I've been doing van life for over a year while being a Director of Engineering. This has involved a large amount of being on Zoom calls. I figured it would be helpful for any engineers (or managers) for me to break down some of my costs.
Internet
1. Starlink internet [50GB/mo priority data, unlimited non-priority] - $250 monthly / $2000+ for flat mount hardware. I had/have the less-expensive RV/home dish (non-mobile) before the mobile flat mount high performance dish came out. I can quickly attach it to the Harbor Freight flag pole and hoist it above most tree canopy if needed.
2. T-mobile hotspot [50ish GB/mo] - Roughly $55 monthly. Works great in cities with 5G.
3. Verizon mobile router (Peplink) [300GB/mo] - $150 monthly for the data plan from: https://mobilemusthave.com/
The reason I have all these is because I need redundant connections to do my job. It's not acceptable to not have internet one day. Also I use MultipathTCP to bond all my connections together so my Zoom calls never drop (which used to be a problem with Starlink, but less so now these days).
Fuel Costs
This is my greatest expense. I have a very heavy Sprinter van that I built out myself. I get about 14 MPG diesel. It really depends what State you are in on what the costs are and how much you travel. The general consensus between all the people I've met on the road (working full time) is that they put about 35k miles on their vehicle per year.
Campgrounds
Really only pay for for these when on the East Coast since there isn't as much BLM or USFS land.
Power
I have 600 amp hours of batteries with about 800 watts of solar on my roof, 1320 watts of portable panels that I can set up when I need to (mostly when I want to run the air conditioner 24 hours a day). I also have a 3360 watt auxiliary alternator that will charge the batteries real fast. The truth is I run a ton of computer equipment and never really worry about power.
This lifestyle has been amazing. I used to feel stuck being an engineer behind my desk all day. Now when I get tired of a town I can simply move onto the next one. There's also some amazing groups out there and I've actually made loads of friends across the country doing this same lifestyle so we'll often meet up in places. For example, Trent (who arguabily started the "Van Life Gamers" movement) has a discord full of people that live this lifestyle https://discord.gg/d4xsZEVH.
I would also say having a Sprinter Van has been so much better than an RV because it's much easier to go places with the van than a huge RV. I can park at a trail head for example in a normal parking spot.
Can you please share more about this? I've been curious to build a router with redundant internet providers ever since I noticed certain PCEngines boards supported LTE modem modules. [0]]
I assume you're using Linux; do you wire all your modems via Ethernet and manage MultipathTCP all in your router? Any hardware offloading you're aware of/recommend?
I have two managed switches --one is for PoE to power all my security cameras and wireless APs in the van.
The reason I use OpenWrt and the managed switches is that it's super simple to set up VLANs. Devices such as the Starlink aren't super nice when it comes to being able to configure network settings (maybe that's changed IDK). So the ports on the switches do VLAN tagging and I'm able to segregate all the network traffic including the multiple WANs into one trunk line going into the router device (the one running Proxmox with OpenWrt).
Thank you for all of this information! I also do van RVing and use a combination of carriers/connections. I did a fair amount of reading on Multipath TCP as it was new to me. What I've found seems to be fairly opaque and it doesn't seem to be highly implemented. Some notes/questions:
* Every device and endpoint that it's used on needs to support it. My PCs, mobile devices, router, etc. all need to have it enabled and configured. This makes me question if every other layer 4 router in-between you and the endpoint also need to support it.
* Endpoints that you're connecting to need to support it. It doesn't seem to be widely deployed. https://mptcp.io/
* OpenWRT's implementation doesn't seem well supported and the kernel that's needed for it is really old.
* In your Zoom example, they'd need to support it server side (I don't see anything public stating that they do, but a packet capture would verify.) Also, a lot of that sort of real time traffic is UDP or QUIC (I don't know if Zoom is.)
Interesting that you configured MultipathTCP. It has been on my to-do list since forever. I use "whatever WiFi we can latch onto" + T-Mobile hot spot device + impromptu cellphone hot spot as needed which goes through a LinkSys running OpenWRT and then on into a UDM Pro. Whenever the internet "goes out" I would just manually shunt to another connection. Think I need to prioritize the investigation of Multipath. Have never run out of data, but I am not full-time like you.
Batteries & solar - can never have enough. Am contemplating adding more, even if some of them sit in shadow for part of the day due to the AC unit.
You might want to look at swapping the Tmobile hotspot for the much better deal from Calyx: https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet - it's Tmo by default but falls back to Sprint when Tmo is unavailable so it'd add a fourth network to your redundancy :)
I put a tile shower in my van (you can certainly do it much lighter). I also have a Natures Head composting toilet (no smells at all.. there's a tiny fan that circulates air through a vent outside). Since I only have 30 gallons (4 of those are in the hot-water heater) of fresh water that I can cary, I'll use planet fitness showers a lot.
Internet
1. Starlink internet [50GB/mo priority data, unlimited non-priority] - $250 monthly / $2000+ for flat mount hardware. I had/have the less-expensive RV/home dish (non-mobile) before the mobile flat mount high performance dish came out. I can quickly attach it to the Harbor Freight flag pole and hoist it above most tree canopy if needed.
2. T-mobile hotspot [50ish GB/mo] - Roughly $55 monthly. Works great in cities with 5G.
3. Verizon mobile router (Peplink) [300GB/mo] - $150 monthly for the data plan from: https://mobilemusthave.com/
The reason I have all these is because I need redundant connections to do my job. It's not acceptable to not have internet one day. Also I use MultipathTCP to bond all my connections together so my Zoom calls never drop (which used to be a problem with Starlink, but less so now these days).
Fuel Costs
This is my greatest expense. I have a very heavy Sprinter van that I built out myself. I get about 14 MPG diesel. It really depends what State you are in on what the costs are and how much you travel. The general consensus between all the people I've met on the road (working full time) is that they put about 35k miles on their vehicle per year.
Campgrounds
Really only pay for for these when on the East Coast since there isn't as much BLM or USFS land.
Power
I have 600 amp hours of batteries with about 800 watts of solar on my roof, 1320 watts of portable panels that I can set up when I need to (mostly when I want to run the air conditioner 24 hours a day). I also have a 3360 watt auxiliary alternator that will charge the batteries real fast. The truth is I run a ton of computer equipment and never really worry about power.
This lifestyle has been amazing. I used to feel stuck being an engineer behind my desk all day. Now when I get tired of a town I can simply move onto the next one. There's also some amazing groups out there and I've actually made loads of friends across the country doing this same lifestyle so we'll often meet up in places. For example, Trent (who arguabily started the "Van Life Gamers" movement) has a discord full of people that live this lifestyle https://discord.gg/d4xsZEVH.
I would also say having a Sprinter Van has been so much better than an RV because it's much easier to go places with the van than a huge RV. I can park at a trail head for example in a normal parking spot.