GoWesty sells a glovebox LED light kit for about $38, but since I already had the LED lights we decided to make our own kit. The first purchase was this micro switch to tell when the glove box is open. It arrived from Amazon in two days and we were ready to roll. Click through to see how we did it.
Like most Vanagon owners I had wind noise coming from my wing window (the triangle window on the front door). I inspected the window seal and it looked like it was perfectly sealed against the window, yet I still got wind noise at speeds over 40 MPH. I thought perhaps the noise was coming from the door seals so I placed some weather stripping around the door jam, but I still got the wind noise. Click through to see how I solved it once and for all.
I always try to use every bit of space in the Vanagon so I can keep the floor space clear. Not only do I keep lights under the jump seats for indirect lighting at night, I mounted a paper towel holder under one of the seats to maximize space. It works great! I have little plastic organizer boxes under the other jump seat so this one was just asking for something to be placed there.
We purchased the GoWesty Auxiliary Battery Kit back in 2007 and were very excited to have a house battery that would run all of our gadgets without draining the starting battery. The installation was easy, but the kit never lived up to its promise. We were going through batteries so often and couldn’t figure out why. We eventually discovered the kit was severely underpowered and designed poorly. GoWesty has since improved the kit with a larger solenoid, but the wire they use is still small so we opted for something a little better. Click through to see what we did.
We have referred to our streaming setup when we mounted the iPad, but we have never explained exactly what we have going on. We purchased this HooToo Travel Router and mounted it behind the Vanagon glove box. It is connected to a 500GB hard drive (or more recently a 256GB USB thumb drive). It allows us to load up the drive with movies and stream it to the iPad. Click through for more.
One of our favorite additions to the Vanagon is this Power Bright Inverter. It allows us to plug in laptops, chargers, rice cookers, coffee makers, or anything else we can imagine. The Power Bright Inverters come in various sizes but we chose this 1100 watt version. It rocks! You can pick it up here and have it shipped right to you.
We tried several inverters but most of them include a loud fan. The Power Bright runs well and is very quite. In our Carat we mounted it behind the driver’s seat. In a Westy camper you can mount it to the cabinet.
One of the best things you can do to your Vanagon is install GoWesty’s Auxiliary Battery Kit. Once you have that done, you might consider this battery hack we first got from Ken at Van Again. He put 3 motor scooter batteries in parallel to get more amp hours out of the setup. We followed his lead and it works great. He used 3 UB12220 batteries to get a total of 66ah. We had to settle for 3 Power Sonic 21ah batteries to get a total of 63ah because nobody would ship the UB12220 batteries to Honolulu, but we are totally happy with the setup.
We found a LED brake light online that was wider than the version GoWesty sells. This light did not stick to the back window with double stick tape so the challenge was figuring out how to mount it. We thought about mounting it to the back hatch, but that would mean drilling into the hatch and leaving some exposed wire. We opted for mounting the light on the air conditioner’s evaporator housing.
