Hey guys so today me and Cayleigh are installing the floor in the camper van which is very exciting!
What we decided to do is go with a one inch xps rigid foam insulation. There's a few different
types of insulation out there there's eps, xps, and then a poly iso. This stuff is the best
for retaining its temperature and also it's the most impact resistant so we're gonna
have an inch of this covering the whole floor and then we're gonna do two sheets of 3/8 inch plywood
and stagger them so there's no seams over top of each other. Luckily there was a plywood floor
already installed in the van when we got it so we were able to use that as a template to cut out the
foam and the plywood which has made things a lot easier so we didn't have to use any templates for
going around the wheel wells and stuff because we all already have them so that's definitely
sped up the insulation. But all we're using to cut out the one inch foam is a knife and
the old template and then we're gonna go ahead and use that to trace out the plywood.
We'll put the foam on top of the plywood, mark it out, and then cut it out with the jigsaw.
So time to glue the rigid foam down. We decided not to use any framing because we're using thicker
plywood and this rigid insulation is actually made to avoid being compressed so that plus the plywood on
top, should be no problems with compression. We wanted to completely insulate the entire floor. If you put
two by fours or any sort of framing it creates a thermal bridge and it won't be as well insulated.
I didn't see the need to do the framing because we're going to be securing our cabinets
to the walls of the van. Alright so we are using some thin rubber to fill in some of these
larger gaps in between the ribs just for a little more support for the insulation.
This is just some rubber material that I had laying around
but you can use anything that's a quarter inch thick. So if you want to buy some quarter inch
thick insulation go ahead, we couldn`t find some at the hardware store so we're just going to go ahead and use this.
But yeah, anything that will help support that insulation underneath. This is the
adhesive i'm using to glue down both the insulation and the plywood it's PL 9000 heavy duty extra strength. It's supposed to be some of the toughest stuff, it's all weather, remains
kind of flexible. So yeah it should work pretty good, hopefully it keeps everything stuck down!
Another thing we're doing with the seams for the
rigid foam is we used foil tape to help with the moisture barrier.
Alright guys so we're putting down our second layer of plywood. We're actually doing
two layers of 3/8 inch plywood because we wanted to stagger our seams and make it a little
more structurally strong. We're also going to be using just standard PL construction adhesive to
glue each layer of plywood together and then I'm going to get some tires and lay them out
to add a whole bunch of weight and then we're gonna leave it out for a couple days to dry.
I got all the plywood installed and laid out some tires for weights so the glue can dry overnight
It feels pretty solid- so far so good and we barely lost any headroom!
So yeah floor is in we've taken the weights like the tires and the compressor I had on here on here off
to help the glue settle and it's solid like it feels really good. Now what we're doing is
going around the edges and filling in with some spray foam. This stuff's about 10 bucks a can
it's pretty cheap and any hardware store usually has them and we're just yeah going around the edges
filling in like all the gaps sealing it off to make sure that the vapor barrier is completely
sealed. Once this is dry you can go around with a knife and just cut off the extra
that's sticking out and yeah that's pretty much it for the floor So while me and Cayleigh were editing
this video i wanted to go into a bit more detail about the rigid foam insulation so three types
EPS, XPS, and Poly Iso. I made the mistake of getting Poly Iso first which was huge mistake! After doing
a bunch of research I found out that the R value doesn't stay at six. It deteriorates as it gets
colder. Like what kind of insulation deteriorates when it gets colder? Especially this one it`s Canadian made and it gets cold here!
So don't get poly iso because once you get into like negative 10 negative 20
the R value goes way down to like i think R2 I read whereas XPS actually gets a little bit
better so it's an R5 value per inch but as it gets colder it goes up a little bit not a lot but still.
Those were some of the biggest differences between those two and then EPS is quite a bit
cheaper but it doesn't have as good of an R value so it's a lot better to go with the closed cell
which is XPS. So point of this rant- get XPS not Poly Iso like I did. It's also better with
the weight distribution right? Yeah XPS also has a better compression value- I guess you'd call it compression value-
so basically it won't compress as much and because we didn't frame our floor that's important to us
because we don't want the weight of us walking around to be putting a divot in the floor. When you
compress insulation it also deteriorates the R value quite a bit so you want to
leave it uncompressed. Thank you so much for watching, that sums up this video, Next up is
going to be going over the spray foam insulation that we did. David did a really good job of
that and we saved a ton of money by doing that ourselves so keep your eyes peeled for that.
If you like this video make sure to give it a like and subscribe to our channel if you haven't
already. Let us know if you have any questions regarding the floor, we did a ton of research
and I think we did a pretty good job- we'll see time we'll test it but yeah
Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions or
let us know what you did for your floor too we'd love to hear kind of
different things people have done. We'll see you next week, see you in the next one!