Vanlife
A van is a small house with a bad heating system and no plumbing. Build it in the right order and it is a very good one.
Vanlife is the most photographed and least accurately described way to camp. The photos are real. So is the part where you drive twenty minutes to a gym to shower, and the part where a Tuesday in February is spent sitting in a metal box in the rain hunting for a phone signal.
The build order that works is boring: ventilation, insulation, sleeping, power, then everything else. People do it backwards, spend the budget on a countertop and a farmhouse sink, and discover the van is damp and the battery dies at 2am. A roof fan is less photogenic than a cedar ceiling and it matters more.
The other honest note is cost. A van is cheaper than rent in an expensive city and it is not free. Fuel, insurance, maintenance on a vehicle you also live in, gym memberships, and the repair that strands you for a week are all real line items. Go in with the numbers and it works. Go in with the highlight reel and it usually does not last a year.
Featured guides
All guides →Everything on Vanlife
Solar is the part people get wrong
Undersize the battery bank and you idle the engine every morning to make coffee. The calculation takes ten minutes and it decides how much of the build actually works. Do it before you buy panels, not after.
Size your system →Latest articles
Coming soon - Coming soonThe highest-value item in a van build, and why it goes in first.
What actually gets you noticed in a city, and it is almost never the van.
How insulating a van wrong traps moisture against bare steel.
Common questions
Ventilation. A roof fan moves the moisture you generate by breathing, cooking, and drying wet clothes out of the van before it condenses on the walls. Skip it and you get damp bedding, mold, and eventually rust behind the panels you just installed. It is the least exciting purchase in the build and the one that protects everything else.
Usually, in an expensive city, if you already own the van and you camp for free most nights. It stops being cheap when you finance a new van, stay in paid campgrounds, and eat out because the kitchen is one burner. The costs that surprise people are not the obvious ones: it is insurance, maintenance on a vehicle carrying a house worth of extra weight, and the repair that puts you in a motel for a week.
Out of town, public land is the answer, and it is free and unambiguous. In town it is much murkier: many cities have ordinances against vehicle habitation, and a legal parking spot is not the same as a legal place to sleep. Rest areas depend on the state. The reliable pattern is to work in town and sleep out of it.
It depends entirely on what you run, which is why the answer people give around a campfire is useless. Add up the watt-hours you use in a day, divide by the sun hours you actually get in the season and place you camp, then add roughly 30% for losses. A laptop and lights is a very different system from a 12V fridge and a satellite dish running all day. Our calculator does the arithmetic.
Most full-timers stop using the one they built. It costs water you do not have, creates grey water you then have to carry and dump, and adds a permanently wet space to a small box. Gyms, truck stops, and public pools cover it for a fraction of the space and water. Build the fan instead.