Dave

A cheap white noise source helped me more than anything else. A small fan on low, or an app, and it masks the footsteps and door slams that are actually waking you. Bonus in a van because moving air is good for condensation anyway.

Short cycling with no visible water almost always means a tiny air or water leak on the pressure side, and the two places it hides are the pump head itself and the joints you can't see.

Diagnostic that takes five minutes: turn the pump on, let it pressurise, then turn the pump off at the switch and open nothing. Come back in ten minutes and turn a tap. If water comes out under pressure, the system held and the problem is likely the pump's internal check valve. If nothing comes out, pressure bled off somewhere and you have a real leak.

Also: fit an accumulator tank. About 30-40 for a small one, plumbed on the pressure side, and it stores enough water under pressure that the pump stops chattering on and off. It smooths the flow at the tap too. On most van builds it's the difference between a pump that's a background annoyance and one you don't think about.

True, though I'd exhaust the leak checks first. Fiddling with that screw without understanding the system is a good way to end up with a pump that never shuts off.

Check the drainage while you're in there. A lot of plastic bins come with drilled holes that block with fine castings after a few months, and then the bottom third turns into a swamp without you noticing. Tilt the bin and see if liquid moves.

Both, but mostly the ribs. Polyiso between the ribs leaves the ribs themselves as bare steel connecting inside to outside — that's a thermal bridge, and every one of them is now the coldest surface in the van, so all your moisture condenses there. This is the single most common van insulation mistake and it's exactly what your symptom describes.

Proper fix is a continuous layer over the ribs: even 10mm of foam board or closed cell foam across the whole ceiling before the ply breaks the bridge. Retrofit is annoying but doable if you can drop the ceiling.

Also, two adults breathing overnight puts out somewhere around a litre of water. Even a perfect envelope needs that moisture to go somewhere, so a roof vent cracked open or a window on the vent setting isn't optional in winter, it's the other half of the system.

"About like a damp sponge" is doing a lot of work. Actually squeeze a fistful from the middle, not the top. Piles dry out from the inside during the hot phase, sometimes dramatically, and a pile at 35% moisture looks fine and does nothing. If no water comes out when you squeeze hard, water it while turning rather than after.

The tap adapter is worth the few dollars. Household water pressure does more in thirty seconds than the syringe does in five minutes.

This is worth checking before anything else, honestly. I've seen two builds where the starter circuit was on the wrong side of the shunt and the numbers made no sense until it was moved.

The numbers say you have a parasitic draw, not a fridge problem. A 45W compressor fridge in winter should cycle maybe 20-30% of the time, so call it 15-20Ah over fourteen hours. A small fan on low is 5-10Ah. You should be waking up around 75-80%, not 20.

How to find it: turn absolutely everything off at the switches, then look at the shunt's current reading. Anything above about 0.3A with everything "off" is your culprit. Then pull fuses one at a time and watch the number drop.

Usual suspects, in the order I find them:

• an inverter left in standby, which can idle at 1-2A doing nothing at all. Over fourteen hours that alone is 14-28Ah
• the diesel heater's control board and glow plug circuit
• a stereo or amplifier with a permanent live
• LED strips with a dimmer module that never truly switches off

Also check the battery is actually warm enough. Lithium below freezing will show odd behaviour, and if your bank sits in an uninsulated space and your BMS is cutting things, capacity readings get strange.

The puddle underneath is leachate and it's strong stuff. Don't pour it on plants neat — dilute it maybe 1:10 with water or just tip it back into the tumbler once you've added browns. On a lawn undiluted it will burn patches.

Diesel, for winter full timing, fairly decisively.

The deciding factor is water. A vented diesel heater draws combustion air from outside and exhausts outside, so the only thing entering your living space is dry warm air. Any unvented propane heater dumps roughly a litre of water vapour into the van for every litre of fuel burned, and at minus 10 with condensation already a fight, that's a losing battle. A vented propane furnace avoids this but then you've lost the simplicity argument.

Running costs at minus 10, roughly: a 2kW diesel unit on low burns about 0.1-0.2 litres an hour, so call it 2-4 litres a night, and it draws 1-2A once it's running past the glow plug stage. That's very manageable on 400Ah.

Things people underestimate: fuel gels in extreme cold so use winter diesel, mount the exhaust so it can't blow back under the van, and budget for one servicing session a year to clean carbon out of the burner if you run it on low a lot.

Whichever you pick, the paved garden is the bigger constraint. Compost wants contact with soil so worms and fungi can come up into it. If everything is paved, either put the bin in a raised bed of soil, or accept you're doing a closed system where you supply all the organisms yourself.

Agreed, with one addition — line the bottom and sides with hardware cloth if you build the pallet bin. Costs about 20 and removes the whole worry.

Practical cold climate advice: build big and build in autumn. A pile under about a cubic metre freezes right through and stays frozen. Insulate the outside with bagged leaves or straw bales and a decent core will keep working down to well below freezing air temperatures, sometimes into January.