• Elli is an Ecamper, so she has an upstairs and - perhaps even more important - a hole in her inner roof to allow access to that upstairs;
• She has an excellent awning - a Fiamma F35 - so sitting outside even on hot days is feasible for me (I have old bones, and chill easily);
• I am old and mildly claustrophobic, so sleeping upstairs is out of the question ... which means the bed must be downstairs;
• I am 5'10" tall, which affects bed length and whether it is possible to sit up straight on a bed platform.

Let's begin with ....

Vertical space
Putting the bed on a platform offers the possibility of storage below the bed. Choose an under-bed storage solution that is a reasonable height (e.g. crates) and you'll be able not only to store stuff but sit on your bed platform during the day to work or to cook ....

Or will you?

The default height of the roof means that, if you make a bed platform that is the right height to sit on, you will not be able to sit up straight. If you make the platform lower so that you can sit up straight, your knees will be bent and your under-bed storage space severely compromised.

Interestingly, I don't have this problem. My bed platform is at the correct height for sitting, and yet I can sit up straight. How? You'll remember that I have the Ecamper conversion, so there is a hole in the roof. I don't sleep upstairs in my Ecamper Element, but that means that there are several useful features available to me.

My Ecamper came with two beautiful plastic panels which closed off the access space to the upstairs (sadly they got marred almost immediately). I leave these at home. You will see from the pic that if I am immediately below the access area, there is enough extra headroom for me to sit up straight.

Space upstairs
Ah, that wonderful upstairs space! It came fitted with mattress pads and covers to fill in the space above the plastic panels. All those now remain in my garage, so what I am left with is an empty space a few inches high running the entire length and width of my Element which accommodates the following:

• An ancient REI air/foam mattress pad, which no longer can be inflated but which is just fine on my downstairs bed;
• An ancient Coleman sleeping-bag;
• A more modern down-filled Marmot sleeping-bag;
• A pillow;
• A robust folding chair, which can be used both outside and inside Elli (there is just enough room to use it at the back of Elli, beside the bed);
• A curtain-rod with curtains, which I use across the two front grab-handles if I want more privacy at night ...

Space on the roof?
If you don't have an Ecamper, what about storage space actually on the roof - roof rails, or even a storage compartment mounted up there?

That obviously is a solution, though I have no personal experience with it. The great advantage to using the roof space afforded by the Ecamper conversion is that it is inside the Element and is accessible from inside the Element. For me, getting the air-bed down to sleep at night is a far different proposition from having to go outside - perhaps in the rain - to retrieve it.

Heater
This tiny Lasko ceramic fan heater is good for 750 or 1500 watts and is an almost exact fit (just push it a little) for the tray on the rear part of the center console. If you have the optional armrest for the driver's seat, it will also fit under that. It warms Elli up in no time. I've had a couple of these over the years and encountered no problems.

Microwave
This is a Wally-World special. It too is just about indestructible, but it can be permanently busted by connecting it to a cheap modified sine-wave inverter (don't ask). The design of the control panel is an object lesson to manufacturers of far more expensive devices.

Fridge
The fridge is an old Engel MT17, bought long ago enough that it cost about 2/3 of its present price. It's outdated now: it can be either a fridge or a freezer but not both at the same time, and it doesn't have pretty flashing lights or digital controls.

People are fond of saying that these fridges are noisy. They aren't, but they do vibrate, and that will set up resonances all over the place unless they're carefully placed in such a way as not to transmit those vibrations.

Shore power runs the fridge (when it detects 120 volts, it automatically switches from 12-volt power), the microwave, the fan heater, and (hopefully, someday) the air-conditioner. It also charges my little Jackery 240 portable power station (of which more later), although I do have to manually switch that between 12-volt power (when driving) and 120-volt power.

The first is a 12-volt distribution unit with several 12-volt and USB outlets. This fits exactly in the little storage compartment below the single-DIN radio and is powered from the sole 12-volt outlet above the glove box. It powers the Bluetooth module for the phone/radio audio link, and charges both the phone and the Jackery portable power station when I'm driving. There are plenty of USB outlets for front-seat passengers to use for their various devices.

The second addition is the Jackery power station itself. This is the second smallest Jackery unit, and there are plenty of competing products you can use instead.

It has two broad purposes. The first is to provide 12-volt power when Elli is parked and connected to shore power. Thus, it acts as a transformer to charge mobile devices and drive the Endless Breeze fan. Its second purpose is to provide 12-volt power when Elli is stopped but there is no shore power. It can run the fridge and/or power the fan for several hours. If you look carefully at the top of the pic, you can see the three power buttons on a little distribution unit, to which the 12-volt output of the Jackery is connected.

It's a Fiamma F35 awning, and not for the first time I am moved to remark how much more expensive an item is now than when we bought it. It has also proven to be bullet-proof. The pix show how well it works, with the addition of weights to hold it down in windier weather. The weights are from Golds Gym, and in the center of each weight is an epoxied bolt with a wingnut, which attaches to the bottom of the poles through a thoughtfully provided hinged tab.

Always in the back of my mind is what might happen to all this stuff in the event of an accident or rollover at speed ....

Reasoning
There are three main reasons for using bungee cords. The first is that it allows quick installation with ready adjustments for positioning and securing. The second is that stuff that is secured this way can move a little: attaching it rigidly can give it a rough ride.

The third reason comes from seeing YouTube videos or other information sources from people who have built out larger vehicles (like our old Ford Transit van) after much thought and careful planning, using best practices and true craftsmanship. The videos I like to watch are the ones that are titled "What We Wish We Had Done Differently," and usually appear about six months after their builds are completed.

I promised when I resurrected this web site that I would see if it was possible to have air-conditioning in Elli when she was shore-powered. This section explores that possibility.

(I did once use a window unit in Elli, many years ago. It sat on the tailgate, with the door above closed, and a piece of plastic tarp blocking the space around the unit. It worked, but it didn't work well.)

About air-conditioning in hot and humid areas
I've written about this many times, and yet I still get comments from people who (I assume, anyway) live north of the Mason-Dixon line, stating there is no such thing as having too large an air-conditioner. If you know that this statement is nonsense, you get an A+ and may skip the next section.

A delicate balance
Air-conditioners do two distinct things. They cool the air, and they dehumidify it.

If an air-conditioner is too small, it can't cool the air sufficiently, so it will run constantly. Good for reducing the humidity; not so good for attaining a comfortable temperature, not to mention the problem of wear and tear on the unit.

If an air-conditioner is too large, it can reach your desired temperature too quickly, while the humidity is still high. Having reached the temperature you chose, it switches off. The only way to reduce the humidity further is to turn the thermostat down as low as possible. As the temperature plummets, you are left perspiring while hunkered down in your sleeping-bag shivering - a strangely unpleasant feeling.

So an air-conditioner must, like Baby Bear's bed in the Goldilocks story, be neither too big nor too small but just right: the perfect balance of cooling and dehumidifying for a given area.

Got it? Good. Now let's rejoin the southerners and continue ....

Floor area of the Element
I'd estimate the floor area of the Element at about 50 square feet. Whether you opt for a window unit or (like me) a portable air-conditioner, the smallest size you can get is about 5,000 BTU, and that is probably too large for 50 square feet.

But the only way to know for sure is to rig up a proof-of-concept system and find out. So my new experiment uses a portable unit (left over from the Ford Transit van days).

Lower-end portable a/c units come with a single hose and a piece of plastic - a spacer - that the hose clips onto. That spacer is placed at the bottom of your home's sash window - as shown here, in a pic of our older unit.

Here is what I have done and discovered so far.

Problems to solve
We need to take into account that ...

• A small portable a/c unit needs to vent outside, as seen in the pic above;
• There has to be a pathway for the flexible vent hose, which is about 5" in diameter;
• The unit will take up floor space (but only about a square foot);
• It condenses water, which needs to be drained somehow;
• It weighs quite a lot, so it needs to be secured or restrained in some way when on the move.

I considered the rear side windows, but there is a problem with them. If you unscrew the latching mechanism, there is nothing (as far as I can tell) to stop the glass falling out. If you don't remove the latch, you can't mount a "mask" for the vent unless you also make a hole to accommodate that latch. So we are left with the front windows.

OK, so we can wind down the front window (on the driver's side, in my case) and hang the end of the vent hose out of it. But how do we make this arrangement waterproof and reasonably air-tight?

On the Element, as long as you are a gifted woodworker, this will present no problem at all. For me, it presented an insuperable problem ... because the wooden spacer must be carefully and precisely shaped, more or less like a boomerang. Why? On the Element the top of the front window is not straight - it is cut away at the front. So your wooden spacer must curve down at the front to match the curve in the glass and the curve in the window opening. There is no hope whatever of the feckless Bleendreeble pulling that off.

Using corrugated plastic sheet
My current solution (remember that none of this has been field-tested at the moment) is corrugated plastic sheet. On the upside, it is easily available (from Lowes, in this case); it is relatively cheap; it is fairly easy to cut with scissors (though I found a jigsaw to be cleaner and more accurate); and it compresses a little (we'll see in a moment why this matters). On the downside, it involves blocking out the entire window, not just part of it, and the sheet can bend too easily or even fold - in other words, it's not very sturdy.

Blocking off the whole window is some sort of compensation for that lack of sturdiness, as is placing the vent port close to the edge of the window. Our solution must fit in the top and side channels and in the bottom seal, and so we must use two pieces, not one (think about it for a moment). The two pieces overlap slightly, and you can squeeze the edges of the two pieces so that the overlap section will fit the top and bottom. Here, a few pictures will be worth a thousand words ....

There needs to be some way of stopping wind-driven rain from entering sideways between the two plastic sheets. I'll probably use some sort of weather-stripping screwed to the trailing edge of the sheet at the front.

Locating the a/c unit in the Element
After you have gazed at this pic for a while you'll be able to tell what it is. It's the actual portable a/c unit (R2D2) riding between the backs of the two front seats. Since I have the driver's seat armrest, R2D2 is jammed up against that and can't move forward. Because of the (completely accidental) width I chose for the lower part of the bed, R2D2 is also prevented from rolling backwards. Sadly, the driver's armrest blocks the hose outlet on the back of R2D2, so at night when the system is set up he has to be wiggled backwards a little to make room for the hose.

However, you may be wondering why R2D2 is wearing what looks like the kind of mask favored by people who rob banks. The reason is quite simple. The "mask" is an old t-shirt stretched over the unit because - without it - R2D2's plastic sides squeak again the fabric of the front seats. Needless to say, when R2D2 is at work he removes his t-shirt first.

There remains only one concern. These portable units collect condensed moisture which has to be removed (daily, in places like Texas). R2D2 (a Hisense model) proudly carries a label saying that he blows all excess moisture out of the hose. Do not be fooled: This has never worked for me on either of the units we've had. There is a drain at the bottom of the unit. A short piece of hose running to a small plastic drink bottle will handle his incontinence. Simply empty the bottle each morning.

Conclusion (based on real life)
Well, I tried it out for real. The good news is that the concept appears to work. The bad news is that the whole business is just too fiddly. When we want air-conditioning, we want it with the push of a button. We don't want to be carrying around a heavy "portable" unit that occupies a whole lot of room even when it's not doing anything useful, and that has to be all connected up when we do want to use it.

So for right now, having a/c when stopped at a campground is off the agenda. The only remaining option might be the Zero Breeze 2, but - good heavens! - have you seen the price?

There is no doubt in my mind that - for me - the a/c solution I tried out is not practical, even if it does work. In fact, within a few minutes of returning home after its shakedown trial, I replaced the unit with the item you see in the pic. It might not be much use for cooling my Element, but it has vastly increased my storage space ....