A minimal viable van conversion, part 3: gas stove and running water
A minimal viable van conversion, part 2: the ikea kitchen
July 21, 2019
The bed for the adults
July 27, 2019Cook and clean
Now that the basic kitchen is in it was time to make sure we can cook and clean in it. In our case, that means a gas stove and a water system.
Both should not take up too much space and I did not want it to be too expensive. When it comes to a sink and faucet this is difficult. And you basically have two options. Do you want camper stuff, or do you want to use home appliances? If you want to make your camper feel like a home I would choose the latter.
I decided to go the camper route (and should have picked home appliances). I combined a Dometic sink with a 33mm hole for the Reich Keramik Trend C faucet. The sink is small, nice and has black glass on it. It will fit nicely with the diesel cooker we'll get in the future. The faucet is plasticky and cheap but it folds in nicely in the Dometic sink and looks nice.
Next up was the stove. Me and my wife have been pitching our tent all over Europe for the last 20 years, so our gas stove was good enough for this. Do check the hose: it needs to be replaced every 5 years. We needed a longer hose anyway to I replaced it and put in new rubbers which sealed so well I didn't even need the tape you use for gas seals. If you want to test your gas setup you should do a soap test!
Bringing it all together
Now that we have all the elements it was time to set it all up. Since the placement of the kitchen is not yet final and the stove would be drilled into the countertop of the kitchen I decided to build a new OBS countertop.It was cut into pieces by the local hardware store, which gave some very rough edges which I smooth out with sanding, varnish, sanding the edges again and a second coating of varnish. Robin really helped out here.
The template supplied by Dometic gave us a perfect sink cutout and then the entire thing was brought to the camper.
The gas stove was clamped to the OBS with 4 screws where I can slide the stove in between and one extra screw to block it in place. The screws of the Dometic sink are awfully soft and will be replaced by better ones in the future.
Running water
To get running water I bought to jerrycans, bought the water hose, the drainage hose, some clamps to keep it all in place and a € 10,- submersible pump.
I then found out there are default screw-on caps for these pumps containing sealed holes for your electric wiring and the water hose for the pump. I bought the screw cap, to find out it would never wit my jerrycan, so I replaced a jerrycan and we seemed to be good to go.
I then found out the new jerrycan had different dimensions, so I had to build a plateau for one of them to make the other on fit, but when that was done all seemed to fall in to place.
All we needed to do now is power the submersible pump. It requires more juice than expected, but leave it to an IT guy to have a 50.000 mAh battery pack ;)
I found the right connector on Amazon for the submersible pump and bringing that all together brought ... a lot of noise and running water!
