Hey guys, Jenna here. Maybe you've never thought you wanted to live in a van,
but I think after this week's video you might just change your mind.
Today I'm going to share the story of West and Savannah and their awesome van,
which is totally decked out with a bunch of green energy and off-grid systems.
Without further ado, let's take a tour.
Hi, welcome to our land yard. This is where we live.
Savannah grew up on a sailboat,
so I noticed early in our relationship that she likes daily travel and lots of
things to be changing.
So three years ago we moved into our first van and we had two years left in
school at that time, learned a ton of stuff and saved money on rent,
which was really a life changer for both of us.
And then that allowed us to sell that van when we graduated,
which gave us the capital to make a down payment on our new four wheel drive,
sprinter van.
My college background is renewable energy engineering.
The van life has given us this outlet to basically pursue our own company.
And so since we've started Tiny Watts solar,
which is our mobile consulting firm where we travel around doing solar projects
on vans and tiny homes and school buses, food trucks, you name it.
The proudest math you've ever done. I'm 5'5
I tower a hole two inches over Savannah.
But we can both stand and did our math right.
Feels good.
We use this as storage and this is pretty amazing cause it goes all the way back
to the wall so we can actually fit a couple of surfboards in here.
All of our um,
solar installation tools and our inboard electric,
skateboard and six chairs, you name it, we can fit a lot in here,
which is so nice.
But the whole point of living this lifestyle is not to collect stuff.
So so far we're doing good. This is how our bed works.
So here's our drawer. You pull it all the way out
here. So it's a 74 by 54 mattress.
We also have storage in here as well for like weather jackets or random,
you know, stuff that we want to hide away.
This is the thicker side. Obviously there's two pieces here.
This is more like the firm side cause
there's only one piece of mattress. I think it's only five inches.
But it's really nice when you're outside.
You can sleep right here under the stars sheets and our pillows.
I will say a lot of people ask if we get tired of making our bed every single
day and it is our only chore and it's easy because when the beds out like this
we literally just reach up here, grab the blanket,
pull down so we don't have to fold.
Meaning it just stuffs back in and yeah it's pretty easy.
We always thought this would be the guest bedroom.
You can pull this out and like Chuck it in the hallway hasn't happened yet.
And then there's a inch
of memory foam on the top.
So it's actually a really comfortable bed and we've been pretty happy with it.
The other cool thing that can happen from time to time, we'll get into it,
but we have a solar roof deck and when we were down in big bend national park,
it was like 105 degrees and we just took this whole thing,
set it up on the roof.
This is just a little slide track so we just undo that.
It's actually a curtain sideways cause curtains are 80 inches long,
which you don't need in a van so this whole thing pulled around like that.
That's how we enter stealth mode and that's why it's real easy to sleep in
because it gets dark in here. My fiance,
Savannah that you've met is from Hawaii,
so keeping her warm has been a top priority of mine or we have radiant heated
floors and here is all the mechanicals and the hot air.
Essentially we have warm floors,
we have hot water off that same loop.
There's a heat exchanger for the hot water and then we have hot air and all
three of those things uses less than a hundred Watts of
electricity. We were in the Sierras.
We were covered in snow and the van was 85 degrees in here. And we're like,
you know, barefoot walking on the floor, cooking breakfast,
everything is radiating the heat so you can open windows and have a fresh
breeze, but the van is warm.
So this is our closet where all of our clothes are.
Imagine that it's actually kind of an afterthought.
So we want to build permanent shelves in here and make this more legit.
The van is four wheel drive but the house isn't always.
So we kind of ripped this off roading a little bit. But yeah,
this is all my clothes and Savannah's clothes and luckily she's pretty minimal
and it all fits in there. So that's why we're getting married.
We have a massive inverter, um, obviously Tiny Watts solar,
we're in the business, so off-grid power,
so this is basically a system you'd find in an off grid cabin or something
except we have it in our van.
So it's a 3,200 watt inverter with a 80 amp charge controller.
And also we have a thousand Watts of solar on the roof.
So this is our kitchen, all stainless steel countertops,
which we absolutely love. Um,
in our old van we had butcher block and was way too happy. So the stainless
is super light durable and it also reflects the light.
So actually makes it feel more warm in here in a van or a tiny house.
With these smaller sinks, you have to have these,
it seriously makes a difference to cleaner sink and make sure everything goes
down the drain. Highly recommend for that.
We have this problem about wanting to do tile in our van, but it's too heavy.
You know, it all adds up really quick.
So we decided super last minute that we want to do some sort of wallpaper in our
van. So this is actually wallpaper.
We have 30 gallons of water under here,
so fresh water tank over here we have our induction cooktop.
So that takes about 1800 Watts.
And this is amazing because we don't have to worry about heat off gas flame,
nothing like that.
So we don't get hot in here when we're cooking and it's actually really nice
back here we also have an electric kettle that takes about 1200 Watts.
This is all storage up here, cleaning stuff,
bathroom stuff, instant pot. Best thing for the van life.
I highly recommend or tiny life. It's just so easy to cook fast
Toaster oven. So usually it goes in here but we don't like to drive it here.
So we make pizza and chicken and cinnamon rolls every Sunday.
So this is our dual zone. Winter 12 volt fridge.
You can have both freezers or both fridge or fridge freezer.
We have them both as fridges right now,
just so we can have our cold drinks and food.
We have a fantastic fan in our van. It's the cheaper one.
I think next time we're going to get the max air fan,
but we've always gone with these because they're cheap and they always work.
There's no issues that we've ever had with them. But these are great.
We don't have AC in our van
so we tend to just open our windows and have the air pull in so we get this
breeze that blows right through the fan.
So there's three numbers on it so you can have three different time settings.
The back of the van, all of this looks more hectic than it really is.
We have an outside shower,
which is good for after surfing and that kind of thing,
but when we do take an inside shower, the water re circulates,
so it goes through a filter, it gets pumped back up, it gets heated back up,
and then this is actually a UV lamp that kills any bacteria in the water and
then it comes back out the shower head.
So it's cleaner than a bath and you can shower indefinitely and use two gallons
of water. When you're done showering,
you push flush and the whole system back pluses cleans all the filters and goes
into the gray water tank.
So it's a complete game changer when you have 30 gallons of water.
This is our shower. This opens up, this is where we hide the laundry bag.
This is just final flooring,
so it like it's rock tile,
but it's actually just vinyl flooring from Home Depot.
Cassette toilet is in here too,
just for Savannah to kind of pee in the middle of the night.
So we pull that out when it's time to shower and actually this curtain rod comes
forward and it hangs all the way out here in the front of this cabinet.
You know guys set that up.
This is our solar roof deck. It's a thousand Watts of solar.
So this panel is 500 this other one right up here that I'm staying on is also
500 so this is where we like to do yoga. Hang out,
I'll drink my beer, watch the sunrise or sunset
solar roof deck also doubles as our garage. So this whole thing lifts up.
We're not tied to rent, we're not tied to leases and we have, you know,
the ability to take our house wherever we want to go.
Everyone thinks we're on vacation all the time and we're like, no,
this is just our lifestyle. From project to project. Yeah. We're working.
We're working along the way.
Our dream is to get a sailboat next and then have a tiny house on a piece of
property. Three vessels. Van. Sailboat. Tiny home on land.
Yeah. We're working our way up. So we can keep moving.