Has anyone considered getting a cargo van to convert into a stealth camper to live in and save a fuck ton of money?
I though this idea was dumb as fuck at first but the more I think about it, the more I want to do it. I'd be able to save around 2500 a month if I did this.
Share your experiences
I have no idea how it works since I'm not from USA but:
How the fuck do you shower if you live in it?
Where do you prepare/store food?
How do you get electricity for chargers/laptop/PC and what about internet?
IMO if you are going to have problem with anything I listed then its not worth it unless you are poor enough to make you want to be homeless
Shower at gyms/ymca, also in the midwest pretty much every trucker stop has showers, Every starbucks and a ton of mickey d's has free internet
You can use portable toilets with powerful deoderizers.
As for the shower and shit situations, you can use 24 hour gyms or if you're super desperate, use hand sanitizer and baby wipes lol
As for cooking, you can use alcohol based cookers.
Electricity, you can use power inverters and solar power.
As for the free internet, you'll be saving so much money that you could consider switching to an unlimited data phone plan and use your phone as a Wi-Fi hub.
booooring
I'm going to convert my T5 soon, plenty of conversion kits available too
fuck yeah i have thought about it.
fucking cross country travel, cheap and with adventure mixed it.
i would get a ford cargo van. no windows. there are some interesting videos on youtube. RV couch is a good element to throw in the fan. some other solor panel stuff. You can find some vans with extra generators for 120v shit.
why not get an actual camping van?
at least it will resemble something like a mini flat
or become a trucker, have your own truck with shower cabin and so on and never leave it, even for work
That might work until they kick you off for high usage or throttle you
Usage is throttled down to 2g speed after 22gb on AT&Ts unlimited plan. Unless you torrent or stream/game a lot, id say thats not an issue.
>why not get an actual camping van?
it's a target for theft by crackheads and general profiling/suspicion by local law enforcement.
That seems like a depressing way to live.
Have a co worker that did this back in the day. Your mental health gets fucked. He had like, a GMC 3500 van, and hated how small it was. You guys are hilarious wanting to live in wagons.
This is awful. Not even refugees and immigrants live like schmucks and plebs. Start being patrician and get a fucking job faggots
> I'd be able to save around 2500 a month if I did this
Settle down bub, OP is just inquiring about how it's like living in a wagon
See this is why it makes more sense to just buy a class B with a shitter and a shower if you want to live in it. You can get a decent one for like 15k maybe a bit more.
seems like a good idea until you realize almost all motor home lots require your mobile meth lab to be a late 2000's model or newer
Those showers are shit,I guess convenient location but a pain to use.
Truck stops have better showers than budget tier hotels and offer reward programs so you can get free showers easily. Also use baby wipes between showers.
*blocks your exit*
Unless you really need the "stealth" element or a used class B is probably a better entry point for road tripping.
Currently the Ford Transit is somewhat replacing the Merc Sprinter as the vehicle of choice, both generally have higher roofs, drive more like the car and get better mileage. There's the dodge/fiat promaster too but i wouldn't.
I would also keep in mind that it's one thing to travel out of a Van and use it as a mobile hotel and another to live in it in one spot and cycle between different spots. If you just kind of throw a mattress in the back of a 2500 van you're going to miss things like a sink, and insulation you can take for granted in even a shitty apartment if you're living in it 24/7, and to do it right is going to take a good chunk of change and time.
Some people might just not give a shit and deal either way which works too.
I've thought about it. But here's the thing. If you're out innawoods with a van everybody knows you're camping. The only reason you need your camper to be stealthy is if you are planning on living in it full time for extended periods of time.
Fuck stealth. It is legal to sleep 8 hrs at rest stops, just go to a different one every night while vacationing. You want to be obviously a good person not up to anything bad, dindu nuffin situation.
Stealth campers now have a reputation for housing homeless populations / drug use / human trafficking so you are honestly better off with a normal minivan and some window tint.
Wife and I have done like 15K in our town and country so far, slept at rest stops and a few national parks (where it was legal to do so check your laws bro) and never had a problem, saved so much fucking money. Two people at a hotel is going to at least be $75 at the cheapest place after taxes and shit
How will you fix electricity? Your car battery won't be able to run your AC all night.
On the more expensive builds the name of the game is basically shoehorning RV systems into a conversion van.
So you basically modify your engine a bit so that it can steal gas from your tank for a generator which pipes it's exhaust to the car's exhaust?
most people just run a 25 ft cord out into the woods and run a tiny generator unit for things like AC / Electric cooking / TV all night.
I beefed up my alternator and put in a secondary 12v for the main system, then I have a little solar setup in the back for all the other shit I don't want compromising my main
The point is to blend in so you can camp out anywhere.
A stealth van parked innawoods looks just as out of place as a camper van parked on some random residential street or in some random business's parking lot.
Literally the only practical purpose is for vagrancy.
holy fuck what
Nobodies mentioned vandweller yet.
Whatever happened to him?
fuck cargo vans
get a toyota bandit
i lived in a van on the side of a house, used their shitter, kitchen and hung out in the living room and saved 500/mo on renting a room
I road tripped in my truck for months, staying at some places for weeks. if i need to shit during the day i drive to a supermarket, on the offchance i need to shit at night, i shit in a bush. when we had the van with the two side opening doors, they were like urinal walls, i could just open them up and start pissing out the van
i run into showers often enough, once a week or so, since im not a social autist and can make friends with people
i currently live at my moms house (not paying rent anywhere) and spend maybe 24 hours a week there, with the rest of the time getting drunk in the streets and passing out in the back of my truck
i cook on a camp stove and have a little kitchen contained in cardboard boxes
if it gets cold then i put on a fucking sweater
i have a lot of van buddies with really sweet setups, and they can live wherever they want
I like your approach. Throwing a generator out your car seems so lazy, I'd rather see a proper solution like yours.
Or my generator idea, but I'm not actually sure how feasible that is. Switch wiring for the battery and the exhaust stuff should be easy enough, but the fuel tap might be a tad tougher.
I've actually been considering buying a long car (earlier Volvo maybe), building a bed in it and a generator like described to run the AC and some other electronics that are nice to have. Not to live in, but to sleep in for a night while you're away from home. The long Volvo is because maybe that'd allow you to keep the passenger seat, otherwise you wouldn't need a longer car.
would
Inverters are a thing. Fuel hungry perhaps, but simple to install.
That sounds comfy, do you like your life?
There's a whole group of people doing this right now. They call it van-dwelling. Most of them are winey libs asking for money on their blog.
But why would you ever want the engine running right next to you all night when you could put it a little ways away?
Because they bought a $500 clapped out van.If your going to do it do it right. You gotta spend money to save money.
Why would they care about that? They just don't want poor people or something?
No rewards program is going to make truck stop showers cheap enough to be worth it. A shitter is already an essential for me so if I've got a shitter I might as well have a shower since they take up the same amount of space just about.
Regular camper vans are uncomfortable to live in for more than a weekend, even with all the amenities. You're worse than the tinyhouse fags on /diy/
What's wrong with the dodge sprinter? It's cheaper so I'm tempted to go for one.
>Has anyone considered getting a cargo van to convert into a stealth camper to live in and save a fuck ton of money?
You can do that in a sanctuary city, but not in mine. There is almost no place to park now in my city as the laws were changed to prevent homeless from camping everywhere. Once a vehicle in the city gets contacted by the police, on the third contact, it is towed to impound. That law made almost all homeless cars disappear from our city. Only a few businesses that opposed the cruel laws still allow homeless vehicles to park on their private property. But those spots are few in number.
Oh right, I completely forgot about inverters. Much simpler and then you can just lift off of the alternator.
There's silent generators, but see the above post, I forgot about inverters and then you can just use your car's idle which shouldn't be too loud.
ooo I want a NEET vidya camp shed, and I'll just find people to let me park in their driveway and I'll have like a 300 ft ethernet cable to mooch off their internet for 20 bucks a monht or something