Category: Mercedes Sprinter

Replacing the stock stereo

On By MashleyIn Car Audio, Mercedes Sprinter, Self build camper van, Sprinter Camper Van, Stereo UpgradeLeave a comment

For a long time it’s been on my mind to replace the stereo in the van. One of the first jobs I had as a kid was working on the weekend in a car stereo store and ever since I’ve never had a standard sound system in any of my vehicles. Pair that with my DJ antics it’s fair to say I know and appreciate a good sound system, the one that came with this van is not a good system, so much so that I rarely have it on.

There are lots of blog posts that tell you how to take out the stereo and reinstall it, I’m not going to go into that, look it up if you need to, what I’m going to share is what I took out, what I put in and how it sounds.

This is the stock system, it took about an hour to get it all out.

The stock Sprinter stereo, speakers and tweeter

Believe it or not that head unit is made by Alpine!

Below is what I bought

Xtrons PSP90M245
Hertz DSK 165.3
Kenwood KSC-Sw11 powered under seat sub

The head unit supports Apple Car play and the android equivalent, car play was the main feature i wanted, it also has a built in 4 channel 50watt amp, you can connect a DAB aerial to it which I will do at some point and you can also add an ODBII dongle and get fault codes and live engine data. It fits straight in to the void left by the stock unit with no need for an spacers or surrounds, the site says the unit is suitable for 906 sprinters from 2006 – 2012, mine is a 2013 and it fits fine with no issues or fettling requirements.

After researching underseat subs and not understanding how anything in such a shallow enclosure could provide any sub base I settled on the Kenwood sub as it seems to be the most popular and wasn’t very expensive.

The decision on the door speakers and dash tweeters was made after looking at other audio system update blogs, the Hertz speakers seem pretty popular and give pleasing results.

Installing the head unit was pretty straight forward, you just take out the old one and plug in the new one, I did have to strip back the aerial connection from the van so it fitted the stereo’s connection. If you want to take advantage of Car Play or have easy access to load your own music / movies on to the head unit then you need to put the USB cables somewhere accessible. I pulled out the USB and audio port in the dash near the steering and routed the cables through there, it’s not the prettiest solution but it works for me.

The sub I installed under the drivers seat as I have a diesel heater in the passenger seat, I Isolated the speaker from the chassis using a bit of left over trim from the cab shelf, the door speakers require a spacer, I bought a pair that are supposed to be for a Vauxhall from Halfords, so long as it fits a 6.5” speaker and it’s the same depth as the original speakers you can use any. There was no need to trim or cut the door cards. I also stuffed some left over insulation around them to try and damp any vibrations in the door.

So how does it sound?

It sounds better but is by no means amazing. The top and mids are definitely crisper but the sub just sounds like a 6 x 9 speaker in small cabinet playing the best sub signal it can muster, this is still better than what was there before and it has it’s own remote control so you can easily adjust it dependant on what music is playing.

I am sure that when I am driving the sound will be far more acceptable than the stock system and having the option to now stream Spotify, Mixcloud or my own personal library from my phone and having navigation on a considerably bigger screen is a major benefit.

I ordered some sound deadening panels and added them to the the passenger door as it was vibrating a lot, if I’m absolutely honest once I installed them and compared it to the door without the panels in it there wasn’t much difference in sound, at some point I’ll put the remaining panels on the other door just because I have nothing else to do with them but to my ears they’ve not made any significant improvement, ultimately I just need to get used to the sound as it which is a definite improvement over the previous sound.

The P0299 code underboost mystery solved!

On By MashleyIn Mercedes Sprinter, Sprinter Camper Van, Urban Caravan4 Comments

A short while back the engine management light came up on the van, no issues seemed to be present which was a bit strange, I hadn’t been on any long drives and wasn’t until I was on one I noticed the issue.

The van would be fine on small journeys below 40 mph but if you ventured above 40, especially going up a hill limp home mode (LHM) would kick in.

When this happens the van will not rev about 3000rpm in gears 1 and 2 and you’ll be lucky to hit 2500rpm in the remaining gears. Essentially the van is running on the 2.1 ltr engine without any turbo, mine is a Bi Turbo so the power loss is really quite noticeable.

Putting a cheap OBD2 scanner on the van revealed the code P0299 which is a turbo underboost code, further investigation revealed this could be a whole heap of things ranging from fairly basic stuff such as a split pipe from the intercooler to the turbo right the way up to a cracked intake pipe which appears to be a very specific problem with OM651 engine on our van.

I physically checked all of the pipes I could see, no splits, there is a massive read pipe that comes off the intercooler and goes to the turbo, no splits on that and I changed the gaskets either end, didn’t fix the problem.

I dropped the van to my mechanic Wayne and he checked out pretty much what I did and few bits I couldn’t get to, he also had a few other people look at it and they all pointed to the turbo being faulty, at £550 for a reconditioned turbo this was the main reason I was convinced it wasn’t the turbo so I decided to try and find a sprinter expert to take a look at it.

As luck would have it, a quick google search for sprinter specialist Croydon brought up MerxWerx, a sprinter specialist that comes to you, perfect! I called up, spoke to Peter who said he’d be round the following day which he was.

On arrival Peter determined there was nothing wrong with my turbo, “rarely go wrong they do” he said, instead he said I had a vacuum leak, somewhere before the turbo on the same side of the engine as the EGR valve and cooler. Unfortunately he didn’t have the vacuum testing kit on him to confirm which part was faulty, he was sure he knew what the issue was but there were four of the same thing and he needed to check using the vacuum tester which one was at fault, he’d be back next Monday with the tester.

Sure enough the following Monday Peter turned up with the tester and happily confirmed the issue was a faulty turbo transducer

Turbo Transducer

Going back to his confidence in what the issue was he turned up with a new one, fitted it, job done!

I’ve since taken the van on a few runs and no more limp mode, van runs like a dream!

The part number for the transducer is A 009 153 31 28 and I cannot recommend Peter highly enough for any puzzling sprinter issues if you are in London and the surrounding areas, http://www.MerxWerx.com

The Flaming 3 Way Fridge….

On By MashleyIn 3 way fridge, Mercedes Sprinter, motorhome, Self build, Sprinter Camper VanLeave a comment

When I was building new Bumblebee I decided on investing in a 3 way fridge as the 12v compressor fridge drained the battery on old Bumblebee, was noisy and wasn’t very big either.

After a good deal of research I settled on an N4100 3 way auto selector fridge which I ordered from Jacksons Leisure. I spoke to Jacksons for considerable time to ensure I bought everything I needed including the correct vents, I was advised by Jackson that the Dometic vents were perfectly fine for the Thetford Fridge install, you’ll see why this is important later.

The vents and fridge were installed in France by Simon, the Fridge had to be raised to meet where the vents were cut (due to the van structure) and the fridge was surrounded by fire retardant insulation, all electrical and gas connections were made as they should be, the Fridge was briefly tested on 12v and 240v but not on gas as there was no LPG in the cylinder. I returned back to the UK assuming all was well with the Fridge.

Covid reached our shores in March 2020 and we all got locked down and for a time I was working from the van as a make shift office, I had the fridge hooked up to 240v to store food that wouldn’t fit in our house fridge, all working as it should do for a good few months. As the lockdown measures eased slightly we decided to head off to some land a friend owns to stay in the van and escape the house, I’d filled the tank with LPG so thought I should test the Fridge before we left to make sure there was no Carbon Monoxide issues when running on gas. I double checked all the connections for gas leakage, no issues there so was confident in firing up the fridge on gas which I did, hung about for ten minutes to make sure there were no immediate issues and then headed off into the house to grab some food, a short time later there was furious banging on my door, my neighbour enlightened me that the van was on fire, luckily we extinguished the fire relatively quickly, the culprit was the 3 way fridge.

The rear of the Fridge post fire

To this day I do not know what caused the fridge to go up in flames, we were very lucky nobody was in it and thanks to the fire retardant insulation the damage to the van wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

The aftermath

I immediately tried to contact Thetford who had shut down their UK operation due to Covid, I managed to report it to their US counterparts who took down my details and then sat on it for a good month or so. Eventually after much chasing on my part a member of the UK team, Paul McNulty got in touch asking for more photos of the damage and the fridge.

What then followed was essentially Thetford’s representative telling me that there were flaws in the installation such as the fridge cavity not being fully sealed, the exhaust pipe not being something he recognised and the vents used being incorrect. None of these things would cause a fire. He then went on to question whether something else in the area where the fridge was installed caused the fire, there is only a water pipe running underneath the fridge so not likely to have caused a fire. The fridge was returned to Thetford who concluded there was no evidence they could see that the fridge caused the fire despite it being the only thing on in the van at the time, the only thing in the cavity where the fire started and the only thing in that area that had a naked flame.

The customer service from Thetford was appalling and consisted solely of them pointing out how they were not responsible and would no way be replacing the fridge. I contacted trading standards and they advised me to take it up with Jacksons as per consumer law, they were just as bad and offered to sell me the same fridge at a reduced cost!

Since this incident I bought a second hand Dometic fridge, myself and my mate Adam installed it ourselves in the same cavity using the same vents, gas pipes and wired the same way, it works exactly how it should, I’ve used it countless times on gas with no issue whatsoever which leads me to believe even more so that the fridge from Thetford was faulty.

If you are thinking of installing a Thetford fridge in your van build please bear my experience in mind, I hope never to have to deal with Thetford again for anything, I do have one of their toilets however and thats great for taking a dump in, it least it won’t go up in flames…

A New Look…

On By MashleyIn Mercedes Sprinter, pregnant, Self build, travel, Urban CaravanLeave a comment

We’ve made some changes round these parts!

As we have a new van calling the blog the adventures of Bumblebee didn’t seem right, we don’t have a proper name for the sprinter bit it is what we like to think of as an Urban Caravan so with that in mind, thats what the blog is now called, The Urban Caravan.

This time around we have built our Urban Caravan from scratch so there are plenty of articles detailing the journey.

We also have an instagram page, search for “urbancaravanUk” if you’d like to follow us or hit the follow us on insta button to the blog.

We’re still building the van so expect some build related posts before any travel ones and the build pages are being constantly updated.

The van is coming along nicely and should be ready for spring, the weather in the UK at the moment is terrible and everyone appears consumed with fear of the coronavirus so not the best time to travel just yet, the most exciting thing of all is we are adding to our numbers..