Our Top Ten Must-Have Items for Full Time Bus Living
If there’s one thing I believe strongly about living on the road, it’s that you truly can’t explain what it’s like to someone who has never done it before. So you’ll have to take my word for it when I say I consider all the stuff in this list to be completely indispensable to our lifestyle. Bus life and minimalism go hand in hand, so each and every item we carry is something that serves an important purpose (even better when it can do a couple different jobs). Here’s a top ten of things I would suggest having in your own rig if your lifestyle is going to look anything like ours!
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If there’s any one item that I would consider absolutely indispensable in our rig, it’s this. We are constantly online, whether it’s doing work, ordering groceries, or staying in touch with family & friends. But a vast majority of the public lands that we camp on are not exactly known for stellar cell service. A cell signal booster essentially fixes that problem and allows us to stay connected quite literally almost anywhere. (Do I still turn ours off from time to time to disconnect from the grid altogether? Absolutely). We have the Drive Reach RV model because of the high ratings, and also because the antenna can be permanently mounted to the bus, giving us one less thing to do when we set up camp.
This is a very close second in terms of amount of use it gets. We are HUGE coffee drinkers and I literally don’t do anything in the morning until I’m at least halfway through my first cup. So the ability to make quality coffee quickly and in large batches is a must. We use this little collapsible filter to brew coffee right into a thermos. It eliminates the bulk of a traditional coffee maker and any glass carafes, and also allows us to make as much coffee as we want.
If you did your conversion yourself, you’re going to already have one of these. But don’t forget to bring it with you when you finally hit the road! The one truth about living this lifestyle is that things are definitely going to break, and you - sole designer of your bus and systems - are the most qualified person to fix it. A drill is no doubt the most used tool throughout the conversion process, and the same goes for repairs as well in my experience. A future post on a bus life tool kit to keep at the ready is in the works.
All The Detectors: Carbon Monoxide, Smoke & Propane
Let’s talk safety for a second. Fires are a huge cause of damage and loss of life in RVs, and the two most likely culprits of those fires are your electrical and propane systems. This is as true in factory RVs as it is in builds - wires can short, connections can rattle loose, propane lines can become damaged and fittings can wear out over time. It goes without saying that a good fire extinguisher is a true must-have in any rig, but I highly recommend going one step further and having systems in place that help alert you to problems before they become devastating.
A propane detector will alert you to any leaks in your propane system and should be placed close to the floor as propane is heavier than air and will sink. A smoke detector is of course the opposite and should be placed towards the bus ceiling (always follow the factory installation instructions for any detector you may buy).
I like to include carbon monoxide detectors in here as well, especially if you have a generator on board. If you run your generator overnight (or at all), there is always a risk of a malfunction that allows the exhaust to enter your rig, which can absolutely be fatal. This is a very real issue that takes the lives of travelers every year. You need a carbon monoxide detector, full stop. Please protect yourself and your traveling companions and get one.
This one is for those traveling with pets, and something that has been totally essential in keeping our dog Piper safe with us. The rules about never leaving a dog in a vehicle have to be bent a little bit when you, in fact, live in a vehicle. As much as Piper is a huge part of our lives and we mainly do activities she can accompany us on, sometimes we like to go into a store together or have lunch at a non-pet-friendly restaurant. One crucial component of being able to do this safely is a temperature monitor for the bus. I’ll warn you, this isn’t the cheapest system out there, but for me personally it was well worth the peace of mind. I get a text immediately if the temperature in the bus moves out of our specified safe zone, or if the power goes out. As an added bonus, it’s a cellular device that doesn’t need wifi to operate, so it works anywhere your cell phone gets service. (A full article on bus life with pets is coming soon).
This one seems silly, but it is absolutely a game changer, I swear. Our stove/oven unit needs to be manually lit each time it’s used, not to mention we occasionally burn candles or need to get a campfire started. In short - we need and use a lighter daily, and regular lighters don’t last very long (nor are the good ones very cheap). This problem is solved by an electric lighter that is fully rechargeable! I had no idea these existed before we did our build and now we’ll never use anything else - I love anything you can buy just once.
I know what you’re thinking. “You have over 600ah of lithium batteries and 1200 watts of solar on your rig. Why in the world would you need a Jackery?” Well, I bought our Jackery while we were in our first van, which had a power system that could not keep up with our needs. The Jackery was intended to be a little power supplement for day-to-day activites like charging phones, and it works wonderfully for that. But we brought our Jackery with us in our bus because we found it useful far beyond that, mainly because of how portable it is. I’ll put it in the cab if I need to use my laptop while we’re driving so I can charge it (it has both 110v & 12v outlets on it), if we’re camping with friends we’ll set it next to our circle of camp chairs to plug in speakers for music. And perhaps most importantly, if you ever have an electrical system malfunction, the ever-trusty Jackery can be set up with its solar panel and give you a crucial extra supply of power for lights or to charge your phone while you work on a fix. (And if you don’t want to splurge on the panel, you can charge the Jackery with its included 110v and 12v charging cables instead).
One added bonus here if you have a modified sine wave inverter rather a than a pure sine wave - the Jackery will power appliances that will not tolerate the electrical output of a modified sine wave inverter. We had a modified sine wave inverter in our first van, and one such appliance that we had this issue with was our electric blanket. Our little 240 watt hour Jackery could run my electric blanket all night, an absolutely wonderful discovery in a rig without a dedicated heater.
Speaking of my electric blanket - it absolutely deserves to be on this list as well. When we talk about propane vs. electric devices in our bus, we often call the electric items “free” to use because it doesn’t cost anything to charge our batteries via the sun, but it does cost money to refill our propane tanks. So, while we use our propane heater on a regular basis, sometimes a little “free” extra heat is great to have (and even better if you don’t have a dedicated heating system on board). But the reason an electric blanket is so much better than a space heater is because of the power consumption. My blanket draws around 100 watts while in use, but a space heater can easily draw 1500 watts or more. It’s targeted, efficient heat that even a small power system can tolerate. But like I mentioned above - be sure you have a pure sine wave inverter before you buy one of these!
Another small but well-deserved inclusion. There’s a ton of situations where it’s great to have your hands free and a light on at the same time. Phone flashlights are great until you’re trying to repair something underneath your bus or navigate around camp in the dark with your hands full. Do these lights look ridiculous? Absolutely. Are you going to use it anyways? You bet. I recently swapped our solar charge controller out for a larger one, and as the sun was starting to set (and our lights were off as I was working on the electrical system), it was so nice to be able to put this on and still have both my hands available. Ours lives in our drawer right next to the side door for easy access.
This one is new to our rig but something we’ve gotten plenty of use out of already and I’m extremely happy to have with us. I’ve mentioned our solar array a few times - we have six panels on the roof, and it’s a well known fact that dirt and grime on your panels will reduce their output. So getting up on the roof to do inspections, cleaning, and maintenance is something we do all the time. That said, I really didn’t want to put a ladder on the back of the bus - being able to not look immediately identifiable as a camper has always been important to us, and a ladder is a dead giveaway. A collapsible ladder is such a cool solution to this. Set up, ours has more than enough height to get us safely onto the roof over ten feet up, but it collapses down into less than three feet tall for storage.
Bonus: DC to DC Charger
This is a little more involved than most of the other items on this list, but I’d really consider it essential, especially if you’re working with a smaller solar system. The ability to charge your house batteries via your engine is very underrated in my opinion. Even Florida and California have rainy, and cloudy days, and if you haven’t been careful in planning your electrical system, running out of power is a very real situation that can happen when you’re off grid. This happened to us so many times in our old rig that we ended up buying a generator (something I was very glad not to have to include this time around). But the one thing that saved us time and again was being able to charge our battery bank via our alternator. In this rig, we have lithium batteries, and it’s not recommended to charge lithium batteries direct from your alternator. a DC to DC charger is the solution - and man, when I tell you this was probably the easiest job in our entire electrical system set up, I mean it. Run a positive and negative line to your battery bank, two of the same to your bus starter battery, and the job is 90% done. Seriously. A more comprehensive guide to that is in the works, but I’d seriously consider adding one to your setup if you haven’t already. (Do make sure you get one that is properly sized to your battery bank!)
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I hope this gives you a little insight into the kinds of things that become important when living on the road! This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of things we use inside the bus, but I absolutely do use and love every one single of the products I’ve mentioned here.