Breakfast from eight, and a wide spread to choose from. The bacon was the surprise: cooked properly, crisp without a film of grease on the plate, which is rare when a kitchen is feeding a full dining room at once. I took the cooked breakfast, a couple of pastries afterwards and coffee. Ochi had the cooked breakfast with fresh fruit, and was offered hot almond milk for her coffee, a small courtesy that pleased her.
Ten minutes by road to Bad Kissingen. We arrived early enough to take a place on the hard standing, of which there are only about a hundred. After that, cars are sent onto the grass, and the recent showers had left it too soft for the old vehicle, so the early start earned its keep. The show occupies a nature reserve, and movement on and off the ground is tightly controlled for that reason. By my reckoning the event has grown a great deal in both exhibitors and visitors across the twenty-odd years it has run.
The queue for the event coaches was already fairly long when we joined it, but far better managed than in the previous two years, when it had been a scramble with no order to it. This time there was a proper queue. The first coach came after about a quarter of an hour and we boarded the fifth, a ten-minute ride to the gates. They opened at ten; we were through at a little after a quarter past. Most people begin at the gates and work inward, so that end was crowded, and we went straight across to the far side and worked back towards the exit. We spent some five hours on the ground.
The first stand of any interest belonged to a firm (camping-pioneers) specialising in roof-top tents and in-vehicle table mountings, neither of which we want. What caught my eye instead were their own folding camping chairs, light and strong and genuinely comfortable, and a set of bamboo folding stools and a table of the Qeedo make. I flagged both for later thought rather than purchase.
Then to the first of the day’s real targets (Clesana), a maker of toilets that seal waste into a high-barrier bag for disposal, with no water and no chemicals involved. The company comes out of medical hygiene and moved into travel only a couple of years ago, first with a built-in model and then, this January, with a portable version. We had seen the portable one briefly at the Caravan Salon in Düsseldorf last year and wanted longer with it. It suits us almost exactly: small, light, battery-powered, easily moved. They were not selling on the day. The distributor sits in Scotland, and we were told that a trader near the gates was stocking them.
Directly opposite stood a water-treatment specialist (Purion), and water treatment was one of the chief reasons for the trip. They offer flexible, hard-wearing components for keeping stored water clean and disinfected without chemicals: filter housings that take standard cartridge sizes obtainable anywhere in the world, together with a UV-C lamp and driver to cycle the tank. A strong candidate for the build, and one I left thinking well of.
The find of the day was not on my list at all. A maker of recirculating showers (Dauer Shower), which solves a problem I have turned over for a couple of years. In a small van lived in full time, every litre of water must be carried, and a litre weighs a kilogram and fills a ten-centimetre cube. That is real weight and real volume, both competing with everything else aboard, and a shower is among the worst offenders for getting through water. The obstacle to recycling shower water has always been soap, which is awkward to separate, so existing systems tend to be either large, heavy and power-hungry or else they eat filters, neither acceptable in a van this size. Their answer is a hybrid. You shower in circulation mode for as long as you like, the water kept hot and clean through an easy-clean, long-life filter and using only a couple of litres; then you switch off, soap up, and run a short burst in fresh-water mode straight to the grey tank, so there is no soap to extract from the recirculated water at all. The maker quotes around five litres and 0.15 kWh per shower; my own guess is six to ten, set against the much heavier draw of an ordinary shower. I will write to them once we are home.
Energy storage next. The living side of the vehicle has long been held back by voltage: the usual twelve volts demands thick, heavy cable for anything that draws hard, which is to say cooling, heating and cooking. I have wanted to move to forty-eight volts for some time, but the kit has been scarce and dear. An Australian (Egon) firm announced a forty-eight-volt architecture in prototype last year and brought the first version to general sale this month, so forty-eight-volt batteries are now the thing required. This stand (Liontron) had a fifty-amp-hour forty-eight-volt unit on show, about 2.5 kWh; four in parallel would give ample capacity at roughly a hundred kilograms. Worth taking further.
A heating make (Scheer) new to me, though my heating plan is more or less settled, showed a diesel hydronic heater that holds a blue flame even from cold start through careful control of the air-to-diesel mix, which gives a clean, soot-free burn (typically these types of devices run a yellow, inefficient flame until at full burn temperature). I need heat for the living quarters, both underfloor and blown, for hot water, and for pre-heating the engine in very cold places. This unit is larger and heavier than I had imagined, and it draws on both AC and DC, which adds complexity, but it interested me, and the person on the stand had genuine technical depth.
The mattress question took up a good while at the stand of an Austrian maker (Flexima) of made-to-measure beds for vehicles, handmade. I want a bed left permanently made up rather than rebuilt from the seating each night. A roof-drop bed would cost too much height in a van already tall, with its raised suspension and large off-road wheels, so the plan is a bed that folds in two and stands upright at the rear when not in use. The mattress therefore has to be relatively thin, light and foldable down the middle, yet still comfortable after years of use. I tried two of theirs and found both very comfortable. The foam carries internal plastic spring elements that can be adjusted to firm or soften different zones, which I had not seen before. I spoke with Chris Schoneman, their Benelux director, and came away expecting this to be our choice. I mean to post a CAD drawing of the internal layout in a later entry.
A British company trading (GN Espace) from Widford in Hertfordshire, with a long history of supplying the marine trade, showed induction hobs and multifunction sinks that looked very well made. Worth another conversation.
We returned to a maker of hanging chairs of the hammock kind (Mira Art), which appealed to Ochi last year. We tried them again and liked them again. I have a suspension solution in mind already, so the difficulty is the weight and stowage of the parts rather than the chairs themselves. A luxury, to be settled last if there is capacity to spare.
I spent time with Michael Iglhaut, whose firm (Iglhaut) converted our vehicle into the capable off-roader it is back in 2000. That connection matters for the future: access to their knowledge of the vehicle and to their own parts as things wear or break, so I am glad to be building the acquaintance.
By the exit stood the trader we had been told about, and he had the Clesana X1 portable toilet in stock. We bought it there and then, so the van now has its toilet, the one firm purchase of the day.
So the day’s reckoning: the toilet bought; the Austrian mattress now the likely answer for the folding rear bed. Carried forward as candidates or jobs to do are the water-treatment components, the forty-eight-volt storage to match the new architecture, the diesel heater for further investigation, the recirculating shower to be contacted from home, the British induction hob and sink for another conversation, the folding chairs and bamboo stools flagged, and the hanging chairs left to last on grounds of weight and stowage. I took no photographs as I was too focused on the exhibitors.
Coach back to the car, the short drive to Kunzmann’s, and a look round the hotel’s spa before dinner at a quarter to seven. The local wines the hotel recommended were very good, but I failed to note their names, which I regret; I shall record tomorrow evening’s recommendations so they at least appear in the next day’s pages.
