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Sportsmobile PlumbingHow it came:The plumbing in the van was the largest disappointment to us. When ordering the van we had specified that we would be traveling year round, sometimes in cold climates, and would need good insulation and a pre-heater for the engine so that it would start when cold. We were assured that all the plumbing was going to be on the inside of the van, so that the water system would not freeze when the temperature outside was below freezing. The engine coolant pre-heater was an Espar unit that would heat the engine coolant via diesel, and could also route the coolant through a heat-exchanger to heat the potable-water for showers and such. Upon receiving the van we found that the heat-exchanger for the hot-water system was mounted OUTSIDE the van cabin, underneath, bolted to the skin of the van. It is a metal box, half-full of potable-water, bolted to a huge heat-sink (van skin), that would freeze solid (the potable-water half) if given any chance. The plumbing to and from the heat-exchanger consisted of many feet of plastic (PEX) pipe, also in full exposure to the elements. The location of the piping and exchanger was below the cabin floor, on the driver's side, about mid-ship, where anything thrown up by the front tire could smash into the plumbing. Before winter this would definitely need to be moved up into the cabin for protection from freezing and debris. In a related note, we found that the city-water hookup, which is below the insulated cabin space, near the heat-exchanger, was hooked to the same cold-water line that the heat-exchanger used.
In a call to Sportsmobile it was admitted that the water system around the heat-exchanger would freeze if the outside temperature was even a bit below freezing for any length of time, but that they had chosen this design so that the heat-exchanger would not heat up the cabin when hot coolant was flowing from the engine (a valve could easily solve this problem, and in fact, when spec'ing the van with SMB we were told a valve would be put in place to choose between heating the engine, or the potable-water heat-exchanger) In August, when we had time to do the work to move the heat-exchanger we found even more issues with the water lines. Since the heat-exchanger and the plumbing associated with it had to be moved inside, this required pulling out all of the cabinets on the driver side, removing the interior wall paneling, and getting to the interior plumbing. Lo-and-behold, the interior plumbing was mounted OUTSIDE the cabin insulation, so it too would be prone to freezing in cold weather, with little of the benefit of being inside the van. It would have taken little-to-no extra work to insure that the pipes were on the inside of the insulation rather than the exterior, but this was not done :( .
This view of the van was also educational on the quality of the insulation job. There were significant gaps in the insulation batting, the largest of which was below the slider window. Unfortunately this was also where the inner van wall had been cut overly-large for the van window, leaving a large gap through which outside air could blow up from the bottom of the van, bypassing any insulation, into the interior. This explained why we could almost immediately smell diesel fumes every time we fired up the furnace or coolant-heater (the exhaust for these is directly below this window) even with all windows and doors closed.
What we changed: First, we obviously had to remove the heat-exchanger from its original location and place it inside under the sofa. This required a lot of work to cut the existing plumbing, remove the coolant hoses, remove the house-battery (HEAVY) for access to the routing of the coolant lines, the prior-mentioned removal of all cabinets and wall inside, and a bunch of measuring, drilling, and re-routing of the heat-exchanger and plumbing lines on the inside of the insulation.
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