$150k vs. $40k SPRINTER VAN (full tour)

We have spent the last six months traveling around the US Living full time out of our converted Sprinter van that we bought for a little over $40,000. This tiny home on wheels has taken us on some epic adventures, but it's also come with its own set of challenges, like electrical issues. I did not think that was going to happen. A propane leak.

A broken fridge. The list goes on. Today we are just outside of Las Vegas and we have rented this tonight, top of the line Winnebago Revel that, according to the Internet, retails for over $150,000. This beautiful van with some super cool features is going to be our home for the next few days. And we're going to be comparing the experience to see just how much more comfort you get for an extra $100,000.

Thank you, sir.

We rented this van from a company called Blacksford, and yesterday they delivered it to our hotel, which was pretty sweet, and we drove it west to the middle of the.

At this point, we've got some driving in, cooked a meal, and spent our first night in the Revel. So now that we've been living out of this van for the last 24 hours, we're going to give you the full tour and show you how this stacks up against the Sprinter van we own.

We should start by pointing out one of the biggest differences between this van and our van, and that's that the Revel is the shorter of the two Sprinter vans. Our van sits on a 170 inch wheelbase and the Revel sits on a 144.

So.

So, with that said, this van actually feels just as big inside, and that's thanks to these flares. This little area on the outside which sticks out a few inches, that gives you just enough room to lay the bed horizontal, which opens up a ton of space on the inside.

But before we show you around the.

Inside of the van, let me finish showing you around the outside of this van. On our van, we have a couple solar panels on the roof, a little plug on the outside, and that's pretty much it. The outside of this van is a lot more exciting. I'll start with one of my favorite features. I'll start by unlocking the door. When you open up these back doors, there's actually an outdoor shower. All you do is you grab this blue hose and then you come right over here, insert the hose into this little metal thing.

Whoops. Like I was saying, you insert this hose into the little metal thing, and then you have the option for a hot and cold shower. There's nowhere really to hang the faucet. So it'll be one of those things where you have to like get yourself wet, soap up, and then rinse yourself off. But either way, it's just super convenient to have the option for an outdoor shower. Or if you were like at the beach and you just wanted to.

Spray your feet off, it'd be nice to have. Also, this van has something that I always wanted on our van, which is a ladder that takes you up to the roof. Unfortunately, there's not a roof deck up here like I've always wanted, so you could like hang out on top of your van. But there is an air conditioner, two solar panels, and a max air fan. It's still just nice to have the option to be able to get on top of your van and clean the solar panels or take a cool picture.

Over here on this side of the van, we have a winterization valve, which may not seem like a big deal, but we're out here without our van because we had a pipe freeze and burst. So that's pretty handy to have. We also have a freshwater drain, a place where we can fill up our water and another freshwater drain. But back here behind the screen, with the touch of a button, I can roll out our motorized awning.

This is so convenient. We wanted an awning on our van because it really opens up your outdoo living space. But I also knew that I would rarely take the time to set it up. But with this being as convenient as it is, I think it's something we'd use every single day. And then once you have your awning out, you just come inside, grab this little pole, insert this little metal piece into the groove, flip up this clip, and you have.

An outdoor table. I just love the idea of being able to eat outside. This was not an option in our band. Before we go to the other side, let me show you one more thing. There is a built in mosquito net that's super easy to use. You just unclip it, roll it down, grab the zippers, and now you can leave the door open and no bugs will get in. We actually bought one of these that magnetically clips onto the inside of the door. But it's such a pain to put up that we used it once. I think that's kind of one of the big differences with this van and ours is just because of how convenient stuff is. I think you would actually use it a lot more. Over on this side of the van, we have a few features that can only be fully appreciated if you live in a van. Like the convenience of being able to fill up your water on the outside of the van or a conveniently located gray water tank drain. Both of these things working together if you're at a campground with full hookups pretty much feels like you're living in a house. Your van's pulling in water as it needs it and it's discarding it when your tanks start to get full. The way we live now, we constantly have to be aware of how much water we have in our freshwater tank and how quickly our gray water tank is filling up. So this would be pretty incredible. And then in this cabinet right here, we have outside access to our cassette toilet tank. So I'm currently holding all of our waste in my hands. But I'm actually excited about it because in our van, in order to empty our tanks, you had to get the pee tank and then carry it through the van, which is a little dangerous. We have big time messed up. Oh, I need your help. Okay, put the camera down. I need your help here. It just slides out. You can take this, empty it where you need to, it slides back in and you never have to see your waste. Not to mention, if we want to empty our solids, we have to completely remove the toilet from our van. And since since that's usually my job, this is one of my favorite features on this van. Before we go inside, the one other thing I should mention is that this van is also four wheel drive.

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All right, now I'm going to show you around the inside of the van, starting with the cab. It's all pretty similar to our van, but everything is just a lot fancier. I love this big screen and most importantly, these four big, sturdy cup holders. This might not seem like that big of a deal, but when you've driven across the country, little details like this make a big difference. We've lost so many drinks due to our little flimsy cup holder right here, so this makes me really happy. But the one thing that the cab has that ours doesn't is this button which opens the back sliding door.

Both of the front seats swivel around to the back, which really opens up this area. Plus there's a table that folds down that's super easy to set up. Just gotta move the seat back, pull it up till it locks in, and then this is magnetic. So you can have a small or big table. I think this is my favorite part of the Rebel compared to ours, because in order for us to have a table to eat or work at, we have to completely convert the bed, which means more than half the time we're eating and working in the bed because we're too lazy to convert it. So this just folds back down super quick and the windows on the Rebel open up. Ours just crack a little bit and there's a permanent screen there. So here you have the option to be screenless or.

Boom screen. But the best part is that the window covers are built in as well. Our window covers take up so much storage space and I feel like they take forever to put up and this takes two seconds. So once again, it's the little details. And up here we have a storage closet. They have a jet boil pots and pans. Not sure what's in here. What I do know is if we were living in here full time, this would be stuffed because it seems like there's not as much storage in the rubble. And back here, behind this bench, we have the control panel, which is just a little bit more organized than our control cabinet. You pretty much control everything in the van with this wall. This turns the heater on and off. This is the hot water heater, solar charger, light switches. This turns the inverter on and off. Pretty sure this turns on the hot water heater in the shower. But what I appreciate the most is this button right here. By clicking this, you can see exactly how much liquid you have in your fresh water and your gray water tank. In order for us to do that, we literally have to take the bed apart and lift the bench and look at our water tank to see how much is left. Same with the gray water. N. It has to crawl under the van to see how much space we have left.

Empty it out with your face. Not so close.

Now, before we move back any further into the van, There are a couple things that I think are really cool but aren't really relevant to us since it's just the two of us. But I want to show you anyway. So this area actually converts into a second bed. You just lift this cabinet extension, which I love, Pull on this lever, and it converts into this little bench. Then you take the back rest, lay it on top, and it becomes a small, wobbly second bed. Nate's brother came and stayed with us for two weeks last year, and he had to sleep on the floor since we don't have this. So even though it's not perfect, it's definitely better than the floor. And legally, we can only have two passengers in our van, like the driver and the passenger seat, because we don't have any more seat belts back here. But there are two seat belts on this seat. So you can have a couple friends join you on your adventures, and then they'd fight over the bed. Moving on into the kitchen. The sink is somewhere that I think that our van has the rebel beat. Ours looks a lot nicer, and it's a lot deeper. Plus, in order to drain the water in the sink, you, have to press this button, which is slightly inconvenient, But I do like how the faucet collapses. You can close this if you're not using it and have way more counter space that plus this counter extension. Now the induction stove. This is something I've always wanted in our van instead of propane, because we all know our relationship with propane isn't the best. Why is this happening? However, Nate tried to use it to heat up water this morning, and we didn't have enough power, so we had to make the coffee outside.

So now I'm reconsidering if this is the best option for us, because we camp off the grid a lot, and this would become a problem if we stayed at campgrounds more often and we could plug in for power. I would 100% go with this option. So above the stove, we have this little shelf with our dish cleaning supplies. We have a cabinet up here that holds the water, kettle, and plates and cups and bowls. Once again, I feel like this is a little small compared to ours, but we have this giant vertical pantry with so much space. I'd want to add a few more shelves here, but this is great. Down here we have a refrigerator and little freezer. I think it might be a tad bit bigger than ours, but I do like how it has this little lock on it so it doesn't fly open. And then we have these teeny tiny drawers. These are much smaller than ours, but has all of the kitchen supplies in there. I do like how they lock with these little buttons though. And over here is the bathroom. So our bathroom has just a curtain which is not super private. So I like that. This is actually a locking door, even though it is a little harder to open. Now this is a shower with a toilet inside just like ours. We haven't used it yet, but it seems pretty normal. Just a shower head that hooks up here. Then there's a little cubby where you can put your soaps and stuff. And when you take a shower, you can close the toilet paper up so it doesn't.

Now we hardly ever use the shower in our van. It really just turned into a storage closet. And what's great about this one is it's built to be a storage closet if you wanted to use it for that. So if you stay in a lot of campgrounds and use the public bathrooms, you could put up to three of these shelves in here and store so much stuff. But we took the shelves out because we are using this toilet. Which, funny story, when we first got here and I was using it, I was like, I don't get it. Like, why is this toilet not, like, why is it facing this way where I can't close the door? And then this morning when my coffee kicked in, I thought maybe.

You can rotate it and then go to the bathroom in privacy. So this toilet is different than ours. We have a composting toilet which separates your liquids and your solids. And I've liked it because it doesn't stink, but it does add a little bit more work on our end. This one is very similar to just a normal toilet. So the way it works is you do your business and then to flush, you just pull this little lever. Everything falls down into the tank. Run a little water to make sure it cleans everything out. Close the lever so you can't ever smell anything. And that's it. And then the magical tank cleaning gods come down and it all disappears. That's neat. Okay.

Woo.

I think I left that open. Too long. It did kind of stink. Now, last but not least, let me show you my favorite part of the van, which is the bedroom.

The entire back of the van is shared between the bedroom and what we are calling the garage. There is so much space back here. Since we're only here for a couple nights, we're just living out of our suitcases right now. But if we were living in here full time, I would definitely want, like, a permanent dresser with drawers, because right now, I don't know where all of our clothes would go up front. But if you were just using this van as, like, a weekend adventure mobile, you could fit so many toys back here, like bikes, skis, fishing poles, all the things that we don't have room for in our van. But it's a little deceiving. Nothing you store back here can come above this line, because.

How great is this? Our bed is already made with just a push of a button. Seriously, the biggest headache in our van is making the bed. Like, there have been so many nights where I've considered just sleeping on the couch because I didn't want to make it that bad. So this is no doubt the coolest feature of this van.

Now, we were super curious to see how we fit in this bed, since ours is vertical. And just for context, I'm five' five, and if I put my head at the very top of my pillow, look how much room I have left.

I'm 5:10. And if I point my toes until they're touching the wall, I have about 2 inches above my head. So you could probably sleep comfortably in this bed as long as you're less than 6ft tall.

Plus, if you need some privacy, just unclip this.

So easy. Over here we have some USB ports, nightlights, a teeny tiny window, and air conditioning. We do not have AC in our van and spent majority of the summer in the mountains last year, so it wasn't that big of a deal. But there were definitely some nights where it would have been so nice to have this. Not that bad.

Not that bad.

No, not when you spread out like.

This for the maximum cooling effect. However, the AC doesn't run off of solar, so it would really only be useful if you were staying in a campground and you could plug in.

And that about wraps up the tour. That said, everything you get for a van that costs over $150,000. Now, if you line our van up next to this one and you made us choose which one we wanted to live out of, obviously we would choose the professionally built one that Costs three times as much. But with that said, there are some things that we love about our van more than this one. First of all, if you take away all the functionality of both vans, I think the inside of ours looks way nicer. I love the clean, white, modern esthetic that we have versus the inside of a van that you can tell was built by a company that also builds RVs. It's totally a personal preference. This one just feels like a camper and ours feels homier and we shoot a lot of content in it. We just like it.

All good. All good. Another thing is our fresh water tank is twice the size of the Rebels, which means that we can spend twice as long off the grid before we have to fill it back up. Now, don't get me wrong, I prefer the motorized functionality of this, this drop down bed and the revel to ours, but our bed is three inches short of a king size bed. I don't know if that's much of a perk, but it's just nice to have a little more room. A huge difference between ours and this van is that if you want to have guests over, this van really isn't set up for it. At best, you could fit two people in this bench seat that I'm sitting on and then one person right here. So you could have three people around the dinner table, but it would be really cramped where ours you can comfortably fit four. This is a little one, but this is something we strategically thought through as we were having our heater installed. And that's that we can turn the heater on and off from the bed, which is super nice because these van heaters, you don't like, set them to 72 degrees, and that's where it holds it. They're either on kicking full blast or off. And so there's times when you either wake up in the middle of the night freezing, or you wake up in the middle of the night sweating. And it's so nice just to be able to reach over and click a button. And last but not least is the storage area that we have for electronics in our van. Not only is it a safe that keeps everything from being stolen if somebody were to break into the van, but there's also also a charger built in so we can charge all of our electronics in one place. This van, on the other hand, there are these outlets in the kitchen. So last night when we were charging everything, we just had our drone and cameras, everything was just laying right here on the countertop. We aren't seriously considering upgrading to a revel. We just thought it'd be fun to try this out for a couple days. All in all, we are very happy with our van, especially when it's working thing.