Blog – Rick Hurst Full-Stack Developer in Bristol, UK

Just Launched: A Free Advanced WordPress REST API Course for Developers Who Want to Build Big Things

Posted on May 9, 2025May 9, 2025 by Rick Hurst

If you’re a developer working with WordPress and you’ve ever thought, “admin-ajax is clunky, and I need more control”, or “why would I use thw WordPress REST API when GraphQL exists”, then you’ll want to check this out. I’ve just wrapped up a full-length, fully free course called Mastering the WordPress REST API, built specifically for developers who want to get serious about API-driven architecture in WordPress.

This isn’t a beginner’s walkthrough of GET requests or basic endpoints. It’s aimed at developers with a solid grasp of WordPress and PHP, who want to dive into enterprise-level development using the REST API — everything from authentication and security, to performance optimisation, custom endpoint creation, and decoupled JavaScript frontends.

Why This Course Exists

Let’s be honest — most of the WordPress REST API tutorials out there barely scratch the surface. They stop right when things start getting interesting.

The course is built from the ground up with a developer-first mindset. You’ll learn how to create custom API routes, authenticate and authorise users using secure strategies, integrate with third-party APIs, and build scalable, decoupled architectures with React or Vue. There’s even a full section on debugging and testing, which is where most online resources tend to fizzle out.

What’s Inside

The course covers the full spectrum of the WordPress REST API and how it fits into real-world, modern development workflows. It includes detailed modules on:

REST API Foundations – Understanding REST vs traditional methods, schema discovery, extending the API, and exploring core endpoints.
Authentication Strategies – Implementing and comparing methods like cookies and nonces, application passwords, JWT, and OAuth 2.0.
Security Best Practices – Permission callbacks, input sanitisation, output validation, rate limiting, monitoring, and more.
Enterprise Performance & Integration – Caching strategies, transient and object caching, API versioning, and handling deprecated endpoints.
JavaScript & Decoupled Architectures – How the REST API supports decoupled frontends, with hands-on labs using React and JWT-based auth flows.
Advanced Customisation – Creating nested data structures, working with CPTs and taxonomies, adding custom fields and filters.
Testing, Debugging & Scaling – Writing unit and integration tests, mocking responses, performance testing, and architecture for high-traffic environments.

Each section includes practical labs and real-world examples — including a couple of case studies drawn from actual enterprise projects I’ve worked on.

Who It’s For

If you’re already working in WordPress and are comfortable building custom plugins or themes, this course will help you level up. It’s especially useful for devs working on headless WordPress applications, integrating WordPress with other platforms, or delivering high-traffic, API-driven sites that need to scale sensibly.

And Yes – It’s Completely Free

No hidden paywalls. No “free sample, full course behind a paywall” rubbish. This is a proper, full-fat developer course. Think of it as a contribution to the WordPress community — the kind of thing I wish existed when I first started getting into REST API work in WordPress.

Take the Course

The full course is available now: https://learn.wpvip.com/course/mastering-the-wordpress-rest-api/
This is part of a series of free Advanced WordPress Developer courses on VIP Learn.

I’ll be updating it as the ecosystem evolves, especially as WordPress core and major frameworks change. Feedback is welcome — I’m always up for a chat about performance bottlenecks or obscure JWT bugs.

From Lead Acid to Lithium: 15 Years of Battery Tech on the Road

Posted on April 30, 2025May 9, 2025 by Rick Hurst

Fifteen years ago, I sat under an awning at a Devon campsite, juggling cables, adapters, a 20Ah Halfords-branded lead acid power pack, and an ageing MacBook that would wheeze its way through two hours of work – on a good day. Back then, trying to work remotely from a campsite felt more like a mad experiment than a lifestyle. Every percentage of battery charge was a precious resource. Every cloudy day a threat to productivity. Yet, somehow, I made it work.

Fast forward to 2025, and it’s genuinely hard to believe how far portable power tech has come. These days, I’m running a MacBook Air with the M3 chip, which casually sips power through a full day of development, writing, and Zoom calls. The machine itself has a battery life I would have barely dared to dream of in 2010. But what’s really game-changing is how easy it is now to keep everything else powered alongside it.

Power That Keeps Up With the Lifestyle

My current mobile setup includes a Bluetti EB55 power station paired with a 200W AllPowers solar panel. On a sunny day (and even on a not-so-sunny one), this combo allows my wife and I to:

Charge two MacBook Airs.
Keep two smartphones topped up.
Boil water for several cups of coffee throughout the morning using my compact travel kettle.
Run a 12 volt compressor fridge (most of the time).

The travel kettle pulls about 650 watts and takes roughly five minutes to boil. While that’s a decent draw, it’s well within the EB55’s capability. And thanks to the solar panel – providing between 0 and 120+ watts depending on cloud cover – I can keep the energy flowing steadily throughout the day.

And all of this, more or less indefinitely. No more rationing screen time or hoarding battery percentages. No more panicked trips to the campsite loo block to find a working plug socket.

That said, I have found the limits of the EB55. When I’m using it to power the campervan fridge alongside everything else, it can get depleted within 24 hours on a cloudy day. I knew that would be the case going in, and in a way it’s helpful – it’s given me a clearer picture of what I’ll need to spec out a more capable, permanent solution for the VW T6 campervan setup.

Why the EB55?

One important advantage of incorporating a portable powerbank like the EB55 into my campervan setup is the flexibility to hunt out a sunny patch away from the van to get the best possible solar input. I do have some long leads which allow me to locate the solar panels away from the van, but using them reduces charging efficiency, so having a portable powerbank that can be easily relocated is a huge plus.

The Bluetti EB55 hit a sweet spot for me, mainly because of its price point. I wanted something portable and capable, but without dropping a grand or more on a bigger system. For the cost, the EB55 packs in an impressive set of features: multiple DC outputs, a 700W inverter (with a 1400W surge), and a compact form factor that fits easily in my van or under a table when I’m set up outside.

It’s also pulled double duty as part of my live music gear, powering both a guitar amp and a bass amp for mobile gigs with my surf-rock band, Los Savages. Not something I had originally planned for, but a very welcome bonus!

That said, if I were building a van power system entirely from scratch and didn’t want to wire in a full DIY lithium setup, one of the larger Bluetti models (like the AC200P or AC180) could easily be the central power hub for a campervan. These units can:

Power a 12V fridge.
Run interior lighting.
Keep a water pump going.
Provide USB and 12V outputs for devices.
And even power appliances like air fryers, induction hobs, or a hair dryer via the built-in pure sine wave inverter.

For a lot of people, these newer generation power stations are becoming viable alternatives to traditional campervan leisure battery systems, especially when paired with solar or shore power.

USB-C: The Quiet Revolution

One of the most underrated advances in recent years has been the standardisation around USB-C charging. Where I once needed a mishmash of proprietary cables, inefficient DC-DC converters, and power inverters to keep everything topped up, now I can charge almost all my key devices – laptops, phones, small powerbanks, even some bike lights. It’s streamlined my power setup massively and eliminated a lot of energy waste from voltage conversion. This might seem like a small change, but in practice, it’s made remote working and living on the road much more seamless.

Looking Back: A Timeline of My Mobile Power Evolution

Here’s a rough timeline of the gear that’s powered my digital nomad experiments over the years:

2010 – Camping with a 20Ah lead-acid jump starter and a power inverter. Preparation & charging
2010 – One week running on battery and solar power. A week on battery and solar power and Day 2
2010 – Reflections after 6 weeks on the road. Lessons learned
2013 – T25 mobile office experiments. T25 mobile office
2013 – Early solar dreaming with the Solar Gorilla. Solar Gorilla, Nexus 4 and solar daydreams
2018 – Got back into van life with a VW T4 that included a large lead-acid leisure battery, charged via a simple split-charge relay or 100W portable solar panel. We have a van again
2018 – Running a home office using solar power. Part 1
2021-2025 – Bluetti, EcoFlow and Jackery power stations become mainstream in these kind of set-ups.
2025-2026 – Planning and building out a full VW T6 campervan lithium battery and solar setup

What’s Next?

Although I’m a weekend warrior who works mostly from my garden shed, I’m building this system with the future in mind. I want to be ready for longer-term vanlife digital nomad adventures when the opportunity arises.

With the VW T6 campervan conversion underway, I’m pushing into more permanent off-grid territory. Here’s a teaser of what I’m planning:

A LiFePO4 battery permanently installed under the driver’s seat – chosen for both size and price-point.
A DC-DC charger compatible with the van’s smart alternator, making alternator charging the primary source of power (especially important in UK winters).
Wired to drive the lights, fridge, water pump (for the tap, not the one under the bonnet!), and multiple USB-C charging points.

I’m not planning to add a mains inverter to this setup- at least for now. For 240V needs I’ll continue to use the Bluetti (and may upgrade to a larger model to handle higher loads needed for e.g. an air fryer or induction hob).

I may also add a solar charge controller and roof-mounted solar later, but given the limited winter sun in the UK, alternator charging will remain the most viable option for year-round reliability.

I’ll be documenting that process in detail soon, so stay tuned. that process in detail soon, so stay tuned.

Building Enterprise WordPress Courses: A Year in the Making

Posted on April 3, 2025May 9, 2025 by Rick Hurst

Following four years of helping WordPress VIP customers scaling their Enterprise WordPress sites and applications, I made a move to the WordPress VIP Learning and Credentialling team. Over the past year I’ve been on an incredible journey developing a series of Enterprise WordPress Courses, and I’m thrilled to share the results with you all. It’s been a rollercoaster of coding, debugging, and, yes, countless cups of coffee, but seeing these courses come to life has made it all worthwhile.

The idea sparked from a simple realization: while WordPress powers a significant portion of the web, there’s a gap when it comes to enterprise-level training. Many developers are familiar with WordPress basics, but scaling that knowledge to meet the demands of large organizations requires a different skill set. That’s where VIP Learn comes into play—a free, enterprise-focused WordPress developer training program designed to bridge this gap, based on the skills and experience of the amazing developers at WordPress VIP and Automattic.

Diving into the course creation, I wanted to tackle the challenges that enterprise developers face head-on. The first course, Advanced WordPress Debugging, is all about equipping developers with the tools and mindset to troubleshoot complex issues. From mastering tools like Query Monitor and Xdebug to developing a systematic debugging approach, this course aims to turn those hair-pulling bugs into manageable puzzles.

Security is another beast in the enterprise world. With the Enterprise WordPress Security course, the focus is on identifying and mitigating common vulnerabilities. We delve into the OWASP Top 10, explore secure coding practices, and emphasize the importance of regular security audits. After all, a secure WordPress site isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity.

Performance can make or break a user’s experience, especially at scale. The Enterprise WordPress Performance course is designed to help developers build high-performing, scalable applications. We cover everything from efficient database management to caching strategies, ensuring that your site remains snappy even under heavy load.

Understanding the architecture you’re working with is crucial. That’s why the WordPress VIP Architecture and Tooling course provides an in-depth look at the WordPress VIP platform. We explore its architecture, workflows, and the tools available to developers, aiming to streamline development processes and enhance site performance.

And we’re not done yet. There are two more courses on the horizon that I’m really excited about. The first is “Mastering the WordPress REST API,” which will take a deep dive into how to build robust, scalable APIs on top of WordPress—perfect for developers building headless applications or integrating with other services. The second is “Enterprise Block Editor,” which focuses on Gutenberg block development tailored for enterprise use cases, with custom blocks, advanced workflows, and best practices for large teams.

This suite of courses forms part of the learning material for an Enterprise WordPress Credential that we have in development Stay tuned!

Reflecting on this journey, it’s been incredibly rewarding to contribute to the WordPress community in this way. The feedback from developers who’ve taken these courses has been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s inspiring to see them apply these skills in real-world scenarios. If you’re looking to elevate your WordPress development game to an enterprise level, I highly recommend checking out VIP Learn. It’s free, self-paced, and packed with insights from industry experts.

Happy coding!

I joined the WordPress VIP team at Automattic!

Posted on March 14, 2021May 9, 2025 by Rick Hurst

After working mainly freelance for the past decade or so, I started 2020 with career development on my mind. Freelancing had been going pretty smoothly, but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere, that I was specialising in being a “jack of all trades” and I couldn’t help but think there was more opportunity out there to develop and find a niche, working within a large organisation, where I could concentrate on developing my software engineering skills rather than running a business. Automattic had been on my radar for years, as an established champion of fully-distributed working and open-source software, but it was relatively recently that I had became aware of WordPress VIP, the enterprise-scale platform run by Automattic. In May 2020 I started full-time as a Developer at WordPress VIP!

As part of the Customer Success (EMEA) team, I divide my time between Code Reviews of customer code, where aim to help customers make their custom WordPress code efficient and secure, proactively and reactively helping customers with optimising code to remove bottlenecks in database queries and caching, investigating solving tricky long-term bugs and performance issues on customer’s sites, and getting involved in a whole load of different internal projects and initiatives. The Automattic creed encourages, amongst other things, continued learning and development, and there’s huge potential for branching out here.

Enterprise-scale WordPress?

I’ll address this first – I know there will be skeptics out there (including amongst my own friends and ex-colleagues!), but with the right set-up, considerations and infrastructure, there is absolutely no reason why WordPress can’t be run at scale, and if anyone are experts in this, it’s the company that runs wordpress.com. The WordPress codebase is incredibly mature, backward compatible and extremely well tested, powering a significant percentage of all websites (I’ll refrain from quoting this percentage, as the number is both disputed and constantly growing!). WordPress VIP take that a step further by running a (private) cloud-based auto-scaling infrastructure and application support tailored specifically to the needs of high-traffic, enterprise-scale WordPress sites.

During the US elections in November 2020 I got to witness first-hand, amazing amounts of traffic on some of the sites running on VIP Go. Watching the Grafana charts for the back-end of some of these sites was almost exciting as the charts being shown on the sites themselves! Here’s a write-up about FiveThirtyEight – a WordPress site and liveblog hosted on WordPress VIP which was reliably serving WordPress at the rate of 132,000 requests per second during election night.

Whilst historically I haven’t always been a cheerleader for WordPress, it became my go-to CMS (yes, CMS, not just blogging software – that’s probably another blog post in itself!) over the last decade, despite dabbling with other open-source CMS and building a few of my own in the past. There’s a fair amount of anti-PHP sentiment amongst some of my peers, usually based on their perceptions of PHP in the early years, before it became the fully-fledged programming language it is today. I don’t share this skepticism, so have now gone all-in, on both PHP and WordPress! Even on dedicated infrastructure, running WordPress at scale (in terms of both traffic and amount of content), requires every aspect of the applications code to be considered, tuned and tweaked for performance and security. This is the stuff that I like doing, and i’m now honoured to be doing it amongst a team of vast experience in this field.

The hiring process at Automattic

It all starts by sending in the initial application (mine was by email, but currently it’s via greenhouse). In some way this is the first technical task – I did as much reading as possible about the organisation and advertised position before sending in my initial application to make sure it covered everything relevant I wanted to say about myself and my skills/ experience. Having made it past this stage, next-up was a technical challenge, in my case re-factoring a plugin to improve it’s performance and security, done in my own time. This was followed by a text-based interview in Slack, where we got into some in-depth technical and previous experience chat. I was then invited to start a trial, which is paid, and flexible regarding timescales, to allow me to fit in around on-going work. The trial lasted several weeks in my case, and consisted of more challenges simulating real-world scenarios – code reviews, debugging, advising customers etc. before I was invited for a chat (again via slack) with the WordPress VIP CEO. Finally I received my job offer letter and arranged a date in May to start on-boarding.

Fully distributed working

For context – I applied for this before the Covid-19 lockdown occurred in the UK, and at time of writing we are still in lockdown. Many people are now working remotely by necessity and hopefully a large proportion of those people will have the option to continue working remotely when lockdown is over. However, Automattic has always been a distributed company, and this was a major selling point for me. Remote-working is not for everyone, but it has always been a goal for me, which i’ve achieved up until now while working freelance. This will mostly happen from my shed-office, but in theory this could be from virtually any location in the world where I can get an internet connection, which a fantastic freedom. However, there are timezone considerations to stay in sync with my team and commitments and local employments laws/visas need to be considered for some locations.

WordPress VIP and Automattic are hiring! – have a look at some of the currently open positions at both WordPress VIP and Automattic.

Raspberry Pi WIFI bridged access point

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Rick Hurst

I usually rely on a wired ethernet connection in my home office, enabled by a powerline adapter running through the mains wiring to the house, where the other end connects to one of the ethernet sockets on an Airport. Yesterday I took delivery of a shiny new Macbook Pro and was reminded that they now only have Thunderbolt 3 sockets, making my Thunderbolt to ethernet adapter redundant. Thanks a lot Apple, that’s another expensive white adapter to add to my box of random useless adapters, and another one or two to buy (I still need a USB port for a couple of things, and displayport/ HDMI for an external monitor or two).

Luckily I had a spare Raspberry Pi 3 B+ lying around, and after a couple of false starts, I now have a bridged wireless access point in the home office, bridging the wired ethernet connection from the powerline adapter. Bridged works best for me so that I still get an IP address assigned via DHCP from the Airport, in the same IP range – it just keeps things simple. I’ve given the PI access point a unique SSID rather than mirror the one used in the house because sometimes it’s useful to know which one you’re connected to.

Installing and configuring the software

This is the how-to I followed: Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a bridged wireless access point. I’m not going to repeat all the steps here, but for what it’s worth, one of my false starts was the result of this part:-

To use the 5 GHz band, you can change the operations mode from hw_mode=g to hw_mode=a.

Apparently this works for Raspberry Pi Model 3B+ onwards, but it just didn’t work for me – the access point didn’t show up. After changing it back to the default “g” it works fine. The powerline adapters (and the mains wiring they use) already limit the speed of the connection a fair amount, so i’m not too bothered about this.

The other false start was following a completely different how-to, which only resulted in locking myself out of the pi via ssh and creating an access point which didn’t provide internet access!

Freerange Freelance (aka Camper Van Things) integrated into this blog

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Rick Hurst

Back in 2010 I started writing about “Remote Working”, initially on this blog, then split off into a separate “Rick on the Road” blog, written using my own (now abandoned) database-less blog software, which I called “eatStatic”. I even did a talk on this subject at the Anywhere Working event in 2013, talking about a summer spent freelance working from France, while touring France with my family in a vw beetle. A few years later, the blog morphed into “Camper Van Things” where the focus became more about the vehicle used for my nomadic working aspirations, than the work itself. Then I rebranded it as “Freerange Freelance”, to bring the focus back onto the remote working lifestyle. Just like this blog, each iteration eventually got a bit neglected, until some time last year, I mothballed it.

Seeing as I had already written some migration scripts to migrate content from my static blog engine to WordPress, it didn’t take much to adapt the script to pull content from the wordpress API and merge it with content from this blog. You can find all that content under the category “on the road“. I should probably take all of this as a warning about buying new domain names on a whim, and creating niche blogs!

My current tools and tech in 2019

Posted on August 31, 2019 by Rick Hurst

I try to avoid jumping on every new trend which comes along in the web world, especially over the last few years, where things seem to have moved very fast, with javascript frameworks becoming obsolete before i’ve even got round to trying them, but I also need to keep my skills and tech relevant. Here’s what i’m using as of late summer 2019.

Editor/IDE

I’ve been consistently using Sublime Text (Version 2 because I never got round to upgrading to 3) for years as my code editor, though i’ve never really taken full advantage of the extensions and customisations available. It just works and I saw no real need to change. One thing it has never done well is working over ssh, or rather from a mounted sshfs folder on a mac. I have occasional need to do this, when using the likes of nano in a terminal doesn’t feel good enough, and it’s one thing that I missed from Coda, when I used that for a while, years ago.

Then after spotting a tweet from an old colleague mentioning remote SSH editing in VS Code (via the Remote – SSH extension), I thought i’d take a look at it. Firstly, having used old-skool Microsoft Visual Studio in the past, I was surprised to see that Microsoft had built and released such a cool free editor, with builds for windows, mac and even linux. It’s already become my default editor – the intellisense and built-in terminal and git functionality is really good. There’s a lot there to explore and a ton of extensions. It also looks good.

Languages and frameworks

Most of my work is currently PHP. I no longer feel the need to apologise for that! PHP 7 is mature, stable and fast. I work on a couple of legacy PHP projects, one of which uses a combination of bespoke MVC code, an old fork of codeigniter (currently being refactored out) and Redbean ORM, and the other uses Zend framework, but is being re-built as a de-coupled app with Lumen (micro-framework by Laravel) on the back end and Vue.js on the front-end.

I haven’t done any web projects with Python recently (though i’m keen to try Pyramid), but I have been using it for a custom FTP server, using pyftpdlib (yes, FTP – for an old-skool EDI project – an old, but still very widely used technology where XML and FTP are used to exchange data – probably predating the invention of JSON and REST). I’ve also been using python for a raspberry pi datalogger project, reading serial data from microcontrollers via USB and then relaying it to a REST API.

JavaScript-wise, I still use bits and pieces of jQuery to get stuff done while I learn Vue.js properly, which is happening as part of a current aforementioned web app rebuild. We settled on Vue.js instead of React because Vue seems to be a popular component in the Lumen/Laravel ecosystem.

For CSS, i’ve settled for now on SASS and Gulp. Sass is a keeper, i’m just using Gulp until I find something that I like better. I tend to use Susy for grid/layout.

Ansible is my go-to tool for devops – I use it to provision web servers and for formerly manual tasks such as migrations of websites, moving content between dev, live and staging on wordpress sites etc. For local development of any sort I almost always use Vagrant now, with an ansible provisioning script, which gives me a very portable set-up, provided I have enough RAM to keep multiple virtual machines running as I juggle projects.

During my last foray back into a day-job (back in 2016), working at an agency, I got a fair amount of experience using wordpress as a CMS, including for some fairly complex projects, relying heavily on the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin. Now, historically I haven’t always been a fan of WordPress, but it proved to be an excellent tool when used with ACF, making the creation of custom page types incredibly quick and easy compared to other Content Management Systems i’ve used, and even compared to using frameworks which would be my usual preference for custom content. Being able to create custom fields, included nested repeater fields via the WordPress admin, having the field definition saved to the filesystem and then versioned in GIT for seamless syncing to production is a game changer!

Down the Rabbit Hole of #vanlife on social media

Posted on September 27, 2018June 8, 2024 by Rick Hurst

When I started this blog (as “Rick on the Road”) in 2010, Instagram was yet to be launched, and it was another two years before Foster Huntington popularised the #vanlife hashtag on instagram. There were plenty of campervan-related videos on YouTube, but relatively few dedicated channels – at least compared to the massive amount that exist today. The first channels I remember watching were Chad DeRosa’s “Living The Van Life” and Where’s my office now (both US based) and Campervan Culture (UK based). Campervan Culture in particular raised the bar for the quality of video production as time went on, and was certainly the first time i’d seen drone footage in an “amateur” campervan video.

At time of writing there is a massive amount of choice of vanlife-related youtube channels, most of which have a parallel life in the form of an instagram account.

But what does “vanlife” actually mean?

This is a contentious issue, it seems. It’s a made-up word, with the word van and life joined together, and it seems to refer mainly to people who live in vans. I’ve seen comments on instagram and youtube where a full-time “vanlifer” will angrily claim the term for themselves, but with over 3.7 million instagram posts (at time of writing) using the tag, and i’d hazard a guess that only a tiny proportion of those pictures depict people living full-time in a van, so it’s a pretty generic term covering pretty much anything campervan-related whether it’s living in one, building one, or lying in the back of one looking at a sunrise while you pretend you haven’t just scrambled to set up the self-timer on your camera.

Is it possible to make a living making vanlife youtube videos?

“When life gives you lemons, piss off somewhere and be a hippy”. Wise words. Very entertaining channel following this guys European adventures in a converted ambulance.

Youtube Channel

Instagram

Sarah and the Bear

A relatively new channel, these two are very chilled travelling the country and national trust properties in their white VW T25 (makes me very nostalgic for Rocky, our previous van!).

Youtube channel

Instagram

Never read the comments on YouTube!

Youtube seems to attract the best and the worst when it comes to comments – I think the majority of the comments on these channels are positive, but there’s a lot of idiots commenting too – best avoided if you don’t want to come crashing straight back down to earth after a dose of vicarious vanlife!

Freerange Freelance on Social Media

No immediate plans for a Freerange Freelance youtube channel, though I wouldn’t rule it out entirely. But we are on instagram and twitter.

Do you have a vanlife channel/instagram channel that we should be following? Nudge us on instagram and let us know!

Running a home office using solar power – part 1

Posted on August 30, 2018 by Rick Hurst

Photonic Universe portable 100 watt solar panel kit

Although I like to use our campervan as a mobile office, I mainly work from a home “office” built in an existing shed. The breeze-block building was already there when we moved in, and luckily it is big enough to create an area where I can work.

It’s a typical “ongoing” project, started a few years ago by partitioning off an end section to remain as a proper shed, and then building out an insulated area with it’s own entrance. Nowhere near finished, it still looks very much like a shed on the inside, but I have plans for wood panelling (inside and out) and stylish lighting to make it instagram worthy!

We do actually have mains electric running out to the shed, so it doesn’t need to be off-grid, but as I already have most of the kit needed, why not?

The Solar panel

I recently bought a 100 watt portable solar panel kit made by Photonics Universe to use with the camper van, but also wanted to see if it would be possible to use it to keep my home office powered. The kit has a waterproof charge controller mounted on the back, so all you need to do is attach it to the battery, either with the crocodile clips as supplied, or via eyelets. I bought a second connector cable so there is one permanently wired into the van leisure battery and one on the portable battery, making it easy to swap from one to the other.

Photonic Universe portable 100 watt solar panel kit showing charge controller

The “Office” kit

It’s a pretty minimal set-up – like when i’m in the van, I work mainly from the laptop, but with the added luxury of an external monitor, which is pretty handy when i’m working on any visual layout stuff for a website or web app.

My laptop these days is a 2015 era 13 inch macbook pro, and from looking at the plug-in current meter that I use, it looks though this requires about 20-30 watts to maintain an already charged laptop and 40+ watts when charging. The monitor requires a further 25 watts. In addition to this, I plan to occasionally run a USB powered fan and 12 volt LED lighting, both of which don’t require much power – at least in comparison to the mains appliances.

Minimal home office freelance web developer set-up

The Battery and electrics

A while ago I took a spare 90Ah car battery and built it into an old toolbox, with voltmeter, 12volt socket and USB sockets to use as a portable leisure battery set-up, so I have the solar panel charging this. Unlike the leisure battery in the van, this isn’t as proper leisure battery, so I need to be careful not to let the charge get too low, or risk permanently damaging it. The battery box has a fuse box inside with each item running off a separate fuse.

Leisure battery built into an old toolbox with USB sockets and voltmeter

I then wired in another external panel with voltmeter, usb sockets and 12 volt socket, which will eventually be mounted on the wall. I’ve then got plugged into this, an old Belkin 150 Watt (300 Watt peak) inverter that is usually in the van. I’ll likely replace this with something better – a pure sinewave inverter that gives a smoother AC output very similar to mains electricity.

12 volt panel with cigar lighter and USB socket

The challenge

The garden, whilst reasonably private for a city and offering plenty of shade, isn’t ideal for a solar panel. The light only reaches the garden from about 10am, and disappears about 6pm, even in mid-summer. The panel needs to be moved frequently to remain in the sun. I’ve spent time imagining building some kind of automated track system to do this for me, and although I have some ideas, I doubt I will ever have the time to realise them! We also live in the UK, not famed for it’s year-round sunshine…

Solar panel in a shady garden

From experience in the van keeping a powered coolbox going (~60 Watts), the panel will have real trouble providing 75+ watts constantly, unless it’s in decent all day direct sunlight, so the battery will likely discharge throughout the day, depending on when I finish, how much sun there is and how often I get up and move the panel to be in the optimum position.

I’ve already found that my external monitor isn’t happy running from the inverter – it keeps going into standby, then attempting to power up again then back to standby, as if switching it on causes a power spike that then causes it to go back to standby. Not sure if that’s the inverter struggling, or the battery not supplying sufficient current – if the battery is plugged into a mains charger, the monitor stays on, so the inverter is certainly capable, but maybe the battery isn’t. It will be interesting to see if a different inverter would make a difference here, or whether the battery isn’t up to the job.

I need to try this out long-term to get a realistic idea, but i’m sure that I would benefit from a higher capacity battery (or batteries), so I can rely more on falling back to battery power, which can then be topped up from solar charging over the weekend to keep me going during the week. Having said that, if we are away in the campervan, the solar panel comes with us, so that’s not going to work! If I had the budget to do this seriously, I think i’d at least double the solar capacity and the battery capacity.

Heating?

Even though it’s well insulated, there’s no chance of heating the space using solar (photovoltaic) power – any electric heating appliance, such as the Daewoo 2500 Watt oil filled radiator which I use in the winter uses way more wattage than could be provided by my inverter, and even with a high power inverter, massive bank of batteries and thousands of watts of solar panels you would struggle. The only realistic off-grid heating option is a wood burner or something gas powered, both of which aren’t cheap and would need to be carefully installed for obvious safety reasons.

Fitting a swivel seat base to a vw t4

Posted on July 19, 2018 by Rick Hurst

One of the first jobs on the list when we bought Hercules was a swivel base for the passenger seat. T4 vans come with either a double passenger seat, so you can fit three people up front (would be handy actually, as we only have four seat-belted seats), or a single passenger captain seat. Hercules came with the latter.

There are two main different types of seat swivel – a swivel plate, which fits between the seat and the standard seat base, and a swivel base, which replaces the standard seat base. After a bit of research I chose the latter, on the basis that this would leave the seat at the same height as it would be on the standard base, whereas a plate will usually raise it slightly. I actually used a swivel plate on Rocky, our last T25 camper.

I ordered one from SVB Accessories , on the basis that it was crash-tested and a good price. They also do a version with a built-in safe which I was tempted by, but i’m kind of reluctant to put a (visible) safe in the van, as to me it kind of advertises to a potential thief where you keep your valuables. Or maybe you could double-bluff and have a visible safe as a distraction, but keep your valuables somewhere else!

Having had much older vehicles, I wasn’t sure how long this job would take, but luckily it went entirely to plan. Firstly, I slid the seat all the way back, and undid the allen bolts which hold the seat rails to the base.

Then I slid the seat all the way forwards and undid the allen bolts at the rear of the rails.

Then you can remove the seat, with rails still attached.

Using a socket wrench, you then undo the four nuts on the bolts which attach the seat base to the cab floor.

Then you bolt the swivel seat base in, and attach the rails to it. The base came provided with bolts, but I used the original allen bolts (as they sit flush inside the rails) with the nuts from the provided bolts.

All in all probably 25 minutes, which is a miracle for me, as I have been known to make a 25 minute job last all weekend!