Be prepared for the worlds most boring job….

Neither the research or installation of insulation is fun, it is boring and monotonous, it is however essential and if done right is the difference between being proper cold or proper hot in your van..

There is no right or wrong way to insulate your van though I would steer clear of the glass stuff used for loft insulation, it’s horrible to work with and soaks up water so will eventually rot your van from the inside out if you don’t have a vapour barrier in place..

I’m not going to go into the in’s and out’s of various insulation types, there are a whole host of posts and arguments about that you can look up..

I ended up using 4 types of insulation:

Diall Insulation – Good for stuffing into places more solid types won’t fit and it doesn’t absorb water

25mm Celotex –  Good for the floor, roof and any large panels, use stick pins to hold up

Expanding foam – Good for getting in ribs and gaps you can’t stuff the Diall insulation into

Low-E – I used this as a heat, noise and vapour barrier, could have probably used something cheaper…

Before putting any insulation up I went round and added sound deadening mats to all the panels, you’d be surprised how much these things change the sound of your panel van..

I tried to do the insulation bit by bit while I was doing other more interesting things so I didn’t get bored, it was still immensely tedious, it took ages too, i started it in one country and finished it in another..

Here you can see panels where I used the Diall soft insulation and Low-E to cover, insulation and a vapour barrier all in one, silver tape is your friend.

Here you can see some of the Celotex added,

For this stuff I highly recommend stick pins which you can see on each corner of this panel, once they are on they are not coming off and work much better than this approach:

Double sided tape, contact glue and gravity do not work out well, I replaced every panel I stuck up like this with stick pins, mainly because most of them fell down.

An advantage to using 25mm Celotex for the floor is you can buy 25mm battens, this makes for laying an easy floor as the battens and celotex are the same height.

Lastly the expanding foam, if you can get one of these foam guns your life will be much easier and you’ll get more foam and less mess for your money.

With the foam sprayed into every nook and cranny you can end up with a van looking like this.

Eventually however you’ll end up with something like this..

Once you get to this stage you can get on with some far more interesting jobs like running cables and taking photos of your mate doing something you should be doing..