonna wait until we actually install that shelf to mess with that whole area just because we figure let's just spend our time in the headliner area once not multiple times so that's okay I feel like my task list is getting smaller every day because every day I'm like crap I can't actually do as much as I want it to but that's okay good news I figured out how to insulate these support beams um so I tried the vacuum trick and at first it didn't work but then we tried it again and it worked really well so basically what you do is you tie you get some string and we got some like mold and mildew resistant string cuz we plan on stringing the ceiling with this too we want to make sure we don't get any mold in the van so we tied a little piece of a t-shirt I like ripped off a piece of this t-shirt tied it on because you want something for the vacuum to kind of suck up um you need to make sure it's really light and then the strings light as well so then you put this through like one well actually sorry rewind you take up all the holes on the support beam that way it's not like all this air coming out so after you do that you put this string in the hole at the beginning you put a vacuum right here and then my dad helped but he can like help push it through neck started sucking it through then once the string comes out on this side you grab it down and then you tie wool to this side and so I've been cutting out these like little thin strips of wool and then you just pull it through and it to be really slow and careful because the first time I made the thickness of the wall too wide and I think I pulled it too hard and it broke inside of here so we had to try again um so I will film while I'm doing this you can see it better but basically it's pretty easy it's just kind of a easy way to kind of slide something through there it's kind of a hard space because the holes are really small unlike some of the holes on the wall but we found this on YouTube so I'll link below to whoever whose channel it was that we found it because they deserve the credit for this idea not us but it worked great so thank you [Music] [Music] so you've started to get some of the ceiling in and tried a few different methods we've tried just like doing crisscross like a bunch with it really tight and like shoving it in and that took kind of a while so now I'm just doing like like kind of back and forth back and forth and I loosen it and then I like kind of lay it in there and then I tighten it that seems to be working better the hard part is just like getting this string in like the small holes and then finding spots to tie it I'm also like I like a wall on my mouth and like looking ups kind of painful and like the wall keeps like falling in my eyes so I've probably eaten that good amount of wall today I worry about right now and I made a promise to myself I'm not going to pay until I finish this so it might be a long night [Music] we have sealing insulation well maybe like 90% of it but hey that's better than yesterday so last time I mom and dad helped me get most of the ceiling insulation up it was really nice to have an extra set of hands so thank you mom and dad y'all are the best what we ended up doing is what I kind of explained earlier we just took the string and kind of like zigzag between the beams to make kind of like a V pattern this is what it looks like to do that we use the side of the support beam where there's the opening in a little hole this is what that looks like it made it really easy to loop the string through between each one so it worked really well once we had all the string setup we loosened it out of the wall tightened it and then we tied the string it's like one of the thicker parts of the support beam on that and we tried to make it as tight as possible in an area where it like really just was like supported so that worked out really well the only concern we have is that some of it might be sagging a little bit I'm just from like over stuffing it or maybe not stuffing it well so hopefully when we start to install the ceiling panels we don't run into any issues but the nice thing about how lock wool is it's very like adjustable and you can rip stuff off and like shove it and push it so it should be okay but that's just one thing to keep in mind another thing to keep in mind is that the space between the beams can vary between them as well as they can be bigger than the actual wool is so for some of them we had to do like two batts of wool or like one bat and like a little on the ends to make it fit okay so keep that in mind as well we did not do the space above or around the fan because we are doing I'm mounting her on the fan and we just wanted to see what that looks like first to save ourselves from potentially doing double work you also did not do the side walls yet for the reasons I mentioned earlier we're gonna wait until we actually start to install the walls to kind of support it and hold it and same with the floors we're gonna wait until we kind of build out the space more to do the floors my dad is a really cool idea of how to build the van to make it a little easier so we're gonna try that out did not do the back windows or this window because we still have to install those windows so we want to just wait until that's done so we solve some installation to go but I feel like the hardest part like all the nooks and crannies is done so feeling really good so I'm gonna cut the insulation video here hopefully I showed you enough of how to install have luck well why we like have luck wool and then just some general insulation tips to make your van build easier so you have any questions just let me know but I will see you next time [Music]