chong

The Subaru block heaters (that's what I had before) replace the coolant drain plug in the block. It didn't have any fancy timers built into it. I have a block heater timer plugged into the outlet on the side of my house. I programmed it to turn on 2 hours before I left for work. I don't need a block heater in Michigan, but I LOVE having instant heat. And GBL answered that question. Not enough coffee in my system yet... I'll see what I can find out about the language in the manual. I know some Powertrain Engineers at Ford that I can ask. Personally, I'm most concerned about the oil and coolant at that temperature.

So last night a buddy and I did a little hardware hacking. Mrs. Chong informed me that at least one night last week, the overnight temperature in Regina Saskatchewan dipped down to -40C. For those that don't know, -40 is the convergence point (-40C = -40F). That level of cold is bad for things on many levels and is the reason that many cars sold in Canada ship with dealer installed block heaters stock. I'm going to be reaching out to my local Ford dealer to see if I can get a block heater installed in my van before we leave, but I'm also going to have a contingency, Fobuino... What you are looking at is the inside of a Ford dealer installed 1-Way Remote Start Transmitter wired to an Arduino UNO. My buddy has been telling me that this is something I should be doing for van road trips for awhile now. I kept pushing it back until I found out just how cold it gets up there. My buddy was in charge of hardware and I was in charge of the software. I do write all kinds of software everyday at work so this wasn't too challenging for me. The Arduino is a very easy platform to pick up and develop on. Pressing the button is simply closing a circuit. We used the Arduino complete the circuit and start the car. I wrote some very simple code to do this every hour. I configured the remote start settings in the cluster to run for the max time of 15 minutes and configured the heater settings to use the last settings from the climate control. Now all we have to do before shutting the engine off to climb into bed is crank the heat and the fans. Fobuino will handle the rest. I've made the code available under the MIT license. Version 1.0 seems to work pretty well. In the future, we plan to hook Fobuino into the OBD2 port to read the Engine Coolant Temp Sensor and use that to start the van rather than a simple timer. We didn't have all the hardware to do that last night, so the timer will work for now. Check it out on GitHub!

Found heated blanket designed for cars. It's 12V DC and plugs into a cig lighter. Claims to draw less than 10A too.

I don't have any use for the inverter right now so its just completely off. It has a remote on/off switch which is pretty nifty.

Our mattress gets delivered tonight! We got 3 custom cut sections of 4" firm memory foam to make up our bed/futon/whatever. The Foam Factory is a local company that makes memory foam mattresses. They are pretty nifty. You can actually send them a CAD drawing and get things more custom if simple rectangles aren't your thing. I can't wait to get that installed. I really hope its comfortable. Our real bed is a Tempurpedic, I have a difficult time sleeping on anything else. I'm planning to sleep in the van in the driveway over the weekend to test it out. Hopefully it gets colder so I can do a real test.

Here's a bit of a teaser from when we test fit the ski box. I had to take a jigsaw to my nice box in order to make it fit the bars. For our upcoming trip, the bikes will go on our Thule T2 hitch rack.

While it didn't work for me, it may work for you. My biggest issue was the size of the batteries. There is one spot on each side of the floor that the battery boxes would fit, but then I wouldn't be able to put the steps back in. Here's a shot of when I had them under the floor. There is certainly room under there, but I would have had to fabricate my own stairs. The other point is that if something went wrong under there, I'd have to spend a LOT of time taking everything apart. As it stands now, they are in a cabinet and I just have to yank 3 screws. I'm planning to put a nicer looking door there in the future for easy access. I do still have some electrical down there, but now its just a secondary chassis ground so everything doesn't have to go ~10-15 feet back into the driver's side of the engine compartment.

And that's exactly how I rationalize spending $1200 on electrical equipment. The system is first class, and it should operate for a very long time.

The batteries final resting place. Everything is secured down. I cut a 2" hole into the bumper of my brand new car to mount up this plug. The other side of it plugs into that battery charger in the previous picture. That's about where the project stands right now. Obviously the craftsmanship of the cabinets and stuff is pretty low. Everything is simply sanded and polyurethaned to avoid splinters and make it water resistant. We are shooting for function over form as we're preparing for a 2000 mile (each way) trip from Michigan to the Banff National Park in Alberta. The car has to be warm and it has to provide a restful sleep while on the road. The plan is to make refinements during the summer when its not as cold outside!

Bed flipped out.

View from the back with the "bed" platform folded up.

One of the stretch goals was to be able to load a bike or 2 into the van with all of the cabinets in place. Given the fact that we had to increase the cabinet for the cooler, only the smaller bikes (eg: dirt jump bikes) will fit, but we're still pushing forward with building up a drawer that pulls out the back of the van. This drawer will be 4' long and mounted on 500lbs capacity drawer glides similar to the cooler. This will end up being a nice large table. Plenty of capacity both on the roof and the hitch to cart bikes around so not a big deal. Some more random shots coming up in the next few posts...

We used Frost King 1/8" thick duct insulation on the floor and ceiling. Above that we used 2 layers of 1/2" thick closed cell foam board insulation on the floor. The plywood in this shot is just weighing everything down while the glue sets up and dries. As you can also see, we built everything up so that we can still get under the floor extension, if necessary. The next phase was putting down the plywood floor. This was pretty simple, just cut a 4x8' sheet of plywood down to 4x7' or whatever the length of the cargo area is. That gives us the flexibility to screw everything down to that and not put holes in the sheet metal. We took Torton's basic cabinet design and modified it a bit. We have batteries and an electric cooler that we need to accommodate so our front cabinet is a bit bigger. We are still planning to utilize the drawer concept that he came up with, but we aren't finished with that just yet. This is where the cooler will live. It will slide in and out on a 2' long 500lbs capacity set of drawer glides.

The original plan was to try and store the batteries under the floor extension. While they will fit, it wasn't going to work out to be a good situation. We decided that they would live behind the passenger seat. The next phase of the build would be insulation. We are hardcore skiers, and it gets COLD at night. We've used a lot of different types of insulation in our build. We have 12" thick rolled attic insulation fully wrapped in vapor barrier under the floor extension.

We bought our 2016 LWB Transit Connect for the purpose of converting it into a road trip vehicle. We often drive long distances to ski (we live in Michigan and there aren't any mountains here) and ride mountain bikes. The van is intended to serve those use cases. It isn't intended to be lived out of for long periods of time, it just needs to be comfortable enough to pull off the road when we get tired and catch some good sleep. When we get to the destination, we will stay in more legitimate accommodations (VRBO, AirBnB, etc...). I'll start with the electrical system. Having slept in my various cars (Subaru WRX and Subaru Forester), I knew that we had to invest in keeping warm. If I had my say, I'd invest in better sleeping bags and be done with it. Mrs. Chong, on the other hand, was having none of that idea. It was heated blanket or bust. Luckily, I have some friends who are electrical engineers. They helped me design a power system that will power the heated blanket we bought for a full 1.5 days without recharging. The BOM for this system is as follows: 2 Optima YellowTop D31t 75Ah Deep Cycle Batteries Battery Boxes Blue Sea Systems 120A DC Add a Battery Kit Noco Genius 10AMP 1 Bank Battery Charger 3 Blue Sea Systems Fuse Block Terminals 3 125A Blue Sea Systems Terminal (slow blow) Fuses Blue Sea Systems 6 Circuit DC Fuse Block 1000W Pure Sine Wave Inverter Combination Cigarette Lighter and USB Outlets (DC) 2AWG Copper Wire And various other bits for wiring up the circuits. The first thing to do was to run the wiring from the engine compartment into the cabin. We ran this through the stock grommet in the firewall behind the glove box on the passenger side. We ran one 2AWG wire to the positive battery terminal and one 2AWG wire to the stock chassis ground next to the battery. We installed one of the Fuse Block Terminals and Slow blow fuses between the starter battery and the add a battery kit: We then got to work on wiring up the rest of the kit. Here's a shot of the panel I made for the Add a Battery Kit and the DC Fuse Panel: That panel lives in that little cubby beneath the passenger seat. Here's an in-progress shot of wiring up the batteries, charger, and inverter: You can see that every single battery has a fuse on the positive terminal. This should keep the system from drawing too much current. If something needs more than 125A, that likely wouldn't be good. It will be neat to see what that inverter does when I finally power it on with a load. Those fuses are rated to sustain 2x the current load they are rated for, for a duration of 1 second, I believe (I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I have friends that design the transformers that live on the global electrical grid, they signed off on the design). And the forum is now telling me I'm at the attachment limit for a single post. Really need BBCode so I can link these from flickr. To be continued...

Wheels still on you say. That's even more interesting. I'm planning on front wheel removal. I prefer that for bike stability. I'm hoping I can get 2 bikes next to each other and only take up half of the width of the van. I'm planning on using some of those heavy duty drawer glides to make a drawer that pulls out of the back of the van for easier loading/unloading. If you don't have a ski box yet, I love my Yakima Skybox 12. My advice would be to get the biggest box you can fit on the roof. The cost difference really isn't that much and the extra space is something I continually wish I had.

I only use the hitch for carrying my bike rack. I didn't bother wiring up the harness.

For those of us that are taking the normal route of the camper build, is this the right spot to post our threads?

Well, I do speak Japanese

I'm going to have to start a dedicated build thread soon. Last night I installed the hitch receiver: Didn't have a ton of time as we had a dinner appointment to get to so it's not 100% centered (its contacting the spare tire a bit right now), but the hard bits are done. Going to center it up tonight and test out the bike rack.

First off, very nice work on your conversion! I'm using your work as the basis to plan my own build out. I have a couple of questions. First, you noted that with this conversion you are still able to put 2 (I assume mountain) bikes inside the van. Can you share some pictures of that? We are huge mountain bikers and skiers so that's what we are planning for. Second, what roof rack system are you using? It looks like you have the crossbars mounted straight into one of the mounting locations for the OEM roof rails. Is that correct? I have a set of Thule Aeroblade bars that I'd like to use. Jury is still out on if they are wide enough. I'm going back and forth on the factory roof rails. Right now, I'm leaning towards them just to raise the entire system up from the roofline so that I don't drag my ski box across the paint attaching it in the winter. I'm also looking into seeing if I can get an awning like yours to mount into the t-channel slot in the Thule Aeroblade bars. Again, great work on your conversion, its truly an inspiration!

So the OP asked if SYNC Gen1 could be upgraded to SYNC Gen2. It can. I've done it (though never in a Transit). Your best bet is to find a Gen2 module that came from a different transit. That will get you the correct module configuration to play nicely with the rest of the systems in the car. Even then I doubt everything would work. I'm betting that climate control will be a bit wonky (but still work) due to the fact that your climate ECU isn't configured for Gen2. I'm actually going to be converting the Gen2 system in my 2016 to Gen3 shortly here. The CarPlay implementation on SYNC3 is the best CarPlay implementation I've ever used (I had a Pioneer AVH-4000NEX in my old Forester and an Alpine iLX-007 in my WRX). You can buy all of these parts from the dealer. I'm busy tracking down the SYNC3 part numbers for my conversion. I expect to have it all done in a couple of weeks.

No kidding! On my 2016 its buried in the cluster!

I feel as though all 2wd traction control systems suck. The only one that I've ever used that I actually leave on full time (unless I'm screwing around or stuck or something like that) is the Subaru system. It can independently control wheelspin on all 4 wheels. It works really well. You can't get a modern WRX out of shape at all with the VDC (what Subaru calls it) enabled.

Hrmm... No multiquote either. Oh well... I'll change the summer tires when I wear them out. I'm cheap like that. I already have a race car, don't need the van to handle like one Stock mirrors, yup we fight over the mirrors in all of our 3 cars. We do have the big padded arm rest. No drama there! I can't see the speedo either (I sit all the way back and all the way down). I have the center screen in speedo mode