Insulation.

There isn’t too much to say for insulation, I finally finished installing it throughout the van.

I used a 50 ft roll of 3M Thinsulate, and had maybe 5 feet left over after all was installed in the van. 3M Super 90 was used to glue the insulation in place where it wouldn’t hold on it’s own.

The reasons for choosing this particular form of insulation are already well documented on the internet so I won’t go into too much detail, but it’s hydrophobic and resistant to mold/mildew, it’s easy to cut and fit into place, has some sound-deadening properties, and doesn’t squeak like foam boards can. Overall just a very easy worry-free method of adding some insulation to a vehicle.

No Reflectix or vapor barrier, I think those are both pretty counterproductive in a van, because it’s difficult to maintain an air gap for the Reflectix given space constraints, and the vapor barrier is likely just to trap moisture somewhere and cause rust. Cars need to breathe and be able to dry out.

The main thing I tried to do when I installed it all is overlap the panels of Thinsulate where they meet, to avoid as many exposed sheet metal areas as possible. It’s questionable how effective this will be, given that the inner structure of the van provides a lot of thermal bridging all around the insulation, but we’ll just have to see. The doors are also insulated, but the same thermal bridging takes effect pretty badly for those too.

The insulation is doubled up on the roof, because I had the space to do so, and because that’s where it’s likely to make the biggest impact.

I used fish tape to thread insulation inside of the roof ribs, but I chose not to insulate the B, C, and D pillars of the van for a few reasons. It’s probably not worth the modest return on insulating effectiveness because of the massive thermal bridge that the pillars provide anyway, I would like to be able to access the tail lights and wiring in case I ever need to replace them, and it’s really difficult to actually stuff the insulation into the pillars, accessibility is terrible.

The insulation was frankly the easy part, recently I’ve been struggling with how to mount the ceiling and overhead cabinets. The roof ribs have a ton of holes which make it difficult to mount to, so I ended up coming up with a probably overly complex, somewhat structural, furring strip system. Details to come.