High Tech #vanlife

This episode is presented by Tom Lianza and Tony Stuck Alright, I'm going to start assuming we've started. My name is Tom Lianza and I am joined by a very special guest, Cloudflare legend, Tony Stuck, who is one of the people who originally interviewed me five years ago when I joined Cloudflare. And you might notice he is in a special location that's not a virtual background. We are going to talk about van life and Tony's transition to living life out of a van and the technology involved in that. Tony, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. So my name is Tony. When I joined Cloudflare back in 2012, just as a front-end developer, and then kind of got into the APIs and got involved in rebuilding what is basically today's dashboard and APIs and got the opportunity to move into engineering management. And that's kind of what I did for the last handful of years at Cloudflare before I left. The connective to the van may be intermittent, so we'll do our best. So I'd love to start by getting us, so I think a lot of people fantasize about doing what you're doing. I know I do on rough days in particular. It just seems so freeing for those of us who are tethered to a home and a desk and all this. But what is it actually like? How does it actually feel to be loose? Yeah. I mean, it is freeing in many ways. You'll have to get used to. So yeah, I guess there's little things like you're used to having plenty of clothing in a van. It's kind of like living out of a suitcase. We've got some overhead cabinets. So my wife and I each get one cabinet for as many clothes as we can fit. And I guess there's also just kind of getting used to not exactly knowing where you're going to sleep tonight. Tonight, we still don't know where we're going to land. It starts to get more comfortable, but it can still be a little stressful at times. I think one of the things that I wasn't quite expecting is just, well, should have expected it, but driving is basically like having a full-time job. If you're driving, you're 100% focused. And when you're driving for five, six hours a day, it's not like you can take a break and look at Twitter or something like that. You're in the zone driving, and it can be exhausting on a long day. It literally feels like you worked all day. The one other thing is I'm a bit of a speed demon as when I'm driving a regular vehicle. And so driving your house down the road is a different beast. So I would definitely recommend listening to all of the speed limit suggestions. Like if it says 35 miles an hour around the corner, you should definitely go 35 miles an hour around the corner or else many things in your house will fall over. Is the van such that when I'm driving the highway, I see warnings about wind or other things that I mostly ignore in a normal car. These are signs for you? Yeah, for sure. We were driving through West Texas where there's a bunch of... I mean, you'll be driving going 80 miles an hour and then just get slammed with wind on the side, and you have to just turn the steering wheel and drive into the wind just to stay straight. Thankfully, the Sprinter vans have built-in wind assist, so it'll automatically kind of slow you down and do some electronic stabilization, which is nice, but it's still a thing. And the van itself, like the living space, I'd love to understand. I've rented RVs before, I'm sure others have, but the van is a special, especially dense, I think, piece of thing to live in where it's not just like there's a bedroom, but everything's a transformer or something for you to exist in. Yeah, totally. How does that work? Work? Yeah, so I'm sitting on what is currently in our living room right now. This is a couch, and it's got some chairs over here, but all of this folds down into... And it's bigger. We can't fit our queen fitted sheet mattress or fitted sheet on this. It's slightly larger, so it's still plenty of space, which is awesome. And then what else folds down? There's different things, like we have a hot water heater and furnace combo, which is cool in the wintertime where we have the heat on and we indirectly just get hot water with so we don't have to have two... It's just a nice compact way to get two services in one. I guess other things is like other things you wouldn't think about that are relatively simple are we have a shower in the van, but the water line for the shower has to come from one side of the van out underneath and then back into the other side. And so we have a recirculating fresh water tank until it's hot, connected to a shore power and hookups to just save water. And what else? I guess the tiny sink that's in the bathroom also turns into the showerhead, so another space saving technique. It's kind of like probably your typical faucet head in your kitchen, how you can have the regular drip or the spray. And so we kind of shower with kitchen sprayer. Can you actually stand up? Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm thankfully I'm not super tall, like it might be you're over six feet, so it might be a little interesting for you, but it totally works. Wow. And then entertainment, TV, electricity. Yeah, so we have one TV in the van that's on like a swivel mount. So like if we're making dinner at the kitchen area, we could swing it around and watch something or we can swing it out to the center if we're laying in the bed at night. And that's really nice and that tucks away really nicely for traveling. We've got like the nice thing is there's USB ports everywhere since it's all like there's a lot of 12 volts. So like USB chargers is at least eight USB chargers that I could probably reach and plug things into right now. Let's see. And is it fair to say that if you plug in a ton of things, you won't end up killing the battery that is required to then start the van? Totally. Yeah, there's two different battery systems. So there's like the regular chassis battery, they call it, and then the house battery. And so our house battery is 600 amp hours of lithium battery. And so that's, it's about 8,000 watt hours or so. And so that can, so I guess for context, the AC unit will use about a thousand watts an hour. So we could run our AC not connected to anything for about eight hours before we deplete the battery completely, which is really cool. And then if the engine started, it will also then we have a second alternator that will just charge the battery bank back up. So it's great as we're moving around, we basically always have a full battery. Is that a like, I think people get panicked when their phone battery is down to 20%. I can't imagine if my house battery were down to 20%. Is it like a point of stress? It's, I mean, in the beginning, it definitely was. The nice thing about the lithium is that you can deplete the battery down to like 10%, whereas with like a lead acid battery, you only get down to like 50% or so before you start to lose voltage and then you can't, like you need to charge it back up. So we can definitely get away with a lot longer in between charges. But yeah, I think the big thing is just we're moving relatively frequently. So just having the engine running and driving recharges it. And if we'll also just stop it in our RV park if we need to, if we need a charge and that'll plugging it into a 30 amp AC outlet, like we'll charge it back up in a matter of an hour or two. Very cool. And you, you embarked on this journey before the world became enveloped in a pandemic. Yeah. Has that really substantially altered this lifestyle and what it's like and sort of your options when it comes to where to sleep? Yeah, totally. It's, it's interesting. In some ways, we felt more free because we could technically go anywhere. But at the same time, there's a lot of social pressures, especially when it first hit. We were like, we felt bad moving around because we didn't, it's like, I don't know, do we just park in a parking lot for a month and don't leave? And like, we can't store as much stuff in our van to like go to the grocery store. So we have to still go to the grocery store route, like much more frequently than if you have a house or an apartment and you can store a lot of things or get delivery, we don't have an address. So there's a lot of little things like that that made logistics or just we would have to, we still had to do those things still had to move around and still had to go to the grocery store. California was harder than other places in that they had more strict restrictions. So like, when we came through California back in like April, if you wanted to stay at an RV park, you had to do a minimum 30 day stay. So you couldn't just stay somewhere for a night or a couple nights or even a week like they required 30 day minimum stay, which was really challenging for us. Just because we wanted to switch out all of our winter gear for summer year. So we were on our way back up to our storage unit. And so that made it really difficult. Other states were easier in that regard. But yeah, I mean, there's it definitely changed the plans in terms of we don't go, we save more money than we thought we were going to because we're not going out to restaurants where we're not meeting up with friends as frequently that we do actually still see people on some regular cadence, which is nice. I think that's true of those of us who aren't mobile too. Totally. Yeah. Right. That's not unique to me at all. In terms of like indoor outdoor, I assume if you were, you know, you get to reconfigure your living space or like you trolled up full down that you try to find a place where you can use the outdoors more like set up camp. I don't know how you like your living existence isn't just in the van, right? It's like the surroundings are become a big part of your home at any given time. So I see a bunch of stuff hanging off the back of the van. I'm assuming that's like there's a whole outdoor component. Yep. I've got like, that's all of like our garage tools, more electrical connections, all that stuff. And then we've got a big awning that is like a power awning that'll come out, which is really nice. That's helped when we were in Seattle for a little while and it rained there a lot. So we had a nice little dry spot to hang out outside. But yeah, I mean, in the winter time, we did the winter months and went skiing and snowboarding and that was your living inside. We had insulation and all of the windows and stuff. So you can't even look outside. So that was a little bit to get used to. But it also, I mean, we stayed a lot warmer when it was five degrees outside. But now that it's summertime, it's much nicer. It's lovely to be able to hang out outside, have a fire. We cook up, we've like, my wife has gotten into like a campfire cooking. So trying to like figure out, we have like a cast iron pot. So like figuring out everything that we can do over a wood fire is a pretty fun challenge, something to do. But yeah. The rest of the kitchen though, when you have to cook indoors is microwave and everything works. Yeah. So we've, since it's all electric, there's no generator in this. There is propane for heat in the wintertime if you're doing, if you're off the grid or something, but we have an induction cooktop, which has worked out really well. And then we have a microwave convection oven, which is awesome. So we've made like, you know, croissants, you know, just a little pop the Pillsbury roll thing and made croissants. We've made pizzas in there, like while we were on BLM land in the middle of Wyoming, which is really cool. So it's, that works out. We've had no problem cooking. The only thing, the only thing to get used to is having only one burner. So it's like a little bit of a juggle and really coordinating the efforts on it, how, the order in which you have to execute, but all achieve. Yeah. Makes sense. And then like, my understanding is it's very, I mean, once people are home improvement, like nerds, they really get into it. And some people are car nerds and really like soup up their cars and you get to do both on this platform. What sorts of stuff have you, have you done? So, I mean, the first thing that I had to do when I, when we bought the van, it had like chrome rims and like, it was all white. So I needed to just like tone it down a little bit. So like just blacking some things out and adding a nice little pinstripe on the side to like make it a little more unique. So it didn't look like every other van that was out there or to make it not look like a whatever creepy van. And then the other, one other thing that we really did that was, that was really fun was this was not fully winter ready when we purchased it. So in the sense that there's tanks, like we have a 30 gallon freshwater tank, a 22 gallon gray tank, and a 12 gallon black tank. And those are just exposed underneath the vehicle, as along with water lines running in and out of them. So what I did is my dad has a background in being an electrician. So he and I installed like tank heating pads on the bottom of all of them, and then a heat tape around all the exposed water lines and insulated everything. And then so that came in to either be 12 volt, is that we have the van life, like empty their tanks for the winter, and then just live out of gallon jugs or whatever it is. And that was, we figured it was worth going the extra mile to make sure we didn't have to do that. The, in terms of like, high tech Internet looks, I'm guessing you are at the mercy of a cellular reception, at least that's what we've seen so far. Yeah. Yeah, it's even, yeah, how's been your experience with that? Yeah, we, so there's a thing, a service or a hardware feature that we have called the Wi-Fi Ranger, which is basically just a Wi-Fi repeater. So it can pick up signals from relatively far away and then rebroadcast them. So we could connect to it. So we like, there's a Starbucks a couple blocks away, we could connect to that Wi-Fi. We use it mainly when we're at campgrounds that have Wi-Fi available. So we just have one connection to it rather than connecting all the devices. We can, we could connect like an LTE modem to it. We haven't done so just because we have unlimited data on our phone. So it's not that big of a deal. A lot of campgrounds don't have Wi-Fi and if they do, it's not good Wi-Fi. Bay Area campgrounds have the best, not surprisingly, have the best Wi-Fi that we've encountered so far. They're very specific on how many megabits down you get and up. So that was, that was, I could work with that. Very cool. What's the, what's your Raspberry Pi project? Make sure you don't miss out on that. Oh yeah. So this was, this has a little bit of a story with it. So this, there's a, an energy management system in the van called, it's built by a company called Xantrex or I think Schneider Electric or something. And so it provides, it does a whole bunch of data logging about how much, how many watts you're pulling in from your shore power, how much, how many watts you're pulling from your battery and kind of gives you historical views of all of that along with a bunch of other metadata and controls that you can do. And so it came with a small like seven inch Android tablet to like view the data, have its own custom app and stuff. And that was cool until I, once you're driving, things rattle around. And so I opened up one of the cabinets one day and then the tablet just came falling out and smashed and shattered all over the ground. So, so then I didn't have an interface really to look at it. So I just kind of, you actually inspired me with your, your, your clock and your bedside that had a little three and a half inch touchscreen with your Raspberry Pi. So I bought one of those and then kind of reverse engineered the web interface and the web, the API and the session management stuff that this, this service has that's running on board. It has its own wifi router and all that good stuff. So kind of figured out how that thing works and then just built my own little Next.js app to proxy all the needed. I can screen share a, I took a video of, of what, what my interface looks like. So I can screen share that if you'd like. So this is, this is working. I just took a short video. So this is kind of just, this is kind of stuck on the side of one of the walls. And so this just shows what the live energy usage is. So in this video here, I just turned on the microwave to kind of give you an idea of like, so you can see when something with that pulls a ton of energy, what the UI looks like. So you can see it's pulling about 140 amps off of the 12 volt system. And then I also created like just historical views. So you can see what things look like over the past 24 hours, the past week. And, and then the past month is the most interesting because you can basically see what our daily kilowatt usage is in the van. And the same thing with the grid input. And so that's kind of interesting. So like in here, for instance, we were in a very hot place in the middle of Mendocino County. So like a hundred degrees every day. So we had the AC unit on pretty much all day. So you can see we were using almost 16 kilowatt hours on July 20th. And so this has been, I don't know, this is a fun project for me to just stay in the, the, the technology game and not get too far away. And it was a good way to spend some time when you don't have Internet service or thankfully I didn't, I didn't need, well, I need to be connected to like download some, some assets, but that was about it. So this was, this was a really fun project and there's, it was fun to kind of decode someone else's API. I kind of always enjoy doing that reverse engineering. Do you have other projects in the back of your mind that you want to do next? Yeah, I would like to, so the one thing that's not in here is the, so we have also have 300 watts of solar on the roof. And so that's not really captured by any of, of this to know like how much over time, how many, how much free energy are we getting? That's not, you know, diesel powered or, or connected to shore power. So I'd love to be able to figure out a way to get that integrated and view that. I think that's, I mean, there's other additional things to do here. Oh, I have, I also make this, this data publicly available, of course. So I have a, I have a website that is actually, is powered by workers and it just pulls all this data. So I also have like temperature and humidity sensors inside and outside of the van. So you can, I like to correlate like outside temperature with energy usage and inside temperature. So that's just kind of a fun, a fun little thing. Wow. That sounds so fun. So what's the, I'm curious what's, what's the dark side of van life? Like what do you, what is everyone missing about like the worst parts, the scariest parts? Yeah. I mean, I guess just things you have to understand, or like, it's kind of like owning a home. It is literally owning a home. Like, and even worse is the home that's on wheels and it barrels down the highway. So like things break. So like, if you think you're going to buy an RV and like, just like, like have this perfect experience that is, that is not going to be the case. So you have to be either a little handy or be willing to expect that some things are going to break cabinet latches or just wear and regular wear and tear stuff. So, so expecting that and not getting frustrated by it that like three months in you're like, ah, man, this, this thing broke already. It's like, that's just the fact of, of owning, owning a home and a vehicle. Um, yeah, the, uh, I mean, I follow at stuck in a van on Instagram as many people do. Um, and I think, but I remember there was a part where you broke down and, and it was so like, it was the first time that occurred to me that like, when you break down, I guess you live there now. Like, it's not just like a car or it is like my house is now permanently in some city. I thought I was driving through and now I'm here for a few days. Yeah. And it's rough. Uh, yeah. Like we, so we, the front differences, a four by four sprinter in the front differential, uh, lost fluid and like, uh, just grinded up the gears. Uh, luckily while we were literally going through the middle of salt Lake city. Um, so we were able to just get a tow that was like four miles away, uh, which is way better than being in the middle of nowhere. Um, so we were very fortunate in that it was all covered in a warranty and all that good stuff, which was great. But then we just had to spend a week in an Airbnb, uh, in salt Lake. Um, and I mean that, that kind of, it was, it was, we have a cat with us as well. So like moving the logistics of moving cat around complicated things, but then we just got to hang out and explore salt Lake, uh, for a week. So it was like, just kind of roll with the punches and like had to take the best of it. And like, so we got to explore salt Lake and that was pretty cool. Um, and then thank also having a like insurances. So like we got some money back for the trip interruption, uh, stuff like that. So, so it worked out pretty well, but it was, it's definitely an adjustment. Yeah. I just can't, I keep, it's so different to me. And when you, when I see things on TV about shelter in place, sometimes I'm like, what does that even mean for you? Like, I know it feels like we, you know, a lot of what we see on the news is assuming a certain sort of lifestyle that may be, that may put you in a bind or less made compatible. Yeah. Yeah. We, we escaped to, well, friends of ours had, um, has a, an acre of property in Tucson, Arizona. Uh, so when everything first, uh, kind of hit the fan back in March, we didn't really know what to do. Uh, and they all, they, prior to this whole thing, they offered if we ever needed a place to stay that we could go park on their property. Uh, so we totally took them up on that. Cause we weren't sure if people were going to, if States were going to be shutting down their borders and not allowing people to cross or pulling people over for driving. We didn't know what was, what the situation was going to be. So like we kind of just booked it down there, uh, and stayed on the property for a month and quarantined there and, uh, and then try to figure out what, what the next move was. That's fascinating. Uh, how long, how long can a human being do this? Yeah. I mean, you could, Oh, there's some people that have probably done it for many, many years. Um, I think a lot of it, I mean, I can only imagine that I'm very happy given the situation that we have a bathroom and a shower in the van, uh, with vehicles of this, this size, like there's no slide outs or anything like that. We just get, you know, this, this metal that you're bound by these metal walls. Um, so that has saved us. Like if, if anybody that's living in a van that doesn't have like a shower or toilet that was relying on all these public, uh, restrooms and shower systems that are all, a lot of them are shut down right now, especially even at the campgrounds. Um, like that would be very, very challenging to live. Um, so we could, we could obviously do this indefinitely. Um, we're hoping we're, I think we could do another, we could do another year if we needed to, we have other kind of intentions and plans that hopefully within a year we won't still be living in a van, but, um, it's not, it's not, once you get used to the lifestyle, um, like you said in the beginning, it's very freeing. You kind of like, we can figure out where do we want to go? We could spend a week or two weeks, three weeks in some area to kind of feel out the culture and like the, just what it would be like to live there. Like, do we want to live here? Um, so that's kind of been a fun aspect of it as well. Yeah, that's, that's incredible. Also, the fact that you can sort of pick and choose what climate you want, depending on the season, um, just seems, seems so great. Um, yeah, except this is a very odd time to be, to be. Yeah, we're making the best of it for sure. Did you try, have a way to try it out before you went all in? Like, I'm sure some people are curious about what they aren't ready to invest in a van and then go all in, but, uh, how do you try before? Yeah. So last, last summer, uh, we right around this time, actually we rented, uh, we rented a van using a service called Outdoorsy. Um, and so they have motor homes and camper trailers and all kinds of stuff on there that you can rent. Um, and so we found a, uh, a 20 foot sprinter that we rented for a long weekend, uh, and then drove down. We used hip camp, uh, to, to like find a campsite to stay in, um, and did a four day weekend to test it out of like, is this something we would want to do? Um, and all that worked out really well. Uh, the one thing we realized is just like having, if we were going to live in it full time, having that extra four feet, so it was a 24 foot sprinter van, uh, that four feet is a lot of extra space. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it is, it's very significant when you're dealing with the size. So. I bet. Very cool. Thanks so much for sharing, uh, this, this adventure, uh, and everyone can follow you on Stuck in a Van. That's correct. Yep. We are literally stuck in a van. Good to see you. Yeah, you too. Thanks.