Made for WINTER - How to Build Your Own Travel Trailer - DIY Insulation and Heat Sources

Well winter is officially here. Thanks for watching the video. If you're interested in seeing how I insulate my trailer for winter camping and how I'm going to heat it, stay tuned I'll explain everything in the video. Hello everyone welcome back thanks for watching the video. Nothing like a little bit of snow to start getting you motivated to insulate your trailer and start thinking about heat sources. If you're new to the channel this is episode 11. There's 10 previews to this that will explain a little bit about how we got to where we are now. In this episode I figured I would tell you a little bit about the insulation in Eddie and why I decided to go with what I did. So as you might be able to tell from behind me I used styrofoam insulation for my build. In the walls the styrofoam here is inch and a half and in the ceiling it is three inch styrofoam insulation. One of the reasons why I chose to go with styrofoam was the ease of insulation. There's several reasons why I chose to go with styrofoam and I'll go through all of those in the video. First of all I'll show you exactly how it was installed in the first place. So the nice thing about the rigid inch and a half styrofoam insulation is that it's easily cut. So I got an old kitchen knife and sharpened it up and that was my main tool for cutting the styrofoam. I would measure the styrofoam, score it with a utility knife and then slice through it with the kitchen knife and it worked great. It made cutting all the pieces very easy and quick. I could just put the styrofoam in place, etch out with the knife where I needed to cut it and use a straight edge and cut it and it worked perfectly. If I had to do it again I would try to frame the trailer so that I wouldn't have to cut the styrofoam as much. I tried to make the best use of the styrofoam pieces and obviously I didn't want to cut it any more than I had to. When I did have scraps I tried to utilize them the best I could and you can see the little pieces that are filled in in the smaller corners of the insulation pockets. So installing the inch and a half styrofoam went really smooth and it was very quick and easy. The three inch styrofoam that I used for the ceiling was a different story. When it came time to cut it with the utility knife and then try to cut through with my kitchen knife, the blade of the knife was a little too thick and it was really jamming up in the dense styrofoam. I could have probably gone out and bought a longer blade utility knife to cut through the three inches. I tried as much as I could with the kitchen knife that I had and I realized that it just was not going to work. So I decided I was done playing around with the kitchen knife and then I brought out one of my favorite power tools. This may seem like overkill, the equivalent of squashing a fly with a sledgehammer, but it actually worked out really well. It was really quick and easy and it made the process go much quicker than trying to slice through with the utility knife or any sort of knife. One of the main reasons why I used styrofoam insulation was, first of all, I wanted to get it up quickly. The temperatures were dropping here and I wanted to be able to work comfortably in the trailer. Just having aluminum skin on the trailer was really hard to keep it warm in here. I have a quartz heater that I've been using for heat and it does a good job since it's been insulated. It's been minus five celsius. I've been out here in a t-shirt. I just came in more than likely I'll be taking this sweatshirt off soon and just working the trailer with a t-shirt on. That's how nice and warm it gets in here. Being able to use styrofoam insulation, being able to get it up quickly was a big benefit, but also being able to remove it. Because this is a DIY project and I am still kind of planning as I go, I need to remove some of these styrofoam panels to run the wiring. I've been doing that. Running the brake lights and the running lights and had to take out styrofoam. I wasn't sure if I was running it through the ceiling or the walls, so I was able to move these panels out fairly easily. Put them back up once I got the wiring in and that was a big factor. Some of the installations that I considered were brake foam insulation, which was probably my number one choice, except that I needed to be able to remove panels because I just knew that I was going to change my mind and things would come up and I'd kick myself if I had to scrape out spray foam insulation and it's messy. It would have been a pain, so that ruled out spray foam insulation for me. Wool insulation was something I considered. I wear a lot of wool clothing. I love wool and the natural fibers. Everything about it I love. What scared me about wool and any loose insulation was when I ripped apart the original eddy. Seeing the fiberglass insulation saturated with water and mold and everything else from collecting water over the years really turned me off of any sort of kind of fibrous insulation that way. That leads me to talk about moisture. I've gotten a lot of comments on the builds now that these videos have been getting a lot more views and people mention moisture trapping between the walls and that sort of thing. I think the best clip I can show you right now, I'm going to show you this clip here. This is when I was wiring the tail lights. It was very cold outside. I had the heater going inside. You can see the condensation on the aluminum built up. I touch it here and you can see all that moisture. The important thing to note here is that when you pull back the styrofoam insulation, there's no moisture where the styrofoam is coming into contact with the aluminum. What I'm going to do is take the styrofoam insulation off when I'm completely done wiring and I'm ready to actually cover the walls for good. I'm going to take those and I'm going to use a spray adhesive and spray the styrofoam directly onto the aluminum so that it's actually adhered to it so there's no air gaps. I cut it pretty close but there's certainly some gaps between the 2x4s and the styrofoam. I'll be filling that with spray foam insulation including around where the openings are for the light switches and all that so anytime there's any sort of exposed aluminum I'm going to be hitting that with spray foam insulation before I wrap up and cover up the interior wall. That should reduce any sort of moisture building up between the walls. Now that I've covered a video on insulating eddy, it seemed only logical that I cover the heat sources that I will be using to heat the trailer. First of all, I'm very excited to announce that I will be using a wood stove as my main heat source in the trailer. I'm very excited. The whole reason why I'm building my own trailer is so I can have a small wood stove in my trailer. Before you start typing your comments, I know there are drawbacks to having a wood stove as a heat source. The biggest one with a small wood stove is it doesn't stay burning very long. It needs continuous maintenance to keep the fire going. It will not make it through the night. I know that I'll be waking up to a cold trailer. It's messy, it's but I love a wood stove. I do a lot of winter camping. If you've been on my channel and flipped through some of the videos, I do a lot of camping in canvas tents with wood stoves. I love it. I enjoy it. I plan to be out in this trailer year round for as long as I continue to use it. So for me, a wood stove was an absolute number one priority and will be my main heat source in the trailer. My early Christmas present from my in-laws, which is very generous, is a wood stove that I'll be using. It's a Cubic Mini Grizzly. In addition to the wood stove, there's a couple options that I'm toying with as a supplemental heat source. I have a buddy heater that I've been using for years in the back of my truck and canvas tents as well and for a lot of uses. It works great. It works on propane. There's a small propane tank that you attach to it. I also have the adapter for this so I can hook it up to a 20 pound propane tank and it will run for a long period of time, especially on low. So for this heater, I can run this in here while I'm away and come back to a warm trailer, which is important because that leads me to another thing I want to explain in this video is that all my water source, everything will be inside the trailer. There's not going to be any water tanks underneath the trailer whatsoever. In fact, underneath the trailer most likely will be being covered in spray foam insulation once I'm done running all the wires and everything else that I need to run underneath it. So when I'm confident I have everything done there, most likely underneath the trailer is going to get blasted with a layer of spray foam insulation because I've been out here now, minus five degrees Celsius weather, even a little bit colder. It gets really warm. I'm ready to take the sweatshirt off. No problem heating it up with I can feel the cold weather and eventually once this is covered, it's only be covered with a small thin layer of hardwood flooring. Realistically, I'll probably need some insulation underneath that. So that gets back to the heat source and that's why I'm going to need a constant heat source in here when I'm away from the trailer, whether it be fishing, hunting, or hiking, or doing whatever I'll be doing away from the trailer. If it's minus 20, it doesn't take long for water to start freezing, so I'll need a constant heat source. Most likely that will either be the buddy heater or quite frankly this quartz electric heater that I've been using during construction. I haven't tested it yet to see how much it draws on my power stations like a Jackery, that sort of thing. Maybe it will run for an extended period of time. I'll have to do some tests on it. So those are the heat sources that I'll be using. The wood stove will be the primary one. The buddy heater will be most likely be the supplemental heat and or the thermosphere I got from Princess Auto that has been working really well, heats this up nicely. Most of the time I have to turn this on low because it gets too hot here even in really cold weather so far. So that's a wrap on this video. There you go, the insulation. This is what I've chose to go with. The heat sources that I've chose to go with. I'm really looking forward to eventually getting the walls on so I can have that wood stove in here and have a fire going while I'm working on the inside of the trailer for you. A lot of exciting things coming up. I'm working on the wiring. Hopefully that will be in the next video. I keep saying that but it's involved and once that is done there'll be more wiring to do in the lights and ceilings and that sort of thing. So stay tuned. I hope this inspired you. Really excited to have you along. If you haven't already done so, subscribe so you can follow along and catch all the episodes as they come up. And if you like this video I really appreciate if you give it a thumbs up. So thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Cheers!