VAN FEATURES - Electrical
So, electrical systems can be as simple or complicated as you’d like, we think we’ve gone with something somewhere in between. We’ve built our van to be fully off-grid but with the option of plugging-in if we choose to. In this article we’ll give you a quick overview of what we chose to use and why.
240V Power
Having enough power to run our microwave and charge all our devices was one of the more expensive additions to our van. After having some pretty serious issues with our 1st smaller, cheaper, and obviously lower quality 240V power inverter, (which incidentally almost burnt our van to the ground one month into our travels) we decided to splash out and get a much bigger and better quality power inverter, the Projecta 12V 2000w Projecta Intelliwave inverter.
The 2000w Projecta Intelliwave inverter is super efficient and has a 240v transfer switch, which means when we plug in at a powered campsite everything that would normally be powered by the inverter will run off the campsite power. The inverter also has RCD safety switches, and a remote mounted control panel.
Lights
When it came time to choose and install our main lighting in the van, a few factors were important to us: They needed to be power efficient, bright, and the right colour temperature. (for us “Cool White ” is really unwelcoming, it’s warm white for the win!)
For our ceiling lights we chose 3W Arlec puck lights. They are sold as 240V under-cabinet lighting, but the 240V transformer actually puts out 12V DC, so they’re perfect for van lighting.
The lights are wired so we can turn on just the back half, the front half, or the whole row at once if we wish. It sounds a bit over-the-top, but we love having the option of just having the kitchen lit up, or the bed end etc.
We also have 2x LED stripe lights that run underneath our clothes storage cupboards;
One strip light is warm white (again, we loooove us some warm white!) and the other strip is multi-coloured, with the option of selecting what colour you’d like displayed. If there are bugs around we’ll use this multicoloured strip to shine orange light, as the colour doesn’t seem to attract as many bugs as your regular plain white lights.
USB Charging
Charging our devices like phones, iPad, portable speaker, and portable battery banks all rely on USB ports, so we installed 4 x 2.4amp charging ports at the back of our van under the bedhead. We made sure to get good quality USB chargers with smart IC and high amperage output. Smart IC basically recognises what device you’ve plugged and charges it at the optimum rate instead of just jamming power into it. Amperage is the amount of power the charger can supply, the higher the amperage the quicker it will charge the device.
Fridge/Freezer
We decided to go with the old chest fridge/freezer for our van. Our main fridge is a 50lt chest fridge with a thermal cover, it’s really efficient so it doesn’t use much power, it’s pretty quiet so it doesn’t keep us awake at night and it automatically swaps over to 240v if we plug our van in at a powered site.
A new addition to our van is second fridge/freezer, we use this one as a freezer and is kept at the very back of our van and slides out when we need to get into it.
IMPORTANT STUFF:
All of the electronics in our van are properly installed using the right size cable and fused with the right fuse. Messing around with or installing electronics in your own van/car can go very bad, very quickly. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t guess, get a professional to do it for you.
Do the research! Before buying the cheapest thing you can find online, find out as much information on it as you can. Our van almost burnt to the ground in the first month on the road due to a cheap power inverter. Despite being more than capable (on paper at least) of handling the appliances we were running off it, we quickly found that it was not up to the task. Not saying the cheapest thing won’t work, but had we read more reviews of this particular product before we chose to buy it, we might have cottoned on earlier that it was a really bad choice and saved ourselves a heap of trouble. You’ve been warned.