I know nothing of Hank, but it is funny how the canonically most-environmentally-friendly people, hippies, do that kind of thing all the time without a second thought. The ancient Beetle that puts out more smoke clouds than horsepowers, for example.
Hank certainly has other options. He can stay at RV camp grounds and use their hookups. He can buy massive banks of batteries. He can travel only in good weather in temperate climates. I'm just speculating assuming none of these are acceptable options.
Slightly patronising there - however much you compare pollution and energy use over lifetime, the absolute worst thing you can do for the environment is buy a new car.
It's far better to run an old one into the ground.
You don't even need to go looking for the production "costs" of the vehicle. Just think of the distance that all the different parts of your new vehicle have travelled before they're put together... and then shipped to your country.
Do you have a source that gives estimates of carbon output from vehicle shipping? I'm wondering roughly how many fumey-old-bug miles correspond to pre-owner new-car transport.
Bob Pease used to make some pretty convincing arguments for driving his old beetle (vs buying a newer car). Actually, the more I think about it, Bob Pease might still make those arguments if he were alive today, despite the fact that he died in a crash in a 1969 Beetle, that might[1] have been survivable in a newer car.
[1] Past personal experience: Many of the elderly people I have seen go through car crashes in which the airbag deploys experience injuries from the airbag that often lead to their death or convalescence. Of course, they would have fared no better without the airbag.
While true, the average weight of a car is 4,000 pounds, of which the engine is 600, all of which is recyclable steel.
The best of both worlds is to ride an old chassis with a modern/freshly rebuilt engine. Both frugal and low pollution. There's no reason to run the chassis into the ground using an engine that's burning oil and choking on the gas.
Partially agree! Modern engines, or a properly rebuilt & maintained engine, can do great things for an older chassis. That said, a rolling chassis can and will wear out. There comes a time where replacing all the failing parts is a losing proposition both for you and Earth.
I wish car engines were modular, where it was enclosed within a frame and only had 1-2 connection points for power/fuel. That way, you could swap the engine in 1-2 hours just by hoisting the old engine out and dropping the new engine in with a lift.
It was like that sixty years ago, but we sacrificed a lot of that for compactness and increased sophistication of the engine management systems (which wildly increase reliability, longevity, fuel economy, and power)
But the new car is already here, sitting on a nearby lot, not being driven while I drive my clunker around. Your argument may apply to a future reduction of car shipments if enough people follow your advice, but that is hard to count on.
Darren from Hak5 is touring across America to hacker spaces and the like, and he did something like that[0] which surprisingly was used to power more than I thought would be feasible. And this was on a sprinter van, so with a bus like this, one could get 4x the amount of energy.
Solar power would be great for charging a laptop or running a heater plate, but for HVAC? Air conditioning and heating both gobble power, and there is no sun to power your heater on a cold night.
I just installed AC units at home that move around 2500 W of heat energy (in and out, heating and cooling), at about 800 W energy consumption.
If one of those units is enough for the bus, and it's on 30% of the time that would mean around 250 W per hour power requirement, resulting in 6 kWh over the day.
In a reasonably sunny environment, solar panels can get 100 W per square meter. Let's say there are around 15 sqm available on the roof, yielding a total of about 12 kWh over the day - that's assuming around 8 hours of sun. If that doesn't work out due to latitude, it would be relatively easy to design panels that can be unfolded, providing extra area and serving as an extensible roof at the same time.
If batteries and inverter don't swallow more than 50% of that yield, it should be enough to drive a normal AC, lighting, and a laptop, maybe even a small fridge. You'd need a backup stove for the winter though.
>If one of those units is enough for the bus, and it's on 30% ...
This is why some full time RV'ers are picky about what state they are in for a given season. If you're in Texas, or another hot climate in the summer in a large bus, you'll need two or three tons (24,000 to 36,000 BTU) of A/C capacity (sometimes more!) to keep it habitable through mid-day and late afternoon.
If you have a large (cover the roof) solar/battery/inverter system, you can run all night without having generators start (and interrupt everyone's sleep) in most cases.
I've been studying sailboats and living aboard them for the last year. You would be amazed on what tech is out there to be virtually self sufficient for energy, water and heating/cooling. A lot of this can transfer to a live aboard bus.
* Wind-electric generators
* Led
* Solar Panels
* Low voltage heaters..etc
Many of the comments here about cooking fuels being heavier than air are correct about the danger- nothing that proper ducting and a bilge pump could not handle. In order to live like this you must adopt a camping lifestyle. Everyday life activities, such as cooking and bathing, become more like camping and require more preparation.
edit-poor formatting, sorry. I meant the asterisks to be bullet points.
In my eyes, there's no way one is going to get a traditional HVAC in something like this due to power consumption restraints that you mention. Though, if you watch the video's of Darren preparing, hes powering more than just a laptop or a heater plate (he also employs batteries to get over those night time constraints).
That being said, I feel like one would probably better off trying to solve the heater on the cold night problem by first approaching it from a fluid dynamics perspective (kind of like a glycol HVAC) and then using minimum energy for things like a pump. Though that is probably outside of the scope for this specific project, but it is probably worth looking into for those interested in building on what is going on here.
Hank certainly has other options. He can stay at RV camp grounds and use their hookups. He can buy massive banks of batteries. He can travel only in good weather in temperate climates. I'm just speculating assuming none of these are acceptable options.