If you search forums and pages for advice on insulating your van, you’ll find a mountain of knowledge and differing opinions on the best way to insulate your van.
After hours wading through it all, we decided to follow the advice of our favourite YouTube star @gregvirgoe & use mainly foil faced insulation.
He does an excellent video in his Van build series explaining the maths behind all the different forms of insulation that you can use: The Facts about Camper Van Insulation
On the floor we’ve got 25mm celotex (earlier post). We knew we could get away with deeper celotex on the walls & ceiling. Our ceiling struts allow us to put on 50mm celotex, & our wall struts allow us to put 70mm celotex down the upper sides, then 100mm Knauf earthwool cavity slabs (affectionately called ‘woolly bear’ on this build 🐻) on lower sides where the van panels curve more & to fill in gaps/pillar holes.
On both the ceiling & the wall we used Sticks like Sh*t and Stick pins (yesterday’s teaser pic – 👏 if you figured it out) to fix in the celotex.
One thing you learn doing your own self build is that it involves planning well ahead – our insulation has be to installed over or around other fixtures in the van (wiring, windows, wood beams to fix walls/furniture to, external inlet points i.e for water), so you’ll see some of these fixtures in the pictures.
See if you can find the pic with one of us fully insulated for installing insulation 😄⛄️ Top tips: – Write on your pieces of insulation so you know where they’re going, each piece needs cutting down to fit in the awkward van spaces, so when you have a giant pile of them you know where they’re going. – Found that although the Stick pins were a good idea, they didn’t work too well for us – we should have got longer ones for the depth of insulation we used, and we still needed to use an adhesive to make sure the panels stayed put… – Celotex is a monster to cut up – the dust goes EVERYWHERE when you’re chopping it up…so make sure you mask up 😷 Bread knife works well for cutting the thinner pieces, but use a saw for the thicker stuff.