Brett and Kira Belan have spent the past decade transforming old vehicles into solar-powered campers. Their journey with Solarrolla began in 2015, with their first conversion project, a Volkswagen Bus: a donor vehicle chosen for its ample roof space (enough for 4 solar panels). Brett engineered a mechanism to tilt the entire wall of panels up to a 40-degree angle, optimizing the vehicle’s ability to capture solar energy.
source.image: Kirsten Dirksen
Growing up, Brett hot-rodded Camaros, Chevelles, and a 1932 Chevrolet and he sees his current work as a continuation of this. “I’m a hot-rodder. I grew up street-rodding. My dad and I built street-rods and the idea with street-rods is you taking a part from this car and a part from that car and you make exactly the car you want,” explains Brett. “We’re now electrical hot-rodders.”
With a degree in mechanical engineering, Brett worked at Ford Motor Company and taught CAD at Jaguar in England before leaving it to live off-grid with family. His first foray into solar-powered vehicles involved creating a solar golf cart and a solar postal van. His projects are diverse from adding 3kw of solar to a Safari Trek 30-foot motorhome to working with master builder SunRay Kelley to turn his wooden “gypsy wagon” into what Kelley called “a solar-power plant that goes down the road that you live in”.
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Their most recent project is an eStar conversion featuring a 5kW solar array for musician Redfoo. This ambitious conversion involved a month-long charging journey, with some necessary plug-ins during a freezing northern winter, from their workshop in Wisconsin to Redfoo’s home in Malibu. For their most recent project, they built an old eStar van into a solar-electric camper van for musician Redfoo. We follow their month-long journey from their workshop in Wisconsin to Redfoo’s home in Malibu camping and charging with their two children where they were forced to slow down for multi-day charges and enjoy the journey.
