With the insulation we continue our conversion of the van. We decided to use a rubber foam mat specially developed for the vehicle interior. This material has very good heat-insulating properties and is also self-adhesive on the back, so that the processing is easier for laymen like us.

Insulation material

When choosing the insulation material, it is very important to pay attention to good quality. Especially the cheap insulation foams emit toxic fumes into the environment. In such a small and well closed space as a car interior, we definitely did not want to provoke problems with air quality.
These insulation mats are available from various manufacturers, but we do not publish the well-known brand names here.
In addition to the mats, we also ordered a kind of insulation tape. This tape is used to make the vapor barrier as continuous as possible at the points where two mats meet.
In addition, it makes sense to consider the basic thickness of the insulation layer and, based on this, to buy insulation mats of different thicknesses in order to either reach the thickness with several layers or to achieve at least a weak insulation with a thinner insulation in places that are particularly difficult to reach.

The purpose of the vapor barrier in the vanconversion

Only gradually the purpose of the vapor barrier became clear to us during the use of the van. The purpose of the vapor barrier is to prevent warm, moist air from the vehicle interior from reaching the bare metal body parts, condensing there and subsequently causing problems and extremely rapid material aging with condensation water.

If you are currently working on a van conversion, pay meticulous attention to insulating all metal parts. We have probably followed this a little too laxly with our van. Time will tell whether we get away with it or if it’s rather worse.

Cutting the insulation mats and gluing them in the van

The cutting is quite simple. With a white chalk the parts are drawn onto the black mat as accurately as possible. The cut works with a conventional carpet knife. Of course, there are even more suitable knives, but the carpet knife does it for us. Especially for large areas, it is advisable to loosen the foil only at the upper end of the cut piece and to stick this piece partially. Afterwards, the covering foil can be gradually removed from the adhesive until finally the whole piece is securely stuck to the van.