I’m still alive. (tl;dr – Get a Good CO Alarm)
A few days ago, I broke one of the cardinal rules of vanlife cooking.
It was a rainy morning, I didn’t really sleep great that night, and I really wanted to get my coffee and breakfast oatmeal started. So I started up my portable butane camp stove – totally forgetting to open the front windows. Midway through the water boiling I hear an insistent beep that I’ve never heard before! Ok, it’s not the van (it was off), not my ecoflow battery, not my fridge, not my inverter (also off).
It was my little aircraft-quality CO Alarm! Beeping at 30 PPM. I opened the windows, popped the slider, and turned on the van’s fresh air blower. It took a minute or two for the CO level to get back to 0.
A ‘standard’ home style CO detector will first alert at 70 (or more) PPM. An Aircraft CO alarm will flash a light at 9PPM and sound alarm at 25 PPM. It is so very worth it in the enclose space of the van.
I’ll link the one I have, but there are others: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076S6KBP2
p.s. A Carbon Monoxide scare is better than coffee to get the eyes open!
Shabazan 