While not a full blown comeback, I have a little update on the van.
As I mentioned a while back, a friend's life came crumbling down around him, and he's been living in the van now for a long time. As such, he's discovering some of the same things I did about insulation and battery life.
The furnace now works properly! My friend pulled it apart, and cleaned everything, and now it pumps out heat and lets the pilot light stay lit. This found him a new problem though, the battery he's using isn't very good. This means that it dies out in just a couple hours when running the furnace only. He's lokoing at some new batteries from WalMart, and saving up for them.
He also found a friend who is willing to insulate the van properly, and as the battery wasn't lasting through the night, he jumped to the next task at hand... the shore power, or lack thereof. It came down to a damaged wire inside the plug itself. He swapped out the plug, and now can connect to steady power, and run the furnace and everything else he wants, all night long.
Not that it's been really cold here, most of our winter has been unusually warm, and hardly dipping below 0C/32F for more than a couple days at a time. Still, that's a temperature still worthy of having the furnace running.
He has also asked if he can replace the carpet that is in there currently, in order to insulate the floor a bit better. He's looking at actually doing laminate, and having a carpet that can be removed for better cleaning laid over top.
Great deal, all of this. Not too bad. I didn't expect anything from him, but he says that since he can't really afford to pay some sort of rent for it, he's happy to make some of the modification that I wanted to do.
A friend in need, is a friend indeed.
