Troop Trials of the New Roof.

Our second excursion took place this weekend, and we have a bit of work to do....

We took Elly to Stonehaven for a night out. This didn't work out quite as we'd planned as the town was chock-full of people and cars. With nowhere to park we had to just pass through and decided to pay a visit to Dunnottar castle instead. 
 

image from Trip Advisor

Arriving there we found the carpark full and the off-road carpark - the verge - full for a mile...We had our picnic lunch at the end of this line and then disappeared southwards to our overnight spot.

We'd booked in as a single tent plus car. The warden's rep queried this. Were we not a "campervan"? If so we'd attract a charge of £20 per night, not the £10 for a"tent + car". I pointed out that the 6-berth bungalow tent almost next to us had a car parked alongside and was taking up 4 times the area that we'd occupied, and were being charged £10. I guess if we'd pulled out a pop-up tent and thrown it on the ground alongside Elly, the debate wouldn't have arisen...we all had a laugh about it and I paid £10.


After another comfortable night we awoke to a much wetter view than the night before. It'd obviously been raining for quite a while but I hadn't heard a thing. In a tent, of course, the rattle of raindrops on canvas would've disturbed my slumbers straight away, but the tin top overhead deadened the sound completely. We did notice that the outer corners of the mattress squab that goes over the "escape hatch" were wet. The cause of this needs investigating but is clearly either the zip or the seam in the corners of the tent fabric. The seams are supposed to be sealed but there's clear daylight visible through the stitching. Most tents need "conditioning" to let the threads expand and create a waterproof seam, but this hasn't happened with these. They've had 2 good soakings now, so perhaps it's time to get out the seam sealer and give them some attention.

The second area to be improved is the overhead cover outside the back door. The roof tent gave a superb "porch" that protected us from the rain when the tent was open. The overhang of the Alu-Cab doesn't provide anywhere near the same level of protection, so we're going to improve on that somehow. 

One reason for the weekend was to try to work out a new arrangement for  the back end. Lots of options here, the obvious one being to rip everything out and start again from scratch. This'd be a bit  of a waste of materials and experience - some of what we have works very well. Let's face it, after so many experiments it ought to! The thought of starting school again...not appealing..surely there's something we can preserve?

The increase in the available height would allow us to raise the cooking area. This was the premise from which the whole exercise was begun. It now appears, after more thought, that the ability to stand up and cook is ideal "but not necessary all of the time". Can you hear the silence and measured breathing here? 😩. In fact, the 160mm or so of extra headroom even without folding the sleeping platform into the roof gets rid of the claustrophobic feeling of brushing against the ceiling all the time.

So.....we both stood inside again and discussed the options. The cardboard mock-up of the Engel was put in and moved about - much easier than doing that with the Real Thing. 

The fridge can't go on the other side as it'd block the "blind spot" window.

 We want to keep the storage bins but the 2 smaller ones at the front end are blocked by the Engel in this configuration. Options are to make access from the side, put the Engel on a slide so we can pull it out of the way or accept that it's "dead space". Not happy with the latter - a bit like surrender! We'll find a way....

I assembled a folding seat that we'd got from eBay at a bargain price.

With the Engel at the end of the storage area, there's room for 2 of these seats side-by-side. The squabs lift up to allow us access to the storage underneath and are handily each the same width as the lids. We only have one seat at the moment and the material is, I think, out of production, so we may have to buy a non-matching second seat and 2 dust covers - probably a good thing anyway.

We made a dummy cooker and set it at the level that would allow stand-up and sit-down use, and put the folding chair in place to see how much room 2 of them would need, side-by-side. Tried to imagine it all being used; which doors needed to open at the same time, what gets in the way of something else, all that ergonomic stuff. Lots of compromise solutions suggested themselves, but in the end we came up with something that seems to work given that there are some "must haves":

Engel fridge and top extension is an example. 

This "TwoZone" accessory only seems to be available in Australia. We found it very useful to use it as a fridge and keep the larger lower section as a freezer. It takes up a lot of space but it's worth it. Cold beer! A steak when 4 days out from the market is a real bonus.

And some "can't do anything about", like the position of the water storage, for instance.

Of the present arrangements, the "NAAFI flap" is so useful we wanted to keep it.

 

For those not old enough to remember, the picture shows the reason for the description...

This opens up the back end to the view, fresh air and conversation. 
We haven't sold much tea or ice cream as a result of having it, but it does allow passers-by to chat.😊






We want to be able to use the inside tap - and thus a sink, even if it's a removable bowl - and this suggests it should be on the side it is now or we'd have to run plumbing and wiring to the other side of the vehicle. By not having the cooker so high we could keep it and the sink roughly where they are now and still keep some of the opening area of the flap. It will still leave enough to give a useful view and, more importantly, ventilation.

I'd been trying to figure out how to build an extractor fan into the wall on the other side, and it wasn't going to work very well. 
The fact that cooking smells and steam, plus the wet by-product of cooking on gas, hasn't really been a bother before was because our bed was on the other side of the roof. Now, all that damp atmosphere was going to be enclosed and we need some way of getting rid of it. Opening the doors and windows is the obvious way but not ideal, especially if it's wet, windy or calm and midgie. The ability to use the NAAFI flap as a vent is good, but it has to be alongside the cooker to be effective. If the weather is too bad even for that, there's room to install a small extractor fan, perhaps made from a computer fan like Daphne's, in the flap. We've tried an insect net over the opening but with even a slight breeze it can get too close to the flame. Maybe I'll continue with this experiment:

This is a duct, electric motor and model aeroplane propeller donated to the cause of DIY by the engineering manager at work. It shifts a lot more air than a computer fan, but it's got 4 times the area.

This brings us back to the choice of cooker/heater. We thought about carrying a single burner gas stove to use on the drop-down table on the back door. 

This needs the door to be open while the burner's in use, which is a bit of a limitation and no good for heating. Using the existing double-burner stove introduces a lot of moisture into the air; this is bad enough from cooking but if we wanted to use it for heating too, it'd be impossible in cold weather. Imagine all that wet air condensing on everything? Camping Gaz or propane doesn't work so well in a cold environment so we'd be forced to keep the cylinder inside. This is what we do now and I've never been happy with the idea but because we were sleeping "outside", it was a compromise we could live with. We're not prepared to make that compromise any more, now that we're sleeping in the "same room". Nonetheless, the burner/sink combo in the Smev range here...

...seemed to fit the requirements quite well and at a reasonable price. It'd only do cooking, though, but we thought that leaving a burner on for a while would heat the truck up nicely if it weren't for the moisture it'd produce.

Petrol stove? We had one of these for a while, a Coleman. Worked well but produced fumes and I was never really happy with the need to pressurize the fuel to get it to vapourise. I've seen these stoves flare up with spectacular results, which would mean only using them outside the vehicle. This wouldn't work most of the time.

A diesel powered heater like an Eberspaecher is one option for heating; the common solution but expensive. 

 These are apparently the "industry standard" for heaters and are fitted to, for instance, Pulse ambulances. There are a number of variations on this theme ranging from cheap Chinese "knock-offs" to UK-supplied lookalikes with a decent warranty. Added to the list of "possibles".


  We heard a (false) rumour of a combination cooker/heater made by the same company and it was while researching that we found this:



diagram from the Wallas website

These are expensive but they are fuelled by diesel which is obviously quite handy as we have a tank full of it already. The extra height needed for the "standing cook" option would be provided by the need to raise the hob by the depth of the body. The heater option is built-in. The diesel is burnt to heat the hob and the heater fan blows recirculated air over it, so no water vapour gets into the truck.

There are a few You-Tube videos with detailed reviews of these options which we've seen. While seemingly not as fast as gas the Wallas cooker is safer, cleaner and does 2 jobs in one without the drawbacks of gas. The other advantages quoted on the website like "As diesel is a non-pressurized fuel there are no tunnel or parking concerns. No worries when looking for parking on your way to the opera in the city centre." weren't on our list of concerns, but I guess they cater for varied tastes...This is definitely a contender.

A company called Truma offer a combination heater/water boiler, but this only does part of the job and needs LPG or Propane as fuel, but can run from electricity as well. Fine for campsite use but no good off-grid as our limited-capacity system couldn't run it.

Oh - nearly forgot...there's always this:

Our woodstove was bought as a nice homely-kind-of-thing to have on a wild camp, and it'd provide constant hot water. It does that but needs constant attention to do so. Fine if we've nowt else to do, but keeping boredom at bay isn't a problem we often have, I'm glad to say, so our little Frontier stove doesn't get as much use as we thought it might. And no good for cooking, either. The heat isn't controllable or predictable and the stove needs shelter and the correct fuel (dry camel shit works best!) to be a viable alternative to a gas or other stove.

The above isn't, by any means, a complete review of all the options but that would probably take a week and bore us all to death.We're still debating the options but, despite the cost, we favour the Wallas hob/heater combination for a long term solution. I'm just off to see how many pennies we have left in the piggy bank.