16 Amazing Campervan Lighting Ideas (Part 1)

foreign [Music]

hello everyone Welcome to our live stream tonight so we're going to be talking about 16 amazing camper van

lighting ideas now this is a this is part one of a three-part series

and we're going to be referencing our article on our website so I'm going to hop over here

and if you go to van builderhq.com read the latest blog post

and we're going to be looking at 16 amazing camper van lighting ideas

so this is a three-part series because we're gonna go in in depth pretty far the first part tonight we're going to

cover the um interior camper van lights some ideas and some stuff that I've

personally used and some stuff that I wanted to uh kind of give you guys a link to that I

thought would be a good a good product and then exterior camper van lights

and then we'll talk about some portable camper van lights so that you can kind of keep in your van that's not physically connected to your van

so we'll be talking about this tonight part two we're going to go over key

things to consider when choosing campervan lighting so purpose brightness it's more the details when you're

actually going to pick it out I might cover a few when we talk about lighting temperature for example

and then over here you know advantages of LED lighting um

topics like this and then the third part

is going to be down here

what we're talking about how to hardwire 12 volt lights in your campervan

and then throughout this three-part stream feel free to you know ask questions

um put those in the comments and that way we can add them to FAQs as far as you

know good questions that you guys are actually answering or asking me and then I'm answering the live streams

so yeah that's kind of the format tonight and then right here this is what will be

we'll be looking at so there's all things when you're inside

a van uh one way and this is just my opinion kind of riffing here but

lighting is a way to really make the space open up it's going to make it feel much more bigger than it is

and so not only the intensity of the lighting but the color

temperature is extremely important and again these are my

strong personal opinions because if you've ever uh purchased or say

you've been into okay don't want to throw these guys under the bus but say you've been to a restaurant and the

LED temperature is very cold it's almost like a cold blue uh it just it it's kind

of harsh and it doesn't feel comfortable and then if you have more of like uh like Cafe more warm lighting

um it's gonna feel much more comfortable more cozy and so you want that to be

reflected in your van and we'll talk about the specifics

um in part two I'll touch on them just a little bit when we go over the camper van lights these links that I have right

here uh so let's go ahead and hop in here and yeah we can get started to uh talk about

it and again throughout the stream if you have a question put in the chat box below and be would be happy to answer it

for you so we're going to hop in and start with interior camper van lights

uh the first thing we're going to look at is recess lights and these links that I have from Amazon

uh if I don't say otherwise they're products that I've personally used either in my van or a customer build

and so the first one are these RV boat recessed ceiling lights

um now you can have them in you know four pack or how many ever needed to order

but the first thing that you need to look at is 12 volts you need to make sure when

you're buying these lights that they're 12 volts they make recessed lighting that's 110

120 you know the household power um you don't really have to worry about

the wattage uh LEDs in general going to be very low wattage so as far as the

wiring you're going to use um uh you know don't worry about that if

it's an LED 12 volt light you're going to be okay with uh not having something crazy that you're

purchasing um and then you'll see like RV boat is a

good way to double check so just double check those two things because they they if you've never bought these before they

kind of look similar um what's really cool about these in particular is not only are they really

inexpensive but if we look right here it's just a simple

positive negative and then they have these Springs and what's cool is you'll come over here you'll drill a hole so

two and three quarter inch diameter whole X sorry you'll cut uh

a two and a quarter inch cut out so you get a two and a quarter inch hole saw

and uh if you guys don't know what a hole saw is

so this is a hole saw so this is a two inch hole saw still got

a chunk of wood in it but you put this in your drill and you can drill out a

hole so if you're a diyer you're going to be buying lots of hole saws because uh

I must have 20 of them

I use them from everything for lights electrical Plumbing anywhere I need a hole

and what's nice is you can get grommets so if you're not putting lights in you

can just do a hole saw cut like in a sheet metal and then put a grommet around it to make

sure if you have a wire passing through that it doesn't cut itself

but you have a two and a quarter inch cut out and then what you'll do is you'll fold back these Springs and then

when you pop it up in there and let go it's going to uh just just hold it up

there um another good advantage to this type of light is say something happens where

it burns out in the future well you can just take your fingers and pop it out really easily you don't need any tools

actually and if you actually buy these Wago

connectors

so I don't have you guys have seen me show you these before these are Wago connectors humble Road loves using these

um that's actually where I found out about them I've done a lot of electrical work in my life and I don't know why

I've never came upon these but apparently they use these in Europe a lot

um professionally so that kind of threw me for over here in the US you know we

got the twist tie with the wire little twist caps but these Wago connectors

they have these little doors that open up and you put the wire in it and then you shut the door

and it makes the wire connection so imagine if you have these uh

these right here you have the power wire coming in and then you have one go into a recessed

light you can take this and use it as your main wiring connector

in the ceiling so when you pull this recessed light out you can undo the door throw the old

light away take the new one clip it in and put it back up in the top of your

van completely tool-less you wouldn't need any tools to do this so if you do this two things combine

gonna save you a lot of headache if one of these Burns Out

um yeah so that's what I did with these

they weren't going to come up to strip lights so strip lights again you need to be

a little specific when you order these they make these extremely cheap

that are not good quality and then they make them that are very expensive and kind of

I'd say overdone a little bit I mean that because

uh cheaper ones you can tend to or at least in my opinion you can find

where you can cut them up and then there's these uh ready-made clips to connect them to each

other in case you don't want to do soldering on the connections

but uh here is something that's important notice this 4000 k

so this is the Kelvin scale

um and we're going to do this for color temperature

so if we go to the uh the K it stands for Kelvin

and so this is a unit of measurement for uh light

temperature so we have our Spectrum here and if we go warm light is going to be a

lower number like 3000 K and then as you move up 4000k I think

daylight is 50. uh they have it at 5 000 but technically

it's 5600

um but anywhere from this you know four thousand to five if we go back over

here on Amazon notice we got four thousand five thousand

for color temperature 5000 is gonna be more white uh four thousand they call like a

neutral White uh let's see if I can find some better examples here

so right here these are really like a golden color and they're three thousand so three thousand four thousand and then

this one's really really white it's 6500 Kelvin

so if you come up here so it's whatever temperature you're most

comfortable with this range like four thousand um

I think that's what I purchased yep yeah four thousand that's going to give you the color nine

times out of ten that you want for example if we go and look at Thomas's van

uh these strip lights up here this is that four thousand color temperature so

it's a little warm it's not it's not so cool and so I did that inside his ceiling and

that's how I did this little effect now I'm gonna drift a little from uh

programming here and I'm going to type in LED

diffuser Channel and if you type an LED diffuser Channel

this is how I achieved that kind of I call I call it like the Tron look but

for lack of better word it's just like this nice diffused light it makes it look like a perfect beam of light

and so what I did is I bought these things and I was kind of apprehensive at the

beginning because I mean stuff on Amazon LED wise is so cheap so

I didn't know how frail this aluminum would be coming to find out it was perfect it's

very strong the pieces of uh diffusing strip that's uh go in the

channel I was worried that this uh kind of Extrusion and the plastic would

not made up too cleanly it'd be kind of janky but it turned out to be excellent

and you can get these in different links so what I did is I mounted this in the ceiling in between the slats

and that's how I achieved that look

okay and if we go back to next one in our article right here

so we're on flexi spotlights and let's see did I double dip on the

yes so I double dipped on this part because you can get lights that are not

bedside lights in a van that Flex so that is what this part of our article is

talking about but as a product at the current moment this

um LED bed reading lamp so we're skipping down to this reading

light right here this thing is amazing so a lot of di wires and Van Builders

are using this style of bedside light because it bends up out of the way so if you have a Murphy bed and you fold the

Murphy bed up you can move this lamp out of the way and then have the mattress push against it and not damage it

and the other point is it has a USB charging port on it so you can plug in your phone to charge

overnight and have access to a reading light

the higher end models so more for like the Marine industry like high-end Yachts

you can find one that actually has like a red LED feature on it

ceiling dome lights so I don't use these but this is something that is more like

a traditional RV style so instead of the recessed light

uh cutting into the ceiling and going up in

there this ceiling dome light um

so this is just like you know typical RV kind of it it's not a Puck Light because

it's the way it mounts so if you can see it's a flush mount

LED pad and then it has a frosted diffused lens or light cover that goes

on top of it so you can kind of see here um see how this is the surface and all

you would need to have is like a little tiny hole so say like a you know quarter inch drill bit

or less um and then it would mount to the surface rather than being cut through and

supported on the back side and that's more like a classic look

um the more modern would be these recessed lights I'd say

um panel lights so if you search panel lights on Amazon

there's a lot of very these very cheap panel lights

um you kind of see they're kind of thick actually these are very small

bad example let's go back to the example I planned which was

this one so you might guys might have heard of Nano leaf

and so they're these little triangles that interconnect to each other and some diy-ers on YouTube or Instagram

you may see this kind of stylized triangle light and they they'll just

um put it on the on the wall of the van and then plug it in and so it kind of has a cool

uh style uh it's like a kind of like a

feature wall type of thing you can change the colors on it

so it is kind of in your face lighting so it's not an indirect lighting by any means but

um it's just something cool cool idea for a van

and I wonder if I have because I'm gonna show you some more examples

um from the Ben trip

and leaf

foreign

example I couldn't find one but I know I've I know I've seen it before

I just couldn't find it before this stream tonight but yeah they're pretty cool I mean you can

get pretty crazy with them uh light bars

so light bars definitely used in a DIY conversion even

professionally so this is exactly what it used in Thomas's van so this light is right here above the

kitchen um

let me reset that see if I can pull up that photo

foreign

so this is a good photo of those strip lights

and we can see how cleanly diffused they are so they look beautiful and then above his

kitchen we have this strip light um

and this is more for utilitarian type of light

these lights up here on the top are extremely bright but you don't always

want to have them on so say at night time you want to just come over to the sink you need to wash your hands or it's

early in the morning you want to get some coffee this strip what's cool about it is you

can power it on with the system switches but uh for Thomas's case what we did is

his seats his driver's seat swivels so he can turn this around put his Lagoon

table up and they can reach out and there's a touch sensitive button right here

so he can touch this on and off and then

if we looked at um let's get some is cleaned up if we look at

this you can see there is a

right here this is a power button there's a touch sensitive power button that way you don't always have to go

back and click find your switch so in his case

this switch is on his red Arc control panel as a touch on and off switch

but if you're not by that and you're not by your phone you just simply want to go up and touch it off it's really good to

think ahead and buy a light that has this feature so that if you're not around or close to the switch

um you can conveniently just turn it off really easy and like with

um what I was telling you guys about there's a warm white at 3000 K and then

there's a clean wide at 4000k and it's a uh so this is a

uh picky subject for me make sure to think ahead

and get all your color temperatures in your van to match so don't rush and go online and buy your

reset recessed lighting at you know 5000k uh your L light bars at

uh you know 4 000 get them all to be the

same color temperature uh it's gonna make your build look so much

more professional and uh it'll make me happy

um let's see you gave them different links so 12 24

36 and 48

fairy lights so these are kind of a

a lot of just you know want to get out there quickly diy-ers you know

this is something that I've seen a lot of Vans um it's a great you know starter light

to get some uh you know kind of some fun Style on the van

because if you type in fairy string lights and you're just put in you know van life

there's just there's a ton I mean there's a lot of things that you can do with it um you can drape them

uh this isn't my aesthetic but I know a lot of people really enjoy this so that's why I'm just kind of showing you

what people do with it

um these are also just good lights if you want to just some really inexpensive way to have uh

something nice for you know close to bedtime that you want to turn on if

you're just kind of relaxing before you go to sleep um yeah these would be nice

and there's different kinds you can have ones that have you know bigger bulbs in them

doesn't kind of set the mood just nice simple and also

you know extremely inexpensive there's two different ones you can get a

battery powered one or you can do solar so I've even seen people put the little

solar box zip tied to like a roof rack and then have the string you know come

inside and again there's no rules so if you want to do like a super simple basic DIY

van build this is great and then if you have a high-end build you can do the same thing

So reading lights same thing as I talked about earlier with the flexi spotlights

going with a flexible dimmable reading lamp by the bed with a USB charger is

very very I'd say it's very important um because when you're comfortable when

you're in bed you don't want to get back up to charge your phone or turn the lights out at the end of the night

the next we have covered Sensor Lights now there is a ton of these that they

sell them at Ikea they have them at um you know Amazon that we're looking at

right now and they have these This little light sensor so when you open up and the

lighting changes what will happen is it'll sense it and turn on now these are wireless USB rechargeable

so there's what you can do is kind of hack this so if you don't ever worry about the

light dying because you don't want to take it out of the cabinet and then recharge it what you can do is get a USB

cable and then wire it into a fuse 12 volt line from your power system and that way

it's always just kind of keeping it topped off

and then again double check you know your measurements to make sure this is going to fit

so one switch on this but in particular brand has it for motion sensing mode

one is a continuous lighting mode um which would kind of defeat the

purpose of the uh the cabinet light and I guess off is off

um comes with double-sided tape you can

stick it pretty much anywhere and you don't have to use this for cabinets I mean you could use this for under the bed you could use this for like you know

your your battery system so that when you open the door if you needed to troubleshoot a fuse or something in the middle of the night you open it it turns

a light on I mean you can use it for anything

but again nice inexpensive

remote controlled LED lights so

Thomas wanted to have a red night light not like a nightlight but uh

you know kind of that military Vibe where you turn red on it's easier to see at night and uh you can keep it on

while he's in his van at night this is what we use to achieve that

but when we bought this one and we turned it on it doesn't default to the last save

color so may possibly going with if you're looking for just a solid color

go with a solid color so go to these led strips

down here type in red LED strip blue LED strip that way the color doesn't change on you

um but I have to say it was pretty cool because we kind of had it like a fading mode at the van show and it just kind of

slowly went through different colors it looked really cool um but this one

see if I have that photo

I've got a vote I've got a photo of the van

all right so we put a piece of Plexiglas on his

battery system and I'm trying to see where that attachment is

standby

all right so as I'm looking this up if you guys have any questions put that in the chat

foreign

guys this is going to be really cool check this out so this is

you guys haven't seen the build progress on this uh van so it's really awesome to

be able to show this to you so this is his power system

and you can see up here what we did is this is another enclosed LED

this is the color changing one so we were able to change to whatever color we want

and then what I did is I put it in the battery system so that let me really zoom in here

so I cut out and recessed this piece of acrylic and then I got

uh my Odyssey logo reverse printed in

etched the etched glass look and what's cool is I put the LED in a way so that it would

kind of shine down on this to kind of color or you know make this um

absorb the the light and it came out really good so this is his power system for sok 100 amp hour

batteries good Lynx distributor and then the red Arc system

but check this out I mean this is just it's just a simple red

LED strip with remote and looks awesome

so yeah so this exact product right here is what is in that um photo

foreign next let's talk about exterior camper

van lights so the first thing we want to look at is awning lights

so Fiamma is the most well-known I would say to most people that they

know what a Fiamma awning is so that's why I pulled Fiamma up however

between Fiamma and Dometic uh the lighting

Fiamma has this uh these small I guess they're like one foot strips

and I'm getting ready to put it in the spec

build and I noticed that the Dometic that I put on uh Thomas's van the the light

strip is built into the frame whereas the Fiamma is attached to the arm system

so depending on which way you want to go with this from a brand perspective

the LED lights are in two different locations now what you can do

and let's see if I can get some better photos here

so if you notice this uh the kit you buy

looks like this it's very simple it's just two pieces

so it looks like that so it's not the long strip so the Fiamma is not the long

strip this long strip um

I know Dometic has one built in if you add the LED light but what you can do is you can go and go

to Amazon and type in awning

LED light strip for camper and then they have a bunch of these

so you want to make sure that you're buying something that has RV camper LED

strip because it has to do you have to be careful with this

so if you go here this is IP67 rated so it's waterproof and shock proof

now the lights that we put inside of Thomas's van those are the standard LEDs

um and the reason we did that is because these waterproof ones are are really

chunky they have this they're they almost had like this gel coating it's about an eighth of an inch thick

that covers like the eight the LEDs and the circuits and all that stuff and so I had to make see

four eight twelve so I had to do 16 individual I had to do

32 individual solder connections to create that lighting effect on his ceiling

and uh with if you buy these waterproof LEDs and you need to

solidarm one is the bad idea because now you're you've messed up the waterproofing

two you have to cut away that gel that is on

uh these terminals right here in order to [Music]

um re-solder them back together so when we were talking about

these strip lights that's why we're doing two things

we have these categorized as interior let me back up

so that's why these are interior and this is exterior

uh where was that

hold on let me let me clean all this up

yeah so awning lights you can get them from the manufacturer or you can do a DIY and get a waterproof

version all right porch lights

so the other technical term for this would be scene lights and if you look at the kind of over

Landing industry this is uh used all the time to light up an area

uh you can go crazy with these big pods which we did on Thomas's van

and uh so we'll we'll show those uh all lit up at night in a future live

stream when his van comes in but over here on the left we got a one inch by two inch scene light and these

are really nice because this is like a flush mounted um light and you're using what you're

doing is you're using this light to let me zoom in you know light up the scene

um and so they're very bright so an awning light would be more

comfortable as far as being able to leave it on kind of hang out chill

um the scene lights are more for really lighting the area up

almost more for safety for example

but what I'm looking when I'm trying to show you guys is there's different options of

how you want to mount it so this one would be mounted more to a roof rack system

this one would be able to mount flush to a door so there's a see if I type in

rigid scene light Sprinter I bet that'll come up

yep so if you see here look how low profile this is

so it fits right onto the van it's nice and clean you do have to drill into the van but

what's nice is this uh there's a there's a gasket around the light

then it keeps everything nice and sealed but that's kind of what you're looking at

see right here nice very low profile very

clean look so that's the porch light the driving light bars

um we're just gonna go super high end here to show you the cool stuff because this

is what uh Thomas's van has so the photos I'm going to give you guys later

are going to be of these light bar systems from Baja Designs they're pretty much top tier

and you can you can see how expensive they are so the X6 straight is what uh we've got

on the top of Thomas's van we got a 50 to 50 inch version and this thing is

insane you I

if I looked at specs on paper you would still not be able to explain how crazy

this light is unless you see it for in real life

this thing is so so bright uh the wiring that we had to do to get this thing

happy with power was was pretty pretty aggressive too

um hey I'm gonna nerd out here on some power stuff but

it's almost 40 000 lumens of light

um and to be honest they have this low uh this low

Lumen feature like a low beam but seven thousand

Lumen difference you can't even notice it it looks like

you know if you have your headlights in your car on and then you put your engines off and you go to start your car

and it kind of dims for a second that's what this looks like so I didn't even wire that in it was it was useless

so I just kept it on the high circuit um

uh where's the look at this it's it's almost 30 amp it's almost my

30 amp uh and you have to do with the Dual 30 amp

too so um there's two lines that come out of it

there's one for the yellow lights and there's one for the the white lights

so if you can imagine making sure so I was just like to drift off in some

electrical territory to help you guys with um let's see here

30 amp wire

so a 30 amp wire size

I think a 10-2 is what we used right here

um yeah so see how chunky this thing is

because the tin 2 is 30 amps

Uh current so we use this to for his for that light

and I think we did a 40 amp fuse

but anyway well we'll Deep dive into that but this light is amazing

so we used that on his um

so I think I had a here let me go let me go here

so make you guys sick while you're watching this hold on

all right so this is this and I think I came come over to the front

yeah here we go so on top here is that 50 inch light bar

and then we got two lp6s down here in the front

yeah that'll be that'd be awesome stream we'll just talk we'll just hang out and talk about that

um so that's some exterior camper van lights now okay let's go to a budget option

let's go to Harbor Freight

let's go Harbor Freight light bar

now I have one of these I haven't installed it yet I'm probably going to put it on my personal van

but I was pretty amazed uh now this is more reasonable than uh

than the other one but this one

you can see we go from 30 000 lumens to eleven thousand

um but let's where's the specs

hmm yeah people love it

but by going with something like this perfectly fun so I actually had this one in the shop

so again in the future we'll we'll hop on that

um all right so that covers the exterior camper van lights now we're gonna hop on down to Portable camper van lights

so think of you know camping outside

not plugged into the van type of thing portable

so one is camping lanterns and I know there are other lanterns out

there that look old school cool that's type of thing but I'm going to show you a product that I've used for since

since 2017 this Lumen Aid I know it doesn't look like a lantern but it is

the it's the coolest thing that I go hiking a lot

and I bring this every single time and what's nice is you can throw it on the back of your pack it charges with

that little solar panel all day um and it

uh why don't they have a picture of that

I should have pulled it out for this stream

let's see here

these videos are always not good okay the whole point of this thing I can't believe they don't show it

it you blow it up with air so it packs down completely flat

there we go okay that I don't know why that's not a product photo on Amazon this is why it's so awesome

so it has a little valve in the back you open it up and it lays down flat and then you snap

it together so it's really really low profile and then it also has a USB port so that

if you had like a battery Bank you could actually charge it

super cool campervan flashlight

so there's a there's ones that look like lanterns I think that's what we have

that we're talking about here on our uh blog post

like you can do a lantern a gas powered lantern that's kind of cool vintage give you that nice Cool vibe or you can get a

battery powered lantern um but I kind of did a 180 and

I don't see a lot of vans that have like a just a simple mag light with these two clips

to where um it just you know it's right by the door it's at

the rear door um more for like emergency situations but I think that that's very beneficial

if you have something like that I have a mini one that I have my my glove box

but just for practicality I think like a just a solid mag light that Clips on to

this you know side of your van easy access in case you needed it

um but then last but not least we have hand crank lanterns

so these are cool because if you want to charge your phone

they make these that where's my photos this one has an integrated solar panel

on the top has a USB port charger phone and at the very base of it you get a hand crank to

recharge it the one that I have personally that I take with me

if I'm if I'm not hiking in but I'm actually using my van

to go camp it's the uh

I think it's the Goal Zero hand crank Lantern

um it's not that well okay

well that was pretty cool yeah that was really nice

yeah I like this one a lot because it looks really nice

yeah it's got a little USB built in so you don't have to go find a cord if you need to recharge it

okay yeah this one's pretty cool um so let me take out Lantern hand crank

Flash light yep so

yeah this is what I have I think that's a hand crank

this one the 250. so this is what I have

so I keep this one in my van um so you have LEDs in the back it has a

plug-in cord uh it has a big solar panel here

and then the hand cranks on the side

and it does have a port to charge your phone does flood spot and then actually has a red light so I like that the red

light on it

all right guys I'm going to finish up the stream here so if you got a question I'll put that in the chat while I go

through and open this up to do my little closeout

foreign like I said this is part one of a

three-part Series so we're gonna we're we just went over the 16 amazing campervan lighting ideas

we went over the interior uh we went over the exterior so in the next one what we're going to

do is go over key things to consider when choosing a camper van lighting so we'll go over these topics

and then the third part so we'll probably do these two parts next week

um but yeah next week probably Wednesday we'll talk yeah Tuesday we'll

talk about part two and then Wednesday we'll talk about this how to hardwire a 12 volt light in your camper van

um I'll try to do like a simple mock-up so that it's just a really

easy DIY understandable way to

get get the proper gauge wire proper LED lights and then hook it up to

a battery show you how everything works and throughout the series make sure you guys leave a question

or leave a comment and we might use those to uh add to our FAQs here to

help others out that are asking the same questions so again you can find this article on

Van builderhq.com it's 16 amazing camper van lighting ideas

then don't forget to uh if you want to contact me Odyssey custom vans you can head over to

my website and then you can go to the contact form put your name and information and then

tell me a message down below and what you're looking for and uh how

it can help you with your future van build

so that is going to do us for tonight thank you guys for joining us and we

will see you in the next live stream

thank you