DIY Van Insulation Options & Our Spray Foam Process

** NOTE: Prices in chart below have since changed

** Disclaimer: We are not professional spray foam installers. We are just a normal couple that enjoyed building our DIY van. The advice shared in this blog is just from our personal experience, and is by no means professional advice that should be trusted without doing your own research.

As we slowly work through our van conversion, we thought it would be a good time to talk about an opinionated topic: insulation. If you’re choosing to convert a van or school bus, insulation is one step that’s absolutely critical. In fact, until we completed our spray foam we felt like we were working in an oven every time we entered our van to work. Temperature measurements of our ceiling/roof were hitting over one hundred and twenty degrees on a seventy degree day. Therefore, insulation is serious. 

First, a little background on our van in order to explain why we chose the insulation we did. We chose to bring home a 2004 T1N Sprinter that we completely restored before we began our interior conversion. Our van had a few leaks and more exterior issues than we could count. Once the exterior looked as good as new, we had to make sure our interior was solid. Adding luxurious finishes to a van that was absorbing moisture would obviously be a huge waste of time. Due to a few leaks, holes that were previously drilled in the van, and rusted areas, we felt that our best choice for insulation was spray foam. We knew it would help make our van more quiet and would completely seal any leaks or cracks we may have accidentally missed. 

Here’s where the van community, that is generally full of advice, can get kind of weird. Mostly all of the research we found on spray foaming a van led us to believe it was the worst idea in the history of ideas. It also doesn’t appear to be common. But then again buying an old, beat up Red Cross van and restoring it probably isn’t common either. When we decided to take the spray foam route, we immediately decided we wanted a company to complete the job for us. This was the only step of our conversion we didn’t even want to attempt to complete by ourselves because we knew how important it was and quite honestly didn’t feel qualified. However, we couldn’t find a company that would spray foam our van. We’re assuming this is due to there currently being a worldwide pandemic and the fact that spray foaming such a small square footage of a space would be a large waste of the company’s resources. We can’t blame them. This turned out to be a blessing because any research we did come across about people that chose to spray foam their vans said that companies ruined their vehicles. This is due to professionals being used to homes and unfortunately not understanding the nature of the van panels expanding if done even slightly wrong. 

We researched the freaking heck out of this stuff before we tried to apply it ourselves at the risk of messing up our van. This is important, make sure you do too! We had to factor in temperature and it was more than helpful learning how fast (or in actuality how slow) we should spraying our foam. Although it wasn’t even close to perfect, it works, seals and didn’t ruin our van so our goals were achieved! We ended up purchasing a Dow Froth Pak for up to 650 square feet on Amazon. 

All of this being said, we thought this blog post explaining common insulation options would be something helpful for others. Anything that’s a struggle for us could save you guys some time later if you’re really interested!

So what the heck is an R value?

We did some research on this in order to make sure this post had the capability to make sense to all readers, no matter what their background is. To be honest, we had no idea ourselves. We just knew that it was very important and that we needed to look for the number that worked best for us. 

According to energy.gov, an R value measures the effectiveness at stopping energy loss by conduction. When we talk about conduction, we’re talking about how heat moves through specific materials. This was the simplest definition we could find. Simple is great guys! Nobody is a van expert here and even if we were, we’re definitely not insulation experts.

The higher the R rating, the better the material insulates and the more effective it is. Tiger Foam Insulation was another great resource we found to better understand what we needed to look for and broke down insulation in easier to understand terms. If you decide to take the spray foam route, it clearly explains open cell versus closed cell spray foam insulation as well.

Everyone loves tables, right?

With a little information about our experience and additional spray foam resources, let’s officially have a look at other options! Price is just an estimate guys. It would obviously depend on where you buy your chosen product and the size of the vehicle you’re converting. However, the approximate prices we’re referencing in this chart are for a long wheelbase, high top van. The difficulty is also our opinion, and is roughly based on research (on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the hardest). 

This is really just a nice, small table to get all the information you may be looking for in one convenient place versus multiple websites or various channels like we went through. We included some of the most common insulation options we see people decide to use.

SO WHAT COMES OUT ON TOP?

Technically nothing does because like everything when converting a van, it depends on your own preference. 

If you’re heat snobs like us that are stuck living in 100 degree weather, you may want to choose closed cell spray foam like we did. If you’re on a budget, there are plenty of other options that aren’t necessarily forcing you to choose the lowest R value. 

WANT TO DIVE DEEPER INTO OUR SPRAY FOAM WEEKEND?

Our YouTube channel covers our build process in weekly videos. Episode 12, shown below, covers our closed cell spray foam process specifically in more detail.  You can watch our steps of setting up (learn about what we regret not setting up), watch us spray, and watch us clean-up for hours (without having to watch for actual hours of course). 

If you’re interested in diving a bit deeper into why we chose spray foam and our process check out our other blog.