Hello and can anyone help?

Newbie's Corner
1

Introduce Yourself…

I have a Chevy g30 camper, and I have under a month to prepare. My lease is ending, I can’t afford to renew it and I can’t afford to pay 1st and last months rent anywhere else. I have nowhere else to stay unless I consider a shelter but if I can make the van work I would prefer that. It doesn’t have any ac or house power but it starts and drives. I have a goal zero 1000w battery bank but no way to charge it. I have been trying to reach out to companies but they are not affordable. It is so hot, I don’t know what I’m doing and I have some tools and a couple thousand left on my credit card to make this work. Is anyone willing to help?

3

Hi,
First off, where are you located? Secondly, what type of help do you need? Thirdly, I have had fantastic results with a few affordable ($20-35) usb rechargeable fans to keep the interior more comfortable. They recharge via a usb auto cigarette lighter/power port.

5

Greetings!

oooooooh… A “Wide One” Chevy, now that’s a rare beast. Most of the “Wide One’s” were Dodges… Or maybe it’s from a different company.

Is the interior intact, or ???

Since you’re working the hottest parts of the day, that’s a huge plus. You should be able to keep your goal zero charged at work, and possibly while driving via the cigarette lighter outlet.

If overnight heat is a problem, they have cooling blankets available on Amazon. Mine are USB powered, and provide both heating or cooling, while using very little power. They have non powered ones as well, and the cooling blankets work very well.

Amazon also has a wide variety of cooling clothing, towels, wraps, & more. Just dampen them and they can keep you cool for hours.

Rechargeable USB fans are also good, and they can be found on Amazon for cheap too. Walmart sometimes has them too. Misting fans can be awesome as well, and can chill you to the bones.

Since I live & work from inside my rig, I use either a swamp cooler, or a Peltier heat pump to keep my whole rig comfortable 24/7. Both are liquid candle powered instead of electric/battery.

I have a 3-way RV style fridge/freezer that I bought used for $50. I converted mine to run using a cooking oil liquid candle instead of propane. This allows me an electric/battery powered free fridge/freezer. Conserving power is easier than creating more power.

Living in a van/RV can be quite enjoyable once you get everything figured out. Bee careful not to get sucked into making stupid choices at the suggestions of promoters. Cheap, simple, & easy for the win.

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


7

Greetings!

Try to keep it as original as possible, that’s where the value is. Restorations are great, but remodels kill the value.

Reflectix window covers attract a lot of unwanted attention, along with any other curtains etc. Dark tint is a much better choice.

There is probably a house battery, or a place for one somewhere.

Corkscrew upholstery pins work great for repairing head liners.

Many auto parts stores can check your alternator for free.

Get a trigger spray bottle and a rectangular dishpan at the dollar store for a sink & water delivery. In hot weather, you can also spray yourself and sit in front of the fan to cool yourself off quickly.

If the floor is down to bare metal, cover with foam board, plywood, then indoor/outdoor carpet.

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


11

Greetings!

If you put a fan blowing out, with windows on the opposite end open, you should get a breeze through the whole place. When inside, a damp t-shirt with a fan blowing on you can feel wonderful.

I would probably paint the floor with truck bed liner, followed by sheet foam, plywood, then carpet.

It looks like the kitchen is missing, and much of the rest looks pretty rough… Even though the wood is falling apart, maybe it could be used as templates for a rebuild if it isn’t salvageable.

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


13

Greetings!

The reason those appliances are bigger is because they were built when quality was still important. If they still work I would highly recommend keeping them. Stuff that used to be built to last 50+ years is now being built to die the day after the xx month warranty runs out.

Screw beer money, you need a side hustle that will make you some big bucks. I’m making $1k+ a day making web pages for $100ea, in 4-5 hours per day using FREE WYSIWYG website editors (TinyMCE & CKEditor). A free online classified ad gets me so much business, I’m turning 75% of them away, and only taking the simple ones. No programming required, and there’s ready made php scripts for feedback/contact forms.

Then I’m a hosting reseller, and offer to host their website for them for a monthly fee, and I make $10/mo off each person that signs up for hosting, with no work on my part other than setting it up for them. In the last year or so, I’ve signed up nearly 1k customers for hosting. (Google “Reseller Hosting”)

Additionally, I charge $100/page for updates. Many restaurant’s update their menu’s every few months, or hours, etc. I do new listings/updates for one realty company, and one used car lot almost everyday in addition making new websites. I do the updates in the evening, in addition to the $1k+ I make before lunch everyday. That leaves me all afternoon to do errands or explore the surrounding area. Once I’ve seen & done whatever I want to do in an area, I change locations.

Selling ebooks, and doing remote computer tune-ups/recovery/repairs, made me a lot of money too. I’ve switched it up just for a change, not because they weren’t wildly successful. At least websites are different every time… Advertising is key, pay an expert on Fiverr to handle your advertising. Out of 1M visitors a month, it’s easy to get 1k+ paying customers.

When I was working regular jobs, if I needed extra money, I’d pick up extra shifts at the walk-in day labor places, and sometimes do double shifts on the weekends. Kept me out of trouble and allowed me to stack the $$$ quickly. Day labor always insured I had a regular income, and some of them were even very high paying jobs, even though I always told them I had no degree’s or experience.

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


15

Greetings!

hehe My favorite hobby is making money…

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


17

Greetings!

I think this is as good a place as any…

A blown head gasket is different than blown heads, but the heads often need to be resurfaced when replacing a head gasket. I have heard of some people having decent luck with head gasket repair additive.

Depending on prices and engine conditions, sometimes it’s cheaper to do an engine swap than to do repairs. A friend with a G20 just replaced both his engine & transmission from a wrecking yard, for $1k including labor. The wrecking yard actually did the swap for him. Some mechanic had quoted him $2500 to fix his old engine.

Mechanics are a roll of the dice, price & quality DO NOT seem to be related. Some of the best mechanics I’ve encountered were also the cheapest. Perhaps retired & bored, or needing more money than social security provided.

Some people have had good luck with mobile mechanics found on Craigslist. Low overhead can translate into lower prices.

Keep those top windows open, and hang a damp towel in front of open lower windows on the shady side for a cooling effect. A frozen milk jug with a fan in front of it can cool you down quickly too.

A 60 amp alternator seems awfully low, when money allows, I would upgrade to a 200+ amp one.

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


18

RV and all other mechanics are charging especially insane money lately. As a woman with no real car repair skills this is one of the reasons I won’t be full-time traveling like I do now for much longer, and will be moving overseas. I needed non minor repair on the truck I had sold recently, which got me stranded in unfamiliar city (at least not in 105F desert where I was heading next), the dealership wanted crazy money but every other mechanic I called wanted close to that but without the kind of nationwide warranties offered by the dealership. Their repair failed in 3 days when I was in the middle of nowhere and 100s of miles from than dealership, though. I had to put up a real fight to get Nissan to live up to their warranty promises. Mechanics had wisened up to inflation but seems like they are charging triple and quadruple of what it used to be.

19

Regarding making money online such as building websites not sure how easy it would be for someone to break into and start from scratch. There are many millions of people including those living in cheap countries that build sites and theres a lot of competition. I am a former software engineer with lots of programming experience, by the way.
I’ve been thinking to go off to Alaska to work in seasonal industries where room and board are provided, knew some people who accumulated big savings this way. Computer stuff can be very stressful, dealing with 100s of picky customers and doing own marketing isn’t easy and the kind of stress not everyone can handle.

20

Greetings!

Building websites using “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) website editors & ready made plug in scripts is super simple and can be learned online within a day easily.

Maybe I’ve been lucky, but out of 2k+ websites, I’ve only had a handful of picky customers. If they don’t like my work, I just don’t charge them, and let them find someone else, while I move onto a less picky customer.

If I don’t get paid for an hours worth of work every month or two, that’s just the cost of doing business, and many come back humbled when they find out most people charge up front with no refunds or satisfaction guarantees.

I just look up their top competitors listed first on Google, then decide what parts of those websites I like, and then combine those parts into a new website. Then I can explain to the customer why I did this or that, and why I think it will benefit them.

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


21

I see, that’s a good strategy. I think I would go insane dealing with customer misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, refunds, no-pays, chargebacks, back and forth, etc. Even office with only few coworkers and managers was very challenging from communication standpoint while technical part was always easy.
At some point I’ve became a typical introverted programmer unable to deal with people.
Yes if you only had spent several easy hours on the project occasional refund isn’t a big deal.
Even 15 years ago I recall many charged $500 for a very basic website. Back then you had to do heavy own marketing, like appraching businesses yourself, I think, or stuff like freelance websites where there were gazillion of cheap competitors from India.

I just don’t see how, with all these people from India and Pakistan where living and pays are cheap a US person can still compete to make the US level of wage, America got real expensive, what’s the edge you can get over them if they can also pay for an ad getting the same kind of client traffic, there are literally millions of them looking for work online. Where an America charges 100 they can charge 10 based on their cost of living.

23

Greetings!

I don’t worry about the competition. I just throw up a short simple ad on online classifieds.

"Support your local economy, simple webpages only $100 each. Satisfaction Guaranteed & no up front charges.

Please reply with phone number for a free consultation."

That simple ad will get me about 10 potential customers in a day. An average website is 3-5 pages, so that’s 3-5 days work for me. The day before I run out of work, I repost the ad for another day, so I basically never run out of work.

So basically in that simple short ad, I hit 4 important points that people care about:

• Support your local economy
• Satisfaction Guaranteed
• No up front charges
• Free Consultation

That works for me…

Cheers!

"A wise man learns from both the successes & failures of others." ~ Off Grid


24

Yes, I can see where people can be more comfortable dealing with someone in the US versus overseas, someone who can communicate well in English, especially if stuff like billling is involved. I thought you had run your ads though google or something, not classified.
I knew someone whose daughter canvassed US dental offices to build websites for then but the actual web builder worked out of Serbia where life is cheap, as a middleman she made good money, amazingly, I’d never be able to figure out commercial stuff like that

26

Greetings!

@chevysupercoach wrote:
@Van_Dweller What temperatures do you see in your environment? So far none of your solutions have been helpful to me.

I’ve done many years in extreme temperatures, down to -60°f in the winter, including MN, ND, SD, WY, MT, & AK, & summers up to 120°f in Miami, S. TX, LA, Phoenix, & a couple months in Death Valley.

Which solutions aren’t working for you?

Cheers!

"Old school, cheap, simple, reliable, and easily replaceable for the win!" ~ Traveler@Heart



27

Wow! I think you should write a book about these adventures and share the wisdom.

The main issue in modern America is money and when it comes to vehicles it gets expensive pretty quick. The entire system is one big racket. Its hard to do vehicle dwelling on the cheap now when even basic mechanics work costs so much, got to have those skills dealing with older vehicles. I’ve been though devastating vehicle purchases and out without housing too (and without a vehicle either), its my opinion that the best is to seek employment with housing or even better with room and board, to save up for vehicle related stuff when things are unaffordable, I had done that in the past.