This High-Tech DIY Transit is the Most Innovative Camper Van I Have Seen!

This is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel. Very excited to have John and Debbie on the channel. They have a really cool DIY Ford Transit custom camper van conversion and this thing is top-notch on the inside. John's going to give us a full tour inside and out, so join us. Hi Patrick, thank you so much for having us on your channel. I'm John, this is my lovely bride Debbie and this is our camper van. It's a Ford Transit 2023. It's the short wheelbase, just the standard one, 20 feet long. We wanted that because we wanted to be able to park in normal parking spots. So we did that. It's the gas version, the EcoBoost engine, so we get 14 miles to the gallon and that's coming cross-country. Let me show you around the outside. It came with the one window and then we put the flares on. These are flare space and the reason we put these on is so that we could get a queen-size bed in there which is really great because I'm six foot, my wife is shorter. She didn't care, I cared. You'll notice we don't have a place to put water on the outside. That's on the inside. We'll show that to you in a little bit. We have two e-bikes which allow us to camp and then have mobility, go around, see the towns, do stuff. So this is really cool. Underneath here is a crate for our little JoJo. She has a four-point harness and she loves there. She sticks her head right here and that's a lot of fun. This is our power, so it's 30 amp power, shore power. We have been out five weeks and we've never once had to use that. So we have all of the solar and two alternators which keep our batteries fully charged and I'll show you those later. On the roof we have 400 watts of solar. We have an air conditioner. We have scare lights all the way around with switches inside and then we have a max air fan. I did put a gray tank underneath. We do not have any black tank. It's a gray tank. It's 10 gallons. I wish I could have fit more under there but that's the biggest tank I could get. So if you want to see inside, welcome to our home away from home. We're going to get back to today's tour in just one moment. I want to thank The Wellness Company for sponsoring today's video. What is your plan if a bad infection hits while you're camped out in a national park hundreds of miles away from the nearest doctor? For anybody living the RV life, van life, or even just a family vacation, getting sick on the road is a major worry. You know the reality. Finding urgent care in a new town, that's a gamble. You might not have cell service for that telehealth call and getting a prescription filled across state lines, that could be an absolute nightmare. A sudden medical issue can bring a great adventure to a screeching halt. That's why this kit should be considered essential gear right alongside your spare tire. It's the medical emergency kit from The Wellness Company. 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That's code N-J-O-A. Get prepared, save some money, and travel with true peace of mind. Now back to the tour. So this is what we call our living room. And so we sit here and we wanted an open feel. Thank you Humble Road for giving us that idea. Nothing, there's no floor-to-ceiling cabinets anywhere in here. So we sit here, we relax, we have this computer table. And then when it's dinner time, we flip it around. We have these little slides that come out. And then this flips open. And we both can sit here and comfortably have a meal. And my phone is ringing. That's Pastor Reno, my pastor at my church. I'll talk to him later. But hi, Pastor. Anyways, this is really fun. This works. And just so you know, all of my woodwork is Baltic birch. So different thicknesses, but Baltic birch. My wife took a piece of Baltic birch, stuck it in water for three days. And it never swelled. And she said, that's what I want. So yeah, this is a mount that is custom to the van. I forget the vendor that I bought it from. I do have a list of all of the components. And I'd be happy to share that with Patrick and you guys. So I have who I bought it from, when I bought it, how much I paid, and whether or not I'm happy with it. And I'll provide that for you. We do have an S-bar heater. The cool thing about the S-bar heater is that it sucks gas off the gas tank. So I don't have any propane. I didn't want to bother with propane. And this sucks about one gallon every 24 hours. So I got a 33-gallon gas tank, never run out. These swivel seats were factory installed. So they work really well. The only thing, Ford has a little issue. You have to open the front door to flip them around. But if that's the worst thing that I have to do, I'm okay. The flooring, the flooring is kind of cool. Again, Humboldt Road, thank you for teaching me how to insulate. So I have aluminum struts going across. And then in between those, every foot is insulation. I forget the name of it. It'll be on the list. So an inch of foam, and then a half an inch of plywood, and then a half inch of the laminate flooring, which has been rock solid. We have the bug wall. The bug wall is great. It has magnets right here. So you just bust out. And luckily, JoJo, our puppy, has not learned that she can go out of it. So it holds her. This is our refrigerator number one. We went with Dometic. It has worked perfectly. It has a little freezer section. We opted to take that out. And because we have another freezer that I'll show you in a minute in the garage. All extruded aluminum. We didn't go with 8020 because that was too expensive. We went with another brand, but it's all extruded aluminum. We have these switches. This is for a step so you can see where you're stepping. This other switch here lights up underneath the van so that critters don't accumulate at night. And then this is our water pump. And we purposely kept the light functional so that we know that it is on. So we don't leave the water pump on. This is for our lights, which is really cool because they're all dimmable and they work great. All right, moving on. The other part of our living room is this storage area that we had to put in. And it holds all of the coverings for our windows, which is really fun. We have our dog bed. And when JoJo is not sleeping on this, we move it out of the way. And this is actually our shower. It's pretty luxurious actually for a little 20-foot van. What you do is you just pull this up, flip this over, and the shower curtain attaches to these little rings up here. And then down at the bottom, the magnets hold it so the water doesn't go everywhere. And if anybody has a better idea of how to get my rings up here, I'm open. So that would be great. The other thing is, oh, what we do for the water source is actually we just unscrew this and put another hose on here. And we just, it magnetizes up here. And we just take a shower. We have 36 gallons of fresh water plus five gallons of hot water. And that's heated electrically. So the cool thing is, is while we're driving, we can heat our hot water because we have two alternators. So I'm pumping 130 amps back into my batteries. And so I can drive and heat water for free, which is really cool. Got that from Our Thriving Life, which was a really cool thing. So the walls are Baltic birch and then closed cell foam and then marine vinyl. And then all of the attachments are stainless steel. And the nice thing is, is that I can get at anything that's behind here. So just a few bolts and that panel comes off. I can get to all the wiring. By the way, the wiring is all marine grade. And then it's all loomed, all put in looms. Up here are the floodlights for the outside, the scare lights. So at night, if my wife hears something, I can light it up and we can see it. This is the control unit for the S-bar heater and it works. It heats this place up. You don't need two. One works perfectly fine, especially for a small van like this. This is the Victron control unit. It shows me everything, shows that I have just 74% in my gray tank full and I can drain it just by pushing a button here. But this is great to see when my wife's using the microwave or using the blow dryer. I can see how much she's draining my batteries. So we did go with a light gray on the walls and then white on the ceiling. And that contrast just makes it feel more open and airy. And that's what we were after. Debbie wanted cutting boards. The only thing I didn't manufacture was the countertop. And the countertop guy had a single. And she said cut it in half, which is a really great idea because then we can still use the sink and the cutting board. So she loves that. And then the deep sink. This is so critical because when we're just in a hurry, don't want to take a shower, you can wash your hair in this and just keep going. So I didn't want things to fall back behind here because this was going to be open for ventilation. So I built this little slide back here. So if anything does fall back, which it does, it just pops right out here. And so we don't lose things. If you don't have one of these, get a ratcheting one. It makes so they don't unravel. 110. So we have these just pop up and we have 110 on this side. We have 110 on this side. They're both GFI. Our water heater is underneath our heads. And you'll see that when we go into the garage. So it's way over here. Since water when you're camping is important, you want hot water instantly when you get here. In order to do that, I put this little valve here. So I just turn that valve and I just feel this. When it gets warm, I flip it back. And now I know I have instant hot water up at the sink. No fuss, no mess. Down here, all my dovetail drawers. I'm really proud of this. It's all Baltic birch. I manufactured these all myself. This is the timer for the water heater because I didn't want to forget and have the water heater left on. So that it'll just, if I forget, it shuts itself off. Like I said, we don't have propane. So we have an induction cooktop, which is great. It's a standard size. So if or when it breaks, we just just buy a new one. Plenty of storage for everything that we have. And again, thank you to other YouTubers that taught me. Don't make all the drawers the same height. I told, my wife told me what she was going to put in them and I built them accordingly. So we chose not to have any propane and thus we couldn't have a stove or an oven. So we opted for a convection microwave oven and it does everything. It air fries, it broils, and it does everything that we need to do. My wife has made some wonderful meals out of that. Probably wondering what do we do? If we have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, we have a gotta go. And the cool thing is it's that's it's Jayco, but they call it the gotta go. But the nice thing is you can do dishes while you go potty or cook an egg or whatever you need to do. But it works really great. And like I said, we've been out for six weeks and we've used it a few times for number two, mostly for number one, and we've had no problem with it. And then no house would be complete without a shoe drawer for your wife. So that's Debbie's shoe drawer and she loves it. And she also has a little place to hang things up over there, which is really nice. And then you can see her little stool for holding things up. And then this just tucks back away and it's nice and clean. So the bed area, it is a queen size bed. So it's 80 by 60. That's important because I'm six foot. And with the flare space flares, it allows that. And then my wife and then little Jojo sits over there and it's great. We have reading lights with USB ports on those. We also have USB ports inside the flare, which are nice. Underneath, we have, as you can see, just extra lighting for task lighting during cooking. We have the toe kicks, which I got from other websites, which are a great idea because you can get in there at night when you're sleeping and you have to use the facilities. You don't want your eyes. You want to turn on a bright light. So I did put in a red light and it is dimmable also. We have air conditioning, which is the nomadic. We went with this because it's low profile on the roof and it's also low profile inside, which is great. So we can sit up here, play cards, do what we, you know, just have fun and we don't walk our heads. We also have a max air fan, which just we keep it going pretty much all the time, except when we're driving. We have these upper cabinets, which are nice and they're all Blum hardware. I got that. We got one over here. My wife said that it had to be grain matched. Home of road. You'll appreciate that. That's scary because if you mess up, you have to start all over again, but it's all grain match. We have a little fan, which is great for at night because you just want a little bit of air movement and that has three speeds and these windows, these slide open, which give a nice breeze coming through. And then the way the flares work is they made a nice little cubby here for, for books. And over here, we keep all of our little doodads and gadgets and that's the inside of the van. Let's go outside. So on the roof, we have an awning. So it's 10 feet long. It's the Funama and it comes out eight feet. I did remember this. So we don't have electric. It is manual, which isn't a big deal. Truly not a big deal. Like I said before, we have the e-bikes. In order to get the e-bikes out of the way, it's real easy. This just flips out. The nice thing about this is most, most stop there, but this brand allows you to go 120 degrees, which allows you to open and lock the van doors open. And then these, this one will go all the way open. So we have the bug screen back here. These, these panels drop down so that it's solid all the way across if you, if you want. And these are the, the bug wall, which we really like. And they were able to customize to where the bed started and where the garage started. So, so if it's raining, you, you just pop these down and then they also have plastic that goes over so that you can actually keep this open in the rain if you want to. So storage, we brought too much on our trip, but luckily we have the storage to do that. So these are normal size totes and we were able to get four of these in there along with an extra blanket because I don't know why. So here is our, our outdoor shower. So we have an outdoor shower. We just hook it up just like this. It's so easy to do just like that. And then the pump is not on, but if the pump was on, it wouldn't have water coming out of that. This is our fill for our water tank. So again, we didn't want anyone to put anything into our water tank that we didn't know about. So we put it inside the, the walls of the van so that we have full control over that. Here are lights. So this is a light down here, which also lights up underneath the van. So at night, this whole area is lit up. This is an indoor light in here. And this switch is something that I still have to do, which is a light inside the tank or shiny into the tank so I can see the fill level a little easier. While we're here, I'll just show you. So this is a 36 gallon water tank over the wheel well. This is the five gallon water heater, which is awesome because we heat the water while we drive and it stays hot for a good 13 hours. And then in front of that is the pump system and all the valves. And I learned my lesson from everyone else that does this for a living and everything's isolated. So I can isolate different sections of the water system. If something goes wrong, I can still keep going. This is our refrigerator slash freezer number two, the ice co, which has worked perfectly. So this can either be a freezer or a refrigerator. We keep it as a freezer all the time because we have the important stuff in here, our ice cream. Up here is just more storage. We keep Debbie's workout equipment in here and our camp chairs. So next, let's talk about the power center. What I put in here was all Victron equipment. So starting at the front, I have the 3000 watt inverter and then down below I have the distributor and then the link shunt. Then going up, I have the MPPT solar controller and then a 30 amp 12 volt to 12 volt DC to DC converter, which is from my number one alternator. And then the dedicated alternator, I have two 50 amp DC to DC converters. And then I have the Servo GX, which talks to everything. Now behind this are my two batteries, which are the 600 amp hours of lithium batteries. And then over here are the AC switches, all the circuit breakers, and then the 12 volt. I also have another 12 volt distribution panel, which is hidden behind one of the panels on the wall. But since there are four screws, I can get at it when I need to. Have fire extinguishers. Then the other thing that I wanted to mention is I went with the one ton because of the weight factor. We went with high quality stuff, which may, I mean, just the DC to the inverter weighs a lot. And so we came in underweight. We weighed it with my wife and I in it and we're underweight, but we couldn't have done that if we went with a 250. Thank you very much for taking the time today to give us a tour of your awesome creation. I love the fact that you paid attention to payload because you want to do a high quality build. You probably have like 800 pounds of inverter and wiring in there and water tank. You got to have enough room to bring additional things and not be at the full limit of the van. So I applaud you on that. I think the build quality is exceptional. Now, what's your level of commitment to van life? You guys, weekend warriors, extended travel, or are you going to go forward? We're extended travel when we can. We're both retired. When we're home, we volunteer at our church, doing marriage coaching, but pretty much we're just retired and just enjoying life. And do you think like off grid with your capacities that you have, you can go a full week? We have been out six weeks and never once plugged in. We just had to refill our water. And that's really all we do, refill the water and refill the refrigerator. And we're off and traveling. And with Debbie and I and the little puppy, this is a perfect size because like I said, we fit into a standard parking spot and that's important. We don't have to worry about, can we turn around? Can we do whatever? This is the right size for us. And I'll get that material list from you. And I understand you guys do some YouTube of your travel. So I'll put a link to your YouTube channel in the description. So our viewers should click over and see what you guys are up to. This is Patrick in New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel. Thanks for joining us.