The Vansion

4x4 sprinter is coming to the US in Q1 2015:
autoblog.com/2014/03/07/mer…

What does it feel like to be stopped by strangers in the middle of the road just to talk about your van? :)

There are AWD drive vans readily available. The Chevy Express 1500. We have one fitted out to camp in. Awesome vehicle, drove from Wyoming to Canada in February with terrible road conditions both ways and it performed better than my 4wd truck. A quick craigslist search in any area will turn up tons of express 1500 AWD vans. Average mileage is about 17-18 all the time. Maybe not your idea of great for a vehicle but quite good for a house!

I bet that mercedes sprinter as a 4x4 will be north of 100,000 grand.

There are plenty of cheap dirtbag vans out there. But you generally get what you pay for. I'm sure most of the vans you find on Craigslist will have a v8, which is nice if you are really planning on four wheel driving but not so nice on the fuel consumption. 90% of the climbing areas I want to visit are off a paved road. I'm not sure why people think 4wd is necessary? Sure in the snow it will be sweet, but in the end is it worth the extra coin?

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet but check out the Yakima trailers. My buddy and I lived out of a subaru last summer and had one. We put kayaks on it. Our gas mileage was a couple better with it compared to ten being on top. They are nice to because they fold flat in a couple minutes. We would fold it flat and either put it on top of or next to the car so we only used one parking spot.
Good luck!

I'm in the process of adding an aux battery to my van. I decided to use two 6V GC2 golf cart batteries instead of a single 12V battery. The benefits of this were more amp hours per $ and batteries that can stand up to a little more abuse than a typical deep cycle. I'll have about 220 Ah with this setup.

I'm combining my starting battery with my aux battery for charging from the alternator using a Yandina combiner smart relay. Blue Seas also makes a similar product. When either battery is charging the relay automatically switches on and combines the circuits and conversely it isolates them when no charge is applied.

I'm installing a new fuse box for the aux battery where I will connect all interior lights, fridge, stereo, 12v outlets, water pump etc. I may install an inverter in the future but I'd like to get by without because everything I'm using in the van is DC and doing a DC -> AC -> DC conversion is very inefficient.

I like the idea of adding solar in the future which will tie in nicely to this system but I want to wait and see if I need it first.

Good luck with your build.

Looks like your into a serious project. I'm surprised the cost of the GC batteries didn't steer you away. I went with a standard 12v solely because of that.

Ryan N wrote:Looks like your into a serious project. I'm surprised the cost of the GC batteries didn't steer you away. I went with a standard 12v solely because of that.