New Wheels & Tyres

For a while now we have been considering new Alloy Wheels with some All Terrain or Mud Terrain tyres to help give an edge when on slippery grass fields or in mud as we quite often find ourselves.
With Gary retiring from full time work and drawing his pension we dug deep in our pockets and decided to buy some alloy wheels and decent tyres at last.

We found these Motorhome Commercial load rated wheels on Ebay, they are from a company called Wheels Direct, it was a pleasure to deal with Gary (the owner) direct and he included a nice set of locking wheel nuts free because we opted to deal with him direct on Tel. 07854 911679

Its worth a mention at this point that after much reading on many forums for the Citroen Relay, Fiat Ducato that we decided to go up a wheel size from 15" wheels to 16" wheels.  Most advice is the bigger wheels improve handling and bring the speedo variation into more or less a true reading, dependant on the choice of tyres.

Tyres??  There are more tyres out there than you can shake a stick at!

After much thought a deliberation, we opted for some serious Mud Terrain tyres.  We chose to go with Kumho Road Venture MT51 tyres, load rated to 112/115 to accommodate the weight of the van being loaded after its completed build and conversion into a motorhome.

Whilst changing the wheels, it had to be done, we painted the brake callipers as they are now clearly visible after fitting the new alloy wheels.

Were well pleased with the end result, the wheels and tyres look great, hopefully they will achieve the ultimate end goal in giving us an edge in slippery conditions in the future.

Heating Upgrade

The Propex Compact 1600 LPG Gas heater just didn't seem to come up to the mark for us, it was a 2KW output which in our LWB van seemed to take ages to warm up, plus we found once up to temperature the thermostat didn't seem to be able to control the heater to maintain temperature and just kept clicking on and off as it pleased.  This lent towards a new thermostat which was around £35 from Propex, now here is the dilemma...
Do we spend £35 on a new thermostat? or do we go ahead and buy a new Chinese Diesel heater at £100?
We opted for a new 5KW diesel heater which cost us with a voucher £90 from Ebay.
We will sell the Propex later on Ebay to hopefully recoup the cost of the new heater.

This heater came with all the kit needed to carry out the fit with no problems.

Luckily, I had the foresight when building the van to allow myself access to the heater in case of repair.

Removal of the Propex was straight forward and didn't take long at all.

A pretty straight forward swap from the Propex to the new diesel heater.

The main issue was deciding how to provide fuel for the new diesel heater, do we us the new 10 Ltr tank that came with the heater, or do I opt to tap the main van fuel tank with a direct feed?

The main consideration started as wondering to fit the new small fuel tank without the risk of diesel fumes in the van from filling it up.  Decision made, gonna tap the main van fuel tank.

Easier said than done as it happens!  The van fuel tank does not hardly have any flat surfaces to fit a standpipe into.  Much reading and Googling I decided to tap the fuel tank right next to the fuel pump access as seen in the next couple of photos.  There was just enough flat area to tap and fit the standpipe without interfering with the workings of the fuel pump and sender unit float.

Stupidly I broke the locking ring on the pump / sender housing, but hopefully not enough for it to leak fuel.  Time will tell on that one!

Fuel tank tapped, now to run the fuel line to the heaters pump and to the heater itself.

Heater fuel pump

Fuel filter prior to the pump.

The instructions that came with the heater were vague to say the least, but good ole You Tube to the rescue with many videos on how to prime the fuel system and run the heater thankfully!

All in all, a good move and the new diesel heater is great!  

Well pleased with the end result and fitting.  The heater runs up beautifully and heats the van up to the preset temperature fairly quickly.  Long may it last.

Note worthy here is, we have fitted a Carbon Monoxide detector and smoke detector.

Upgrading the Solar System

Not much here to report, except that we feel that 150 watts of solar panel is not quite enough to keep our twin leisure batteries topped up when running our fridge on gloomy days.

Hey ho, lets fit a second 160 Watt solar panel

Glued with Sikaflex 252 and screwed down on the roof same as the existing solar panel, dont want them coming off when travelling!

I cut the existing solar feed cables and fitted new MC4 connectors and a pair of Y connectors to couple both panels together.

We now have 310 Watts of solar energy at our disposal to keep the leisure batteries topped up.