Burning Van v2.0



First, Burning Van 1.0 (The Aerostar)

I used to have a '94 Ford Aerostar minivan that I used for hauling my keyboard stuff to gigs. Over time, my gig rig shrank to the point where I could fit everything in the back of my Prius, so I didn't need the van anymore. I had planned to sell it, but waited for a few months because I knew I wanted to bring it to Burning Man. I don't actually have any pictures of it on playa, but here's one of it all packed up right before I left San Diego. This van had rear seats that fold into a bed, but I took those out and instead brought a small folding futon. This made room for all the other crap you see here, including a ladder and a costco carport, food, water, etc. I set the carport up on the playa, then parked the van inside the carport, and slept on the futon inside the van. Worked out well enough - definitely stayed cooler and quieter than sleeping in a tent.

The bug sprayer you see in the lower left hand corner was my shower. I found that I could shower and wash my hair on about a quart of water, while standing in a plastic tub to collect the water, which I then poured into empty 1g water bottles. You see, at Burning Man, you're not allowed to pour grey water onto the ground. Everything you pack in, you must pack out, including all your waste water. So bathing on a quart of water was something of a score, but it took a long time, and wasn't much fun in heavy wind or a dust storm. (We had a big one on Wednesday. I ended up not bathing that day.) But, whatever, I survived my first burn, and since I got separated from my friends, I ended up camping by myself. It worked out OK, but next time around I decided to go for a few creature comforts. Not that I'm a clean freak, but I do like to bathe at least once a day (and who doesn't?) and showering for a week with a bug sprayer got old.

The other thing was that for the first few days at Burning Man, I was having a bit of an upset stomach. Without getting too graphic, my ailment created the urgent need for me to get up in the middle of the night, hunt around in the van for some warm clothes, then get on my bike and ride about 1/4 down a deeply rutted road, while trying to, uh, keep it all together. And while the Burning Man org does an admirable job of getting the potties serviced, nobody's servicing them at 5 in the morning. So it sometimes took several tries to find one in acceptable condition. Get the picture? Just describing this brings back memories.

Burning Van 2.0 (The Pleasure-Way)

For 2007 I decided that I wanted to go for a couple more creature comforts: an indoor shower, and my very own private crapper. Which pretty much meant an RV of some sort. For awhile I thought about getting a small travel trailer. In terms of bang-for-the-buck, you cannot beat a travel trailer. But they come with their own set of issues. Also, I originally planned to do an art car for '07 - circumstances have pushed that out to '08 - so I wanted some sort of tow vehicle. Obviously, if I'm towing a travel trailer, I can't also be towing an art car. So it was either going to be a truck with a slide-in camper, or some sort of self-contained RV. I also knew that I wanted the the smallest RV you could get with an indoor shower and a crapper, which pretty much means a Class B conversion van. There are a few different brands. Roadtrek seems to be the most coomon around here. I was looking for something about 8-10 years old, and I looked at a lot of Roadtreks, most of which had seen a lot of use and some of which were downright nasty inside. Eventually, though, I found the RV I ended up buying - a 1999 Pleasure-Way Excel RD based on a Dodge 3500 chassis. Here's a shot of it at my first overnight in it at the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park:



Thing's pretty nice. Has a comically small bathroom with a toilet and a sit-down shower, a small two burner stove, a 3-way fridge, furnace, water heater, generator, and roof AC. Also has a TV and VCR, not that I forsee using them much at Burning Man. For its maiden voyage I took it to the High Sierra Music festival and it was great to camp in. Pretty plush, actually. Driving it wasn't much fun (how much fun can driving a 9000 lb vehicle be?) but I loved being able to pull into a rest area, draw the curtains, and conk out in back. The van's only 19 feet long, so you can pretty much park it in a regular parking spot. A definite step up from the Ford Aerosol.


The Cargo Rack

It also has a 2" Class IV receiver hitch, so I can tow stuff. In 2007 I just need to carry a little bit of cargo, not enough to justify the hassle of dragging a trailer. Basically, I wanted a way to carry a bicyle, and a way to carry a bunch of tarps, carpeting, and other stuff that will get playafied to the point that I don't want to bring the stuff inside the RV. On the web I found a receiver hitch combo stack bar (shown to the left) which allows you to use two receiver hitch things simultaneously. I bought a bike rack off Craigslist for $40, and bought a large cargo shelf off the web, and the combo stack bar allows me to use both at once. Although, it turned out the bottom tube on the bike rack was too long, so I had to go to the local trailer supply store and get them to cut a 14" piece of tubing which I then drilled to fit. That turned out being kind of a pain in the butt and I burned up a couple drill bits trying to bore through the thing, but it did come out nicely.



Since that time, I wanted to find someplace outside the RV to store the Flush King and other sewer-related stuff. I looked into a bunch of options but decided on something simple - I went to the local army surplus store, bought an ammo box, drilled a bunch ofdrainage holes in the bottom, and mounted it to the spare-tire carrier using U-bolts. Worked out great:



Shelter from the Scorching Sun

The next thing to figure out is shade. During the day it gets really, really hot at Burning Man, and shade is key. Particularly in the morning. In the afternoon, you're pretty much screwed for heat no matter what you do, but in the morning, having good solid shade means the difference between having to get up at 7:00am, or sleeping in until 11 or so. I decided early on I was not going to do the carport thing again - too much work - so it was time to try something different.

On the recommendation of several people from the "RV Burners" tribe on tribe.net, I went out and bought a 25 foot roll of silver bubble-wrap at Lowe's. It's very easy to work with - just get some scissors and cut out pieces to fit the shape of all your window openings. If you get the size right, you can just stuff the bubble wrap into the window opening and the friction around the edges is enough to hold it in place. You would be amazed at the difference this alone makes. Just parked here in San Diego, at around noon the van is a good 15-20 degrees cooler inside when the bubble wrap is in place compared to when it's not. Most of the heating of the interior is radiant heat blasting in through the windows, and the silver bubble wrap does an amazing job at blocking the vast majority of that. I used the stuff at High Sierra and it was a godsend. Eventually, though, even though the sun isn't radiating through the windows anymore, it's still heating up the van, and eventually it will get warm inside. There's no avoiding that, but I want to slow that process as much as possible.

I had read a lot about Aluminet, and everyone who used it seemed to swear by the stuff. Aluminet is aluminized Mylar shade cloth, and outside the Burning Man community not many people have heard of it. By far the biggest market is for agriculture (greenhouses). The rest of it, presumably, gets bought by Burning Man freaks. You can buy the stuff in various reflectivities, but the 70% stuff seems to be what everyone favors on the playa. It's dense enough that it reflects most of the heat, but it still is pretty porous so the wind mostly blows straight through. It doesn't try to act like a sail the way a tarp does. Initially I bought about 1000 square feet of the stuff to play with. That was more than enough to make a gigantic shroud for the van and I had a lot left over after that.

My original plan was to make a PVC frame to support it. I bought a set of gutter-mount bike racks off Craigslist that I cannibalized for the gutter mounts. Ideally I'd use the whole frame, but the fiberglass roof of the van precludes doing that, and in fact this van only has the rain gutters at the front and rear of the van. The idea was to put the clamps where I could, then and use those as anchor points for a PVC frame. The problem is that in order to make a robust PVC frame, the anchor points need to be really robust as well, and I couldn't figure out a straightforward way to make that happen.

So I bagged all that, and decided to just drape the Aluminet over the van. I also bought an EZ-UP type instant canopy for the front porch, and rather than use the vinyl top, I cut a piece of Aluminet for that as well. The theory was that the Aluminet, being much more porous than the vinyl, will not want to act like a sail when the winds pick up.




You will notice that I only have three sides of the van covered. The passenger side of the van is where the main entry door is, so I leave this side of the van completely uncovered and park the van so it's pointed due west. That faces the entry door towards the north so no direct sunlight ever hits the unexposed passenger side of the van. This worked very well in 2007. Really, really well. Here's a night-time photo of our camp:



As I'd hoped, the Aluminet did not act like a sail. Even during the craziest dust-storms, the Aluminet shade cloth - a couple hundred square feet of the stuff - barely budged. The corners are tied with the special clamp-on grommets made for Aluminet, and I was just using regular cotton clothes-line type rope. I was using rebar for stakes, but I easily could have gotten by with regular 1 foot tent spikes. It's amazing how well the stuff works in the wind. And it does a great job of reflecting the heat as well. The inside of the van stayed comfy and cool until about noon every day. I can't say enough good things about it. Likewise, the EZ-UP also held up well. EZ-UPs are notorious for "exploding" on the playa because the frames are really spindly and once the wind picks up the vinyl top makes a nice sail. With Aluminet, the shade cloth does bow and flex, but most of the wind blows right through so the frame doesn't endure much stress.

In 2008 I brought my flying saucer surrey to the playa, so I ended up renting a trailer, which the van towed without much drama. The space-age appearance of Aluminet made it a nice choice for the body of the flying saucer. This time I brought two Aluminet-clad EZ-UPs:



Mellow lighting

Next on the agenda - mood lighting! Actually, that wasn't so much the main concern, more of a happy byproduct. I wanted to find a more efficient way to light the interior. Mostly something that gave off enough light for moving around inside at night, and something that would draw a lot less juice than the interior RV bulbs, which are really bright. Really bright is good when you're cooking, not so good when it's 4am and you need to run to the loo. I was already thinking about LED lights when I happened to stumble across these trippy Ikea LED lighting fixtures.

These are four foot-long thin strips each of which has a bunch of clear multicolor LEDs on it. The thing is meant to run off 120 volts, but it uses an inline transformer which drops everything down to 12 volts dc. So, you chop off the transformer and you're set to go off 12 volt house power. It has a one-button user interface which serves as a power switch and also cycles through the various modes - solid one color, cycling through the colors, gradually fading between the colors (really bitchin, super chill effect), and off. The power switch is a "soft" power switch (when it's "off" it's still drawing about 20 mA). When it's on it draws between 200-600 mA, depending on what color is bring produced. This is far less than the regular RV interior bulbs, and the Ikea thing dumps out tons of light. LED lighting can be pretty harsh on the eyes, so I have them mounted way down low at foot level. This keeps most of the light out of your eyes, and the effect is quite nice. Not too bright, but bright enough to move around comfortably.

Mounting them was a lot more work than I expected. I have not yet found the courage to drill holes in the Pleasure-Way woodwork. It really is nice, and I can't bring myself to ruin it. At the same time, I didn't want to have wires dangling everywhere at Burning Man. I figured I'd do a fairly temporary and reversible installation as sort of a trial run. The Pleasure-Way has two light switches right by the entry door - one for the "porch" light, and one for an interior light right in the entryway. This interior light also has its own switch built right into the lighting fixture. So I decided to tap in to the door switch, and I could leave either fixture switch off if I want to. So now the door switch can control whichever set of lights I want.

I did have to drill one hole in the cabinet, but it's way down low at floor level, so it's not visible. Out of this hole I ran wires for the switched 12 volts and ground, and gaffer's taped the wires along the floor back to the bed. In fact, all of the wiring is gaffer's taped into place, mostly along the floor, and on a couple of the walls where that was necessary. Not very pretty, but it could have been worse.

In 2008 I replaced most of the interior incandescent bulps with LED replacements. I wish I could find a better source for these, I got mine off eBay. What is nice about these bulbs is that they only draw 5% of the energy of the regular inbcandescent 1156 bulbs. That's right, a 95% reduction in power consumption. You could leave one of these bulbs on for a week and it would draw less juice than a regular bulb left on overnight.



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