Choosing a roof accessories layout for your Camper Van!

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thank you [Music]

hey guys welcome to the live stream got a new set up today and uh so I'm

going to go through the chat here in just a second make sure it's working but in today's video we're going to talk about roof design and layout so if

you're building the van the first thing you're probably going to do is start to think about roof racks solar panels vent fans stuff like that

so what we're going to go over into the video today let's go over here to the pad and we've got these couple options

here so what I want to do is go through the

see here we've got this layout this layout and this layout

so what we're going to do is going to have three different ways that you could lay out the roof and then over here on

the right side the components that you may be wanting to put on the roof I'm going to go over a couple things that I

suggest you do and then some things I suggest you don't do just based on my experience

so if we hop over here to one of the videos on the uh the channel This Is Us

beginning to work on the roof of Thomas's van and so you guys can check out this video

it's on the channel but essentially we're starting our process of

prepping the van and we're putting a roof wreck on

so I'm starting with the roof rack is if you haven't already laid out your fans on the top of the the van

the first option that you want to look at is uh what roof rack are you going with

there's a couple different roof racks on the market and just for the example of this live stream and to keep things nice

and short I'm going to go and talk about Flatline vanco

so none of these vendors are affiliated with me in this video and this is just

basically me getting you guys information quickly get online and find some options

that you guys can go with so these are just strictly for example purposes

but I like Flightline vanco basically because they're custom fit to

each van they're a low profile roof rack which makes it really Sleek on the

outside doesn't make it so high when you're going down the road

when you get a roof rack on your van you may have to say goodbye to

drive through Windows stuff like that so so keep that in mind

so we got a row Flex right here and the first thing I wanted to point out is um

since we're talking about layout options today focus on these ribs so these cross

members right here now each one of these roof racks you can adjust these cross members to different positions

so when you're doing that and putting them in different positions you're able to

relocate where the vent fan is you can put it in the front and the back if you

did want to use your roof rack for storage you could do that however in my experience once you get

the amount of vent fans you want on the roof one or two you want to add some solar up there those two things are

really taking up the space on your roof rack so thinking about using it as a

option for storing items you're probably not going to have the space to do that

the next thing we want to talk about is how do how does a roof rack

um interact with the structure of your van

so the structure of your van is going to be different for every single van so let's take a look at the uh the Ford

Transit so the Ford Transit has a couple different layouts you're going to have

you're going to have the low roof you're going to have the medium roof and you're going to have the high roof

so we got those three different options and the amount of ribs in each one of

those depending on the length of the van so 148 inch 170 inch so these are the uh

regular size and then the extended versions so that's going to give you less or more

ribs I believe in the high roof 148 we've got four of these ribs

in between these ribs is where you're going to be able to cut out holes for vent fans air conditioners different

accessories you want to put on the roof like lighting that type of stuff so

as we start to do this uh let's go over here to the drawing pad

this is pretty much how these options are coming about so we're going to draw

our van here or at least try to draw a van roof so we're looking straight down

on a van and let's draw a 148

um High roof van medium roof

the the length so that 148 that I'm talking about that is uh the wheelbase

so let's just say this is the 148.

and I think I'm going to erase this guy so you guys can

I can highlight the ribs because they're important it's pretty much the only thing that's going to keep you from

uh putting stuff that you want on the van on the van so let's make this light blue

so we have rib here and these are the structural members on the top of the van so I think we got

one two here there's a big gap and then we got this one

and then we have one further up here

so if you notice there's only so many places that you could put something through the roof here here

here and not up here so we're going to go ahead and make that

red so this part up here think of this this

is where the driver and passenger seat are

and this is also where the curvature of the van is coming into play so that curvature you're not able to do anything

so the first option that you guys have is and this just to give you guys a better

visual this will make more sense as we add more photos here

okay so we're going to call these two sections right here these are our vent fans

so you got one here and we got one here

now if we check out the van behind me this van we only have one vent fan the front we don't have any vent fan in the

back um I'm possibly planning on putting an AC unit on the back of it we're actually

going to talk about AC units on the roof later in the Stream but the first thing you want to do is

let's go back here so we're looking at our our layout

so the layout that I'm showing right now is we're going to go with

this one right here that is the one that we did for Thomas's

van so we have our roof and we've chosen

one of the roof racks so let's go over here let's say we chose

this Flatline vanco roof rack right here so let's superimpose the roof rack on

the roof and see how it interacts with where we can locate our Vin fans

so let's make our Flatline vanco roof rack green and we're going to come in here and it's just going to hover on the

side here come down

and then it's going to come over on this side so it comes in four pieces

and so you'll have two you have four rails they kind of break right here in the middle and there's a plate that

attaches them so you got one two three and four

and then up here in the front you're going to have a fairing

and then you're going to have a couple mounting points

so for example the blue is our ribs so you're going to have a mounting Point here

here and up here

and the roof rack actually goes a little bit over here

and take this with a grain of salt this is not to scale this is more for examples for you guys

so we got our

mounts for the roof rack so the roof rack is on the van and now we're going to put the cross

members in so notice where the blue cross members are of the so there's the

roof ribs of the Ford Transit well where our mounting points are they're already locations to put

crossbars so they just kind of follow

what Ford is doing now if you need to adjust a crossbar say you wanted to move this one back you can

do that you can move it back so we have our van

our 148 we've got our roof rack

and so now we're actually start we're able to move forward with uh our roof layout

now in this option that I'm giving you guys I'm not including that you didn't go with a roof rack it's possible that you

don't want to do a roof rack and you want to bolt the solar panels directly to the roof instill the vents and not

use a roof rack I shy away from that because uh the more solar panels you add the

more the weight gets uh it's pretty heavy on your roof and the skins of these roofs on Ford transits are very

flimsy and floppy and it's just very hard to reinforce

um the structure of a Ford van without actually adding a roof rack as the

structure that's going to hold the uh the solar panel

so right here we're going to go with the next step

so we are talking right now about our Vin fan and then we'll actually go down and talk

about the rest of these items so for this layout

we've got our Flatline vanco roof rack or any roof rack that's laid out like this we're going to add our vent fans so

there's really only two or three locations where you can put it this first location I'm gonna do all

this in red is right here because what you're doing is you're

going to you want the vent fan to have some type to share some type of structure with uh

the Ford Transit van itself so this cross member right here it's going to share a support

so that the vent fan doesn't flop down because if you put the vid fan here for example

it would flop up and down because there's no cross member support going through here

if that makes sense so the rule of thumb is you want to have

that vent fan sharing some type of support the nice thing is in the back here you can see

we have two sides of support let me draw that better we got one over

here we got one over here and since the distance right here is not that far

we don't really sacrifice the structure

now something that I'm not sure if it was designed ahead of time it's almost too good to be true but

on a Ford Transit this rear section right here is exactly 14 inches wide

and well technically is like 13 and uh

three quarters or something like that you do have to cut a little bit into one of these ribs to get the vent fan to go

in but essentially you really don't have to do any work if you're going to put a rear vent fan in you just cut the square

out pop your vent fan in and you're good to go when you move to this front area

you may want to support this with some reinforcement

bars so I'm going to go over here I'm going

to grab the reinforcement bars and I'm going to show you uh what I'm talking about

so there's a company let me go to the desktop here um

again no affiliation just showing you guys some stuff here

it's a DIY van and so they make uh they make adapter parts

or like adapter rings for Ford transits for example and one thing that they make are these

supports so this is a inside support frame for the van

and so you can see this uh

this customer or person Builder van they

could not they didn't want to put the van back here in the back or right here at the front they wanted it in the middle

and there's a couple different reasons you might want to do that so

let's show you why so for example let's look at one of these pictures

so this is a top of Thomas's van as we're working on it and if you notice

we don't have any obstructions but say for example over here you had an in an enclosed bathroom

and the fan needed to move up like three or four inches so it needed to move past that area

and you'll need to support it so right here you'll have these uh two

extending bars and so these will actually go up into the van and then once they're up in the van

actually they go like this they'll be glued in and then you can actually bolt screw the fan into the sides here

so that way here you go so those support ribs

they go here and then what's nice is

the roof vent itself can tie into here and then tie into here so now you

actually have three points of structure our support

so that is two locations and then you could do it you could do a third one here but you're going to have to uh

you're still going to have to support it some way

all right something back up a little bit there we go

so let's just say that we have decided that we're going to do again we're

working on this layout right here this one so we're going to do two vent fans and

the two solar panels so vent fans all right

so let's check it off we got our vent fans here they're just hanging out

and that is where we're going to put them so the next thing that we're going to do

is we need to we need to look at our solar layout

so once we have the roof rack we have our vent fans in place and we're making sure

make sure I talk about this so when you're designing the layout of your van

designed the floor pan floor plan first that way you'll know if your front vent

fans can interfere with your bathroom if you guys are doing that or I could close it and if you're a rear vent fan is

going to be in a spot where you want it for sleeping or something like that

all right so we got these two now we're going to add the solar it's so let's go ahead and get this uh

red here turn to Green because I'm going to do the solar in red

now the reason I was talking about that you needed to do um

a roof rack to hold as much solar as possible is because

that is you know free energy throughout the day that you can be supplementing your power system with

and so if you're going to do solar you're going to probably do want to do as much as you can on the roof as possible

so when we did uh and I'm just using Thomas's being for example

we had two locations so we had let's see if I can pull up his photo real quick

no I'll go back here so there's only two places to put our 175 watt solar panels so we had two of

them so we did one in the rear so it was actually offset just a little bit

so it was like this and we're just going to follow that line that we did earlier

so that was one and this is 175 Watts

and then this uh for the mid-roof van there's a fairing

that's actually up here and if you move this

cross member forward to right where the fairing is

then you're actually you're you're opening up the space right here now it's okay to do this because what

we're what we're going to do is we relocated

his cross member back to right there

so now this gives us this section right here

to put a second 170 watt centers 175 watt solar panel

so as I was talking about earlier you can kind of see we're getting a little busy here we have

we have our vent fan we've got our solar panel vent fan

solar panel front fairing structural roof rack

bar our second one our third one our fourth one and then we went one here in the back

and there is really no money to there's really no area to

store anything got the whole thing filled up

so again if you're trying to store stuff on the roof you're going to see a theme with these three layouts that I show you

there's not really any room to do that so we're just going to keep with this

example let's back up and let's talk about

the next thing in the list let's talk about the AC unit

so if you're wanting to add an AC unit to this actually let me back up

let's talk about

we talked about the layout let's talk about uh solar the capacity oh no I'm gonna do that in a third one

okay we're doing good we're on track back to the AC unit so we'll go over

these middle these extra details here after we go through this so if we go to the uh

join again we're going to change this up a little bit

now if you are putting an AC unit on your roof you're probably going to have to get rid

of this rear solar panel

because when you do a rooftop AC

it's pretty wide and it's pretty long as far as in shape

you can fit a skinnier panel in here

let's just call this we'll just call this one 100 Watts let's say 100 watt panel fit there

and then here's where things start to get tricky so

once you change your wattages so you have 100

watt and you got 175 Watt the current coming out of these is going

to be different and possibly the voltage

and that's where we come into one of these little questions right here

so single or dual solar controllers

so because of your roof layout if you decide to go with two different

size solar panels each one of these panels is going to have to be in a separate circuit

so it's going to have a have its own box and so this is a this would be a solar

controller these two things so you kind of see the more complex you

do stuff on the roof and the more you move stuff around other things come into play

and so our capacity like for example it changed so now we have 175 100

now you don't have to have solar panels at all but it really does

help and then that's also our layout and the question that I wanted to ask

and uh maybe we'll get some people in the chat here but the question was is having an

AC system on the roof of your van is that make or break

if you already have a van are you comfortable with just having a vent fan two vent fans or you've had the vent

fans and you wanting to get AC unit because it's just it's just too hot so

that's one thing I wanted to uh kind of pull everybody was you know is having an AC unit is that a kind of a make or

break for you and then as we go go down uh let's talk

about awnings so once we have all of this on the roof

and let's get rid of our

little solar controllers down here

so now we're going to add an awning to this to this roof

so over here on this right hand side of the van is typically the passenger side

we're going to have an awning it can be motorized it can be manual

awning it doesn't really matter but what you want to do is if you are if you are

looking to purchase an awning you're going to want to make sure that for

example uh if we go like Flatline vanco just for an example let's uh let's click

on this one so their roof racks I'm hoping they have

a picture of it real quick so let's zoom in here so if you guys can

see these back holes right here these middle holes and the foremost holes

this one is pre-drilled to receive

the Fiamma f45s awning so what's nice about that is that you already have places kind of pre-drilled

out to put that awning on your roof

so the two things about options for roofs are you got a manual and self-supporting

if you can afford it I would go with the self-supporting because if you get the

manual version so the f45 s is actually a manual version

they make a motor for it but

the motor will extend the awning

to about right here and then you have to pull legs out of it and then continue with the motor and

let's sit it down so even though you get a motor option

it's not going to fully it will fully extend it but it dips pretty aggressively and you need to actually

walk out and support it so if you my suggestion is if you could go with a

self-supporting awning uh Dometic makes one that's really good

I would do that and then last lastly on here

we have lighting

so there's all kinds of different lighting options that you can do in a roof and we're actually going to go back here

and we're going to take a look at uh Thomas's van

so this is a good picture of the lighting on his van now this video is more focused on the

roof layout so we're going to talk about that but for example this uh we'll talk about

this audience real quick since we get a photo this is a the self-supporting awning and this is

a Dometic awning so it actually has integrated lights it's self-supporting so one button

actually does make it come all the way out there's no supports needed it has got a wind sensor all that good stuff

and there's a point I'm trying to make when I talk about adding all these accessories that I'll get to in just a minute

but that's his van and then we're going to go through these photos and these are lighting

accessories so you have these things on the side so this is the awning

this is the rear of the van and this is called a scene light so it's essentially there to light up

the side of your van at night time so we have one on this side we've got

two facing the rear one of them is actually infrared which is kind of fancy

right there and then

we have the same on the other side but this photo right here this is another

topic for layout so now that you have your roof rack

you've got your vents cut out or your AC let's just call this AC

you have your solar panels you kind of got everything laid out and then you've

also added say you've added a light up here back here

and these are just your lights for shining out the side of your van maybe you have some side lights

typically if you have an awning you're not going to have a light here

but now the question comes where do all these wires go so where are you going to wire

all the stuff into the van so what I like to do is I like to pick one location towards the rear and then

I'll have another location up closer to here and that's mainly because most

awnings for some reason the electrical is on this right hand side of the Ford

most side so you've got two options

now typically what people will do on a van build is they'll buy one of these

uh cable gland units and you'll you'll drill a hole that's about you know two

or three inches and then stuff all the wires in there and I just don't think that's a good idea because one if you

need to work on one wire you're basically messing with all the wires to work with

one wire so what I do is I create I use these uh

cable gland kits so I wonder if I got one right here in the shop

cable Glen kit where'd you go

the nice thing is you can buy all the stuff on Amazon so this is the cable Glen kit right here

and so you have all kinds of different uh diameters

so you can have small wires you can have medium all the way up to very large wires

and essentially the way that these things work they're pretty awesome so you have the gland itself and what

happens is you'll unscrew so this is the top so right here

let's start with the bottom first that'll make more sense so the bottom has a nut

plastic nut so it comes off you have a rubber gasket right here

and so when that comes down on the van that seals the water out from coming in

and then you have a top piece so once you put this in the van I'll

draw this on the book and you squeeze this down and twist it now that's pinched and that's going to

make a seal between the the sheet metal the roof and then right here you have this rubber

gasket and you get these little fingers these fingers

and so the rubber gasket goes in here and then this is where your cable this

is where your cable is going to go through so you put your cable through this first then you put it through here second and

then you slip this down and then what this is going to do is

going to taper all those uh

that rubber gasket and this is pretty cool I think you're going to be able to see it on the camera

but as I twist if you guys can see that the more I

twist the tighter that gasket gets you see the diameter gets smaller and

smaller smaller and that allows you to fully seal here in here now this is the coolest part about this

say I wired something and for some reason in the van I'm all done this is all sealed up and I say I snipped the

wire and I need to re-run The Wire well if I had a whole

bunch of wires and I had zipped them tied them all together I'd have to undo all that and then pull them all out with

this I can just go to the I can just go to the to the one wire

whatever one it is I can take this I can loosen it up

I can pull the wire out fix it put it back in and then tighten it back down

and so what it does is it makes it so that you can you can service these wires

and then around here we just have some lap sealant at the bottom

and then we'll do the same for these and what's nice is you know two can be dedicated to solar

the rest can be dedicated to auxiliary lighting under van

and so essentially that's what these uh these blue boxes right here

are kind of showing you guys they're the locations where you want to run the wire

so we got those two locations all right let's see what other things we

wanted to talk about so we just finished out with talking

about locations and options let's see if there's any other photos here to just

show you guys that maybe I prepared

yeah so this one shows you just a little bit more deep or how detailed these circuits are going to get

they get really heavy the more and more and more you build the van so not only do we have a line here which

is two of the solar panels coming in so we've got right here we've got our uh

our solar connectors which these are Branch connectors that are connecting the solar panels

um so imagine you have two lines and two lines from each solar panel that's four

so you need to take the two make it to one and the other two to one so this is the two to one connection and the two to

one so the two negatives to one connection here to positives to one connection here

so that's there and then this one for example this is a

Baja Designs Squadron pro light and we have uh so this heat shrink and

this cable so I do all this in-house so it looks like it was almost purchased

this way and that's kind of way I like to do the Aesthetics but at the same time it's done on purpose because we've

got a triple seal in here so inside here we've got the crimp connection that's heat shrunk

then we got a protection over the heat uh the crimps and then we have a outer

jacket that kind of makes this into one cable because this is just going to be in the

sun outside so um plus we want it to you know look really

neat and then here we have each one of our inputs on the top of the roof

and if preferable it's it's preferable if you if you look on the top of the

roof you see how this part dips in and this is high and this dips in if you can keep these cable glands on the high part

instead of this lower part that's preferred because water actually drains through these like gutters

and so if you have these right here it's not the best but the reason that we had to

do this here is because the ceiling starts right here that slotted roof ceiling so we just I didn't have any

room okay so those are those photos let's see

what else we got so we talked about uh

locations and options for lighting on top of the roof

um the vent fan manual are motorized it doesn't really matter but as far as a

roof layout this doesn't affect it but I was just going to go over that if somebody had a question

so that's pretty much all the things I wanted to go over on the roof but

they all point to this right here weight

so one reason that I kind of harp on doing a roof rack on the van is because you need

something to take up that weight um the van roof just by itself is only

designed to carry the outer sheet metal shell in fact it's actually not even welded to

the top of the van on the Ford van it's actually uh

there's this adhesive that it's glued on so it's kind of like a Shale and then it's glued on

it might be crimped in some other places I don't know but I do know the middle part of the van

if you wanted to you could cut the two sides of the ribs off and you could just

peel it off and it's like this there's this foam uh adhesive that's actually holding the roof on

so there's really little structure there so if you can tap into the forward

mounting locations so if we go to this photo right here and we zoom in

this right here is a bracket from Flatline panco and this bolt right here is bolted into

a Ford factory roof route roof rack mounting location

and so this is designed for contractors people that are carrying ladders

Emergency Services some of these Ford Transit Vans are actually made into ambulances

so the uh if we go over here

so these mounts right here they are designed to take a load

now this is some pretty crazy I think the maximum weight

per one of these don't quote me on this it's been a while since I looked it up

but it's about 75 pounds so you get about 150 150 150 150

so I'm actually going to look that up real quick

500 pounds okay I was off 27 pounds

so that's 27

now we're going to look this up so yeah one two three four five six seven eight so we got 27 times eight

yeah I think it was about 70 75 pounds but the maximum load that um

so this is over here is on a American Van dot com

actually no this is full Thule

yeah 220 pounds

yeah it's not a lot so check this out

2012 Transit for the low roof the medium roof and

high roof low roof is 419 pounds medium roof 331 and high roof 220 pounds

so if you have two solar panels the roof rack the vent fans

those are pretty negative negligible they're not that heavy but then the awning the awning is

extremely heavy so if we looked at the let's see here Dometic

cell supporting awning let's see if we can find

we're gonna go to Panther

automatic

doesn't actually give you weight

108 pounds

so I'd say maybe it's a little less but still that's half your weight and then I did

want to talk about solar panels really quick let's talk about the 175 so this one

this one is uh 20 pounds so we got a hundred 140

so you can kind of see that the the weight adds up and once you get everything on the roof you can't you can

really feel it when you're driving the van so that can be something that you take in consideration

so if you're loading everything up just be aware about the weight

that's something that's really important to uh just be cognizant about

now we talked about this one these other two this one right here and this one over here

they're pretty self-explanatory you're just you've got a vent fan and then you've

got two panels and then over here you've got an AC unit one solar and then one vent

and pretty much this is just kind of like a checklist to go through and think about all the stuff that you're putting

in a roof with the end result being understanding how much weight that you're putting on

the roof um and to ensure that it's safe now I would say

90 percent of the Vans out there I'm pretty sure they have a little over their Max roof weight

um especially if this is uh the max

because the higher you go which most everyone has a high roof the lower weight capacity

so just something to uh to think about

all right guys so what we're going to do is we're going to probably take each one of these topics and break them out into

a future video so we'll have the the vent fan is one we'll go some reviews

with some of those for the manual versus motorized we'll do the solar

um hopefully in the future we'll be putting an AC unit in one of the Vans and that way we can go through uh the 12

volt systems there's a company that we have here it is again no affiliation but

um it's a nomadic Cooling and so they sell a line of

AC units that are 12 volt AC units so they're not the uh

240 volt AC units or the 120 volt AC units that normal bigger RVs have where

you need Shore power to actually run those they're not able to run off of a battery some do if you have a huge

battery Bank high capacity and you're using an inverter but that's really one

of the most inefficient ways to run an AC unit you can do it but

um it's really going to drain those batteries and maybe you get one night out of that whole thing

with the 12 volt units if you have typically about 600 amp

hours worth of batteries you're going to be able to run it for a night or two depending on your solar and Arrangements

like that so that's why I wanted to uh you know purchase one of these for one of our

spec builds and be able to show you that or just how efficient it is

the one thing about these is they are very expensive for example this one's like twenty four hundred dollars you

still need to buy a 400 power cable that's 28. and then you still need a

gasket well they're actually including this so that's nice but like you know 2800 and then uh

the mounting kit so now you're at you know 3100 and then if you needed to if you

wanted to clean it up with this uh adapter ring kit to make

the installation easier you know you're at 30 300 without tax so it is pretty

pretty expensive um but again they're extremely efficient units these units again they run on 12

volts instead of an inverted 12 volts going to 120.

so yeah it'd be great to uh talk to you guys about that as well and

one of the benefits too is the interior dimension on this this 13.9 by 14.4

that's going to allow you to actually fit it for on a Ford Transit for example right

here so you'd only have to nibble out just a little bit of this right here and it would fit in between those ribs

and some people some people do that

all right guys well yep take this checklist with you if you're planning on trying to start

the process of laying out your roof and if you have any questions on

individual you know vent fan solar AC Awning or lighting put that in the comments below

happy to put that into a future video and this is going to close out the live stream today and hope to see you guys

next time [Music]