Ep 7 - Van Life Disaster... When a Build Goes Wrong

Hey guys, welcome to another exciting episode of Tech Talk with Kurt. I'm Kurt and today I have a special guest. I'm Snow. Snow. So I warned you in the last episode she's been trying to get into Tech Talks and today we're lucky enough to have her here. But today actually Tech Talk meets Real Talk. So if you guys have watched some of our other videos you know that we have a Real Talk series where we just kind of keep it real in terms of what it's like to live in a van and experience some of the things we do. We also have a travel series but today Tech Talk meets Real Talk and we had a near catastrophe in the van guys and we're going to share that with you today and I'll tell you what it just it shook both of us shook both of us up a lot but today we're coming to you live from South Florida. That's right we know we were supposed to be in Mexico by now for anybody that's been following us but we also know we needed to winterize the van and my niece is getting married in Georgia and the first week of January so we said let's just head back east fix the van meet friends and meet up with friends and family one more time for the holidays see the wedding and then haul booty to Mexico. So that's what we did we took a big detour guys. Yeah so this is a big detour and I'll tell you it's already been very rewarding on many fronts but we're going to talk about winterizing the van here but before we do that I just want to give a special shout out and thanks to my parents. We're here with them we've been here for a few days and mom has just been putting on these amazing meals and so feeding us real good then dad has a super nice shop with all the tools and so it's been a real nice workspace we have a little canopy our uh yeah an over yeah carport yeah covered covered workstation. His mom keeps making cookies yeah that I have to eat because they're so good so anyway snow's loving on the cookies but um so it's been really nice and we've had family coming over um throughout we're not going to be here for Christmas but I got to tell you it's been a really special holiday season and so I'm super glad that we actually ended up making this detour and uh you know the bonus is that it's been a nice workstation to actually do some repairs and so the good news is and I don't know if you guys saw the episode when we were in the Grand Canyon area I think it was actually Bryce Canyon and we had a freezing situation and we broke the spin down filter in our for our recirculating shower and all the water drained out and so we ordered that and I was able to get that replaced and then all the way back in I think it was South Dakota or Wyoming yeah when we got into uh but I think it was Wyoming we actually uh busted off our accumulator tank accumulator for our pump pressurizes the pump keeps the system aligned I think we've actually had some comments or questions on you know do those things really add benefit my answer is absolutely yes we put a new I put a new accumulator tank on there and boy the pump doesn't come on on off nearly as much and it's also much quieter and so it's um so it's been really good so I was able to get that done and then I was also able to get some winterizing the pipes um so that uh we don't freeze those up and so I'm not going to share that with you today I'm just going to tease you with it today this was Snow's brilliant idea and we're going to talk about that more I've got it plumbed in but I don't have it fully uh the electrics fully done and hooked up so we're going to talk about that maybe in the next tech tech talk or an upcoming episode but what I did do is I started uh plumbing in the heater and uh so the heater is inside it's fed by our our hydronic heating system the glycol circulates through that and up into the van and that's where the story begins and so watch this and you'll see the disaster what happened so we're at Kurt's parents house for the holidays and we came a little bit early because he's got this great covered area where Kurt can do some work on the van and y'all know Kurt's done some pretty creative and forward-thinking stuff on this van we had one go not quite exactly right so we're having to fix it I don't know all the details so Kurt will explain it so I wanted to explain to you what we were working on so I was working on the air heater for inside the van and so if you guys if you watch the hydronic heating tech talk video you know we have a hydronic heating system which means we have a diesel s bar heater that circulate heats and circulates glycol or antifreeze through a closed loop system underneath the van and that's what we use to heat our water for both our sink and our shower so it circulates it through two heat exchangers one for the sink one for the shower and back to the heater and that heats that antifreezer glycol to about 170 to 190 degrees and that's what heats our hot water so the idea was is that we're going to tap into that to heat our the air inside the van and so I got a heater unit right here so if you guys can see this I'll just show you how this works so the idea is the glycol would come in through here and inside this little heater unit inside this little heater unit there's there's tubes and there's coils and there's like these little metal blades in there so that 170 degrees glycol would circulate up in here and then come back out and continue to get reheated it heat this inside up and then on the back here if you guys can see this on the back there's a big blower so the idea is and this has got a three speed uh option to it so you can set that and that'll blow the air through that this these hot foils right here and that'll heat the air in the van and so that's what we set out to do and so underneath the van I cut into the existing loop and the intention was is to run it through here and I'll just kind of explain to you what this piping is this tubing is so the idea is the hot glycol comes in in here and this is a three-way valve and so from this three-way valve so right now you can see I've got the valve pointing this way so the glycol would come in it would have no choice but to turn here follow this loop now here there's a little arrow on this but this is a backflow preventer our check valve and so basically the glycol couldn't go this way so this is a bypass so the glycol would go here here here here here and then back in the loop and the reason I wanted a bypass was if it's in the summer or it's warm we didn't want that 170 190 degree glycol to come up into the van into the heater even though we didn't have the blower on it could create some heat in the van so we didn't want that so I made this little bypass and so if you and so that's the bypass route so if I want to turn the heater on so we're in winter I'll turn this valve this way and so what happens is the glycol then would come into this t it would go straight and then up into the van into the heater out of the heater back down through this pipe and it would go through the this one-way check valve and right up and recirculate in the system and so that would close the loop and then we would have the heater so again this gives me the opportunity to turn it off or to turn it on and so I plumbed all this in and except for because I didn't have the switch and the electrics for this yet I had it on order so I didn't have this on but I set the valve to bypass so this so again that means no glycol should go up into the that into the van because I had this closed so right here I went and I turned the system on I filled it with the antifreeze I turned it on and I looked over and water's dripping out of the van so I went over and I was like oh no I have a leak I crawled into the van and I saw it was literally dripping through the van so I ran inside and lo and behold the check valve had failed and or my three-way valve was the wrong way and I was pumping antifreeze into the van and that's when the chaos really began and snow's going to pick it up from here hey guys now that Kurt's explained all the details to you I'm gonna head inside the van here um the scariest part of that whole incident was that antifreeze ended up spilling into the van which Kurt's probably already told you so I'm inside with his parents and I come in and he's he comes in screaming for towels screaming antifreezes in the van very hectic scene I come running out and as I'm getting in the car he's already in he's tossing Vanna towards the front of the van not throwing her just tossing her everything was crazy and she was in the antifreeze so I picked her up the first thing I did is smell her face and guys I smelled antifreeze on her face and I knew it was on her paws scared the daylights out of me and I don't know much about it but I do know that antifreeze kills pets so it was very crazy I'm washing her off in the sink I'm scrubbing her little face I'm trying to wash off her tongue I have no idea if she's drank this stuff or not the whole time we're on the phone but within 10 minutes we were en route to an emergency vet which is good so we get there and timing is the most important thing with this kind of poisoning in a pet and we still don't know if she's drinking or not but you can't take the chance so they take her back they get her an IV they get her a catheter and they are pumping fluids through her and while they're doing this they're drawing blood and they're running the test so after about an hour at the vet extremely stressful comes back that she doesn't have any showing up in her blood the vet wanted to be safe and keep her for another five or six hours and just keep flushing her little system because what we learned is if it was in her system it messes up their kidneys and and that's what kills them antifreeze will kill them it's very deadly but she had a rough day at the vet she probably still doesn't know why which is hard on us but we are happy to report that she's fine it's two days later there are no symptoms so she's going to be a-okay other than a little bruise on her cute little arm where they had to put the IV in and what we're dealing with now is when she came back from the vet they washed her down with antiseptic all over to get any antifreeze off of her fur so she smelled really weird to G our other kitty and they're having to kind of get to know each other again so we're dealing with that but they're making great progress and that's all going to turn out good but that's the main reason curd has just completely changed his mind about how we're going to heat the air in the van we don't want to take any chances of anything like that ever happening again so it was a tough decision because he has to undo a lot of work that he did which i'm sure he's already told you guys because he explained all the technical stuff but it's the right choice for us going so see her she's good to go other than a little bruise on her leg look at her she wants some loving so i'm going to stop this video and give her a little loving actually i'll pick her up so you guys can see her here she is see she is just fine aren't you baby look at her sweet as can be so moral of the story is doing a diy van build isn't always easy there's going to be some things you have to undo and redo and change course in the middle and i'm just super thankful that kurt as a mind that thinks through those kind of things so we wanted to share the story with you guys so you kind of know that it's not always super perfect if you like this video be sure to hit the like button subscribe to our channel and hit the notification bell if you want to help support our videos be sure to check out our patreon page where you can join the journey and see some behind the scenes action thanks for joining us we'll see you guys in a few days