Snowmobile Camper with Off Grid Heater- Surviving the Night in -18C / 0F Temperature!

Let me introduce you to my DIY

snowmobile

camper

. I built it last year with my dad and have taken it on several trips since then. This year I doubled the insulation and am currently preparing to take her on her first tour this winter later. making provisions for my beautifully feathered friends now I can take care of mine I've been looking forward to this trip because I'll finally be able to field test a heating system I've developed for the caravan the weather report says it's going to work It'll be cold to

night

so I hope my homemade water

heater

will keep me warm enough with a loaded

camper

in tow.

I was on my way through a snowy clearing and a long forest trail. I went on a mixed weather day of cloudy in the morning and snowy in the afternoon with some patch of sun as the afternoon progressed and the ride stretched further, the trees together got closer and my pace was noticeably slower. It was while walking through the close-knit cedars that I decided it was best to stop for the

night

. I didn't want to find myself at the end of a trail without an easy way to turn around. I started looking for a small clearing where I could camp.

It wasn't a large opening, but it will have to be enough for the On the plus side at night, the dense tree cover will provide excellent shelter from the wind. It was time to settle in after establishing the fire. My next job was to turn on the

heater

. I filled the ammo can with a 50/50 mix of eco-friendly antifreeze and water for a total of about 30 liters of fluid to keep it from falling out overnight. I made sure to anchor the animal camps. The next wall was the copper coil I had placed inside this lobster pot filled with sand.

Finally I connected the outside coil. to the ammo box inside the camper using two hot water lines that I ran through a port in the floor of the camper. I added pool noodles to the exposed water lines to insulate them from the cold and minimize their heat loss after placing the coil on the fire. I noticed that it took an hour for the water to start circulating, since I already talked about this system in another episode that I linked in the description. I'll just give a summary of how it works here, basically the water and ammo can travel to the coil where it is heated in the fire, the heated water then circulates back to the ammo can while the water continues to circulate and heat the ammo can. ammunition and then radiates that heat towards the caravan once the fire is out, the sand and the lobster.

The pot and water in the ammo can will act as thermal batteries radiating their heat towards the caravan until it eventually dissipates. The hope is that the ammo can will absorb enough heat energy from the fire to keep the camper warm until morning, at least that's the hope. Once connected, I made sure all three valves on the tanks were fully open. The bottom valve on the side is where the colder water flows to the coil. The top valve on the same side is where the heated water from the coil circulates back to the ammo. can and finally the valve at the top acts as an event.

This venting is extremely important because it prevents pressure from building up in the system. It's also routed outside with a hose to prevent the caravan from filling up with moisture anyway, that's basically how it all works. Everything works after the system had taken several hours to sufficiently store the thermal energy of the campfire, the

temperature

of the caravan had risen to 21 degrees Celsius and rising while it was minus 11 degrees outside and as it fell, the caravan would eventually reach a

temperature

maximum of 24 degrees Celsius. or 75 degrees Fahrenheit, although I had left the door wide open several times during the night, I noticed that there seemed to be a good amount of steam escaping from the vent hose, this worried me because I did not want to lose too much water and therefore , the campers are heated to evaporation, however, when I checked the water level in the tank the next day I saw that there had hardly been any leakage, once it seemed that the water in the ammo can was about to boil, I removed the coil from the ignition and allowed the system to slide a little.

The good news is that the water continued to circulate anyway, but no longer at a breakneck pace. I decided to take a short walk to stretch my legs one last time before going to bed. I have never spent a night here without hearing at least one howl and often many more, but tonight the forest was unusually quiet as they slept or watched, the temperature continuing to drop and would reach -18 degrees Celsius or zero degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the day. day. In the wee hours of the morning, so I figured the Coyotes had hidden themselves in their warm dens and that it would be wise to do the same when the fire was out.

I placed the coil back on the coals, which is where I left it overnight. To keep the heat inside the camper, I wouldn't open the door again until the next morning. Once inside, I could finally sit down to eat one of my no-cook dinners, smoked salmon, peppercorns, macaroni salad with ATS fruit and trail mix, it's not. Stylish but practical, as you can see I'm all set for the night and although it's a typical winter night outside with -12 degrees Celsius, inside it's a cozy 22 degrees Celsius. What I did before entering was let the fire go out.

Just down to the coals and I have the lobster pot or copper coil over those coals right now so as the night goes on it will slowly dissipate but for now those coals are just keeping the system warmer for a little longer of time, I hope I can do it. I mostly make it until morning, as this place is nice and warm. I also have a 12 volt electric blanket inside my sleeping bag to keep me warm if it gets cold here, so I'm really curious to see how the heat will dissipate. Whether it will happen quickly or slowly over the course of the night, I'm just not sure, so I'll have to check back with you in the morning, but the good thing is that this is all pretty well insulated, so the floor is insulated. the walls on the ceiling are also insulated I have two inches of insulation in the walls and above me I have one inch of foam board insulation followed by two inches of clearance which is where the ceiling joists run and then below that There is a inch and a half of foam board insulation followed by cedar wood here, so I think with the combination of having a couple of sheets of full insulation on top of me and a little bit of air between them, I think that will make this roof really good at keeping you warm for much longer for how long I don't know so again I'll have to check back with you in the morning if you've been following my channel you'll know that I've been developing this mokan heater or this mokan heater copper coil for several episodes.

Now, in the summer, I came up with a conceptual design and was pleased with the results, but I also knew there was room for improvement, so through some research on my part. own and just some observations I had made I started to refine the system at the same time I had received so much feedback from the external community so many great ideas and suggestions to help further refine the system from different people around the world different walks of life , different skill sets and experience. It was really great to hear from all of you, so I took some of these suggestions and implemented them to create a better system.

I received several comments from people suggesting I use the group. noodles to insulate the water lines and are certainly helping to improve the efficiency of the system because there is not as much heat loss as that traveling between the fire in the camper. I also got a lot of suggestions from people saying that I should use any antifreeze in the system and initially I just didn't want to use any antifreeze because all the antifreeze I know of is bad for the environment so if I accidentally spilled it it would be bad for animals and for the plant life in the area, but as I read the suggestions there were people who said there is actually an eco-friendly antifreeze you can buy, it's called RV antifreeze, so having the RV antifreeze mixed in with everything It gives me peace of mind knowing that these lines are not going to freeze up on me, so that has been our big suggestion that I really appreciate, so I say all that to say a huge thank you to the external community.

I really appreciate your suggestions and it really helped me refine the system, so this is as much your project as it is mine, so thank you very much. Here's a look at the foot of the bed. I have everything packed on the right side. I have my drone bag, which has to stay in here so the batteries don't freeze, the same with my camera bag, my camcorder and GoPro, here I have a power bank that runs the electric blanket in my sleeping bag and Of course the ammo can gets hot, it's really nice that it's at the foot of my bed so I can put my feet against it and it keeps me nice and warm so I can stretch out here, but there's no more extra space either.

I have my old LED lights caged. as you call them, the funny thing is that every time I have an episode where these lights are shown, people always ask me where I got them from, so in this episode, in the description of the video, I have linked them, so If you want to know where I received these lights you can just click on the link and that will be your answer so yeah I think I'm ready for the night and I'll see you in the morning once I've left the coil on the coals and Going into the night, the ammo box continued to gurgle steadily for another hour after that, the circulation slowed to a gentler pace, just as it had taken the system four hours to reach maximum circulation, it took the same amount of time for circulation to stop.

After the fire was extinguished, the system ran on whatever thermal energy it could store, which lasted me pretty much until morning. Well, good morning, it's 8 a.m. m. and I'm calmly getting up while looking at the indoor/outdoor thermometer. It's minus 17 degrees Celsius outside and plus 13 degrees Celsius inside, so it's a 30 degree difference. It's still pretty hot here, especially considering how cold it is outside this morning now in degrees Fahrenheit outside, it's around zero degrees, maybe a degree or something like that. and it's 55 degrees Fahrenheit inside, so it's pretty much a 55 degree Fahrenheit difference, so obviously the ammo box heater has been doing its job pretty well now, of course this place would get a little warm with my own body heat and I've had the electric blanket running all night but it's a 12 volt blanket so it doesn't give off much heat just a little bit into my sleeping bag so I'm not sure how much it produces, but I feel like the ammo box heater is a little warm to the touch, slightly above room temperature when I went to bed for the night, the ammo box was too hot to touch, the water It was still pretty hot, circulated well and I could hear it circulate for about an hour to two hours after I went in, so the lobster pot in the sand that holds the coil did a good job of retaining that heat and continuing to circulate even once that the fire had been reduced to embers, I now suppose, although I stopped hearing it.

It circulated an hour or two after I entered. I think it was still circulating a little, it was just circulating so slowly that I couldn't really hear it in the tank the last time I was in the

snowmobile

camper, I boiled some water outside. I lit the campfire and filled military canteens and put them here and they stayed warm, I would say, for three to four hours until they lost almost all of their heat and in the morning there was no heat left in them, so that leads me to believe there must have been a bit of traffic overnight, maybe even into the morning, since it's over some of those embers.

As far as my general thoughts on the ammo box heater go, I would say that this is obviously a working system. It could use some refinement. He needs the children to take care of him. For example, if you had left this box of ammunition on the fire, it would probably start to boil, which is no big deal. Everything is sealed, but I would do it. I don't want to push the seals beyond their limits and the boiling point would do that, so I wouldn't trust the system to leave it on fire and go to bed like that just because it might start to heat up uncontrollably, so that That's why I left it on the coals, although it would have been better to have a little fire burning with it, but I don't want to go back out and take care of the fire once I close this door, the night awaits me because I don't want to open this again and let out all that hard-earned heat.

The downside to this ammo box heater is that it is actually veryclunky but it works so I'd say it's a great system in an off

grid

app but I'd rather leave it plugged in but as I'm packing up the caravan this morning and heading out that means I'll have to take the system apart again and pack it all up which It's a bit of a pain, so if I was staying here for multiple nights or for an extended period of time the system would make a lot more sense, but overall I'm happy with its effectiveness. It seems like I'm pretty warm in here, though Anyway, it's pretty cold outside this morning.

I'm going to gather my things now and help. When I was able to check the water lines in the morning, I noticed that the liquid inside had turned to slush. I guess that's what I get for using 1/ 2 I was glad I didn't use pure water after all because if I did, the lines would have undoubtedly frozen, probably breaking the coil and rendering my system useless. When I rejoined the trail that morning, my head was already full of new upgrades and designs for my little snowmobile camper, which means there will be more episodes of these on the way until next time, my friends, when it comes to this one. trip, I think I covered almost as many miles on foot as I did on the sleigh.