Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

Since Taylor and I decided to travel NZ in the winter, we have had the luxury of battling cold weather for the past few months. While in the North Island, we really had it pretty easy. We only saw a couple nights below 40F. Unfortunately, winter in the South Island is a bit tougher. We got our first real taste of cold at Nelson Lakes, and our first hard frost near Milford Sound.

Taylor and I aren’t wimps, we’ve camped plenty in Colorado, we’ve slept in the 4Runner in winter many times, and we both agree winter here is nothing compared to that, but sleeping in a van with no heat source when it gets down to below freezing just isn’t fun. We have good blankets and an awesome hot water bottle, and even a heated blanket that tries to help, so we were never that cold. Nevertheless, we wanted to look for a way to keep the van warmer. As you could imagine, there aren’t many low cost options for this, the most obvious would be a diesel heater, but we didn’t want to spend the ~$500 to buy one of these, plus the van probably doesn’t have the battery to run it for very long.

Eventually, after longer than I want to admit, we read somewhere that you can tape bubble wrap to your windows and it’ll help keep heat in. After thinking about it, it made perfect sense. The little van has 0 insulation, it’s basically a tin can, so any bit we can add will help. We read that it could keep the van 5-10 degrees warmer…this was enough to convince us to try it.

I know what you’re thinking, why don’t we insulate the entire van?? Well, because that would involve tearing it half apart and probably breaking half the things we tore out. Then we would have to replace them, so we opted to do just the windows because they’re easy and we’re lazy and on a budget.
We went to Mitre10 to pick up the material, which ended up costing around $30, so not too bad. (Mitre10 is one of my favorite stores over here, its basically a Home Depot but it has a few more home good things, like kitchenware and whatnot. Most of them also have a Cafe with a full breakfast menu and they are always busy, we will have to try it one of these days.)

The roll of bubble wrap rolled around in the van for a couple days until we got a nice afternoon to get the job done. We focused on the rear hatch window, the rear side windows, and a partial section of the middle windows. We made sure we could still open our slider windows. We ended up having too much bubble wrap, so we did two layers, why not right? All in all it took us about 30 minutes to get done.
That next night, the temps dropped to like 25F, so it was going to be a good test if this whacky idea would work. Taylor and I both agree it made a noticeable difference. The bubble wrap has been in place for about 6 weeks now and the van definitely stays warmer longer. By morning, the van is usually brutal cold still, but the cold takes longer to set in.

The bubble wrap is no substitute for a heater, but for the money we were both pretty happy with it. The downside of the bubble wrap is it looks stupid and tacky, but luckily we have tinted windows so you can’t see from the outside. Another downside it is traps moisture and makes it a bit tougher to dry the van out. While the bubble wrap has been very good to us, we are both counting down the days until it is warm enough for us to rip it all out.