Roof Vent

I wanted to add some extra ventilation on the roof as I only have a sunroof which is little use when its raining. I had a look at all the boat vents and solar vents but the ones that work 24 hours using a rechargeable battery were very expensive (> £100). I decided to make my own powered vent using a ECS ventilite which cost £10 and a 80mm pc fan which cost me 50p.

The ventilite is designed to take there own fan but these cost about £70 and actually only contain a pc fan.

To fit the ventilite you have to cut a small hole in your roof which I cut using a jigsaw, my van used to have a wind ventilator fitted so there was already a small hole.

I then bonded some 18mm plywood to the inside of the roof using Sika this was bigger than required but is also going to actually support my 15" LCD monitor.

The bottom part of the vent then screws through the top of the roof into the plywood, its best to add some sealer around the base of the vent. The top part of the vent then screws into the bottom half, it comes with a mozi net. It is also called a ventilite because daylight can shine through but you could always paint the top cover to colour code with your vehicle or if you didn't want any daylight shining through.

I then inserted a pc fan into the hole in the plywood and added a piece of black perspex with an 80mm hole to hold it in place. (The perspex is oval because it was the cutout from my 6 x 9 " speaker spacers I made) I inserted the fan so it would extract air from the vehicle.

Once the roof lining was back in I added a PC Fan trim which cost about 25p but looks pretty good.

The Fan is switched from a remote switch and uses about 2 watts so can be run all night if required. Of course you get ventilation through the vent even when the fan isn't running.