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Originally Posted by SaraA
The financing of the trip is not the part I'm worried about. Nor is it something I'm going to discuss here, except to say that for other people who might like to do something similar, you definitely want to be a writer first and already rather than trying to start your writing career and going on the road or taking on any other big project at the same time and thinking that's how you're going to make money. In any case, this is not a writers forum, but one focused on bus conversions.
Do you have book recommendations? What are the relative merits of a big bus vs short bus vs van?
And if you don't think power for laptops is a problem, what kind of system should we use (solar rather than a generator because I hate the noise) to power two laptops for long periods of time? More than just an inverter, because we regularly pull 6-8 hour days. Or longer, depending on what is going on. "Writing" includes interviews which we record, et cetera. Could we also run a hot plate off of it and use that for cooking, rather than propane?
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Please forgive the poor formatting and occasional strange word. Typing on my cell phone while my hunny bunny sleeps. Church in the morning.
I noticed a bit of flack from a few naysayers so I thought I might pipe in. Ruth and I live in our bus year round. We have land in the desert here in New Mexico that is mostly undeveloped. We have a well. No power. No sewage. We built our bus to be self sufficient, and comfortable. Not to be a work of art, but very functional.
We are not at home often because we just live where we stop moving. Sometimes for days at a time, even locally.
We love the skoolie platform because school buses are built for the road. They are a very sturdy platform to start from. Another platform that is great especially if you want to build a spacious tiny home that blends in in a Walmart parking lot and even affords you stealth camping capabilities is a straight truck. Something in the 25 plus foot range with a dry box will give you a space in the 150 to 190 square foot house with 8 foot ceilings. The running gear is prepared for the additional weight of water tanks, furniture, and infrastructure. We built one of those and lived in it for a couple of years it was great but we did it on a 20 foot e350 cut away van. It really wasn't designed for the extra weight and it was old and tired when we bought it.
When we made our current bus purchase we were bidding on this bus and a 26 foot international truck. The truck was shorter than the bus, and that concerned us when we were figuring out how much solar we could get on the roof. We decided on the 84 passenger international rear engines bus because there was enough roof real estate to mount up to 16 solar panels. Like I said, we wanted comfort. It is a comfort to be able to run air conditioning day and night even on cloudy days.
We power, a 7.5 cut ft deep freeze. Two 4.5 cu foot fridges. Microwave, instapot, coffeemaker that never stops brewing, 12000 btu mini split air conditioner, laptops, hotspot, phone chargers, swamp cooler, 50 inch tv, not all at the same time but sometimes pretty close. The ac runs all summer. We have a shore power cord and a generator we never use.
I am reasonably handy so within a few days of the bus purchase we had a bed, 8 solar panels an inverter, our first battery bank ,tv , cooktop ,fridge and ice chest, lots of heavy extension cords, and we were off doing what we love, wandering around.
A year in the process of living in and building we are close to what we envisioned when we started. We have 12 solar panels on the roof and four big BYD LiFeP04 batteries for about 800ah of storage.
We did a very open floor plan with our king bed and big tv at the back. We use canvas tarps and magnets to make room separations when we feel like it an open up by stowing the curtains when we like.
Some of our infrastructure is still a bit primitive but we live it and it is functional.
If you want to travel and do hotel rooms a van is better tha a car for an extended journey because you can make it an easy access rolling closet with sleeping space for those times when there is no room at the inn. We've done that kind of travel and got tired of it and the expense as well as depending on restaurants for meals.
Motor homes are fine, except not really sturdy. You can spend 100k and still be driving sticks and styrofoam down the road. I watched a brand new Winnebago Adventurer roll over in the median 20 miles from the dealership it had been bought at, the guy dozed off and drifted into the median. It was soft. And the motorhome was top heavy. The end result was that it dissintigrated in seconds. It was just all gone.
There are a couple of companies that build motorhomes on bus chassis. One of the is Wanderlidge. They are privy but really well built. You can sometimes find an older one in the 25k range.
Skoolie is a great way to go if you are handy and want to make that part of your adventure. We paid 1898.00 for our international amtrans rear engine bus. We have about 1600 in solar panels, 2k in batteries, 2 inverters, a primary and a backup, about 400 bucks each, 3 solar controllers, 200 bucks each, 500 bucks in wire, outlets, breaker panels etc. 800 bucks in the mini split. And perhaps another 2k in construction materials like plywood, screws, insulation etc.
No money in labor, because we do it all ourselves and we are a couple of 58 year old fat people with a fraction of the energy we had a decade ago.
I guess my whole point is, it's not so bad to build the sailboat and then go sailing if you have a plan, have some aptitude for the task at hand, and perseverance.
Avoid buying a rusty rig be it bus or boxtruck. Rust will waste a lot of your time.
If you decide to build you can hit many of us who are doing it or have done it for guidence.
Good luck.
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