Every bit of this is in my van right now. I paid for it. I fitted it. I am not paid to mention any of these brands and there are no affiliate links on this page. If a piece of kit is here it is because I use it and it has earned its place.
Why this page exists. Motorhome forums are flooded with gear questions and the advice ranges from excellent to expensive-and-wrong. This is what I actually landed on after a few years of fitting, un-fitting, swearing at invoice emails, and re-fitting. Take what is useful, ignore the rest, and if you want to ask about any of it reply to [email protected].
Connectivity
ROUTER
GL.iNet Spitz Plus (GL-X2000), Wi-Fi 6, 4G
The router in the van. Dual-SIM slots, proper VPN support, decent Wi-Fi 6 throughput, and it runs on 12 V directly without faffing with a converter. Small enough to mount behind the TV and hot enough to keep my feet warm in winter.
Dual SIM means I keep a UK SIM active and drop in a European eSIM for roaming. No swapping, no panic.
Built-in OpenVPN and WireGuard clients. I tunnel home when I want to watch UK iPlayer abroad.
12 V input, no inverter in the loop, runs off the leisure battery all night on a few watts.
There is a shinier 5G version. I did not buy it. Reasons below.
EXTERNAL ANTENNA
Poynting Puck-5 (5-in-1)
Mounted on the roof. Two cellular elements plus Wi-Fi and GPS. The jump from the stock internal aerials to a proper Poynting is not subtle, it is the single biggest upgrade you can make if you work from the van or your reception is patchy. Expensive for what is essentially a plastic dome. Worth every penny.
Why I did not bother with a 5G router and antenna. 5G rural coverage across most of Europe is still patchy and, more importantly, the speed you can realistically use is capped long before 5G's headline numbers. A 4G signal with a proper external antenna beats a weak 5G signal with internal aerials every single time. For video calls, for streaming, for uploading photos to the cloud, 4G plus a Puck is plenty. Revisit the 5G question when the coverage maps look less like Swiss cheese.
Power
BATTERY
300 Ah LiFePO4 leisure battery
I arrived at 300 Ah by totting up everything I run in a day (see the calculator below), doubling it for the days I stay off-grid, and then rounding up because lithium hates running low. At 12 V that is around 3.6 kWh of usable capacity, which in real life is comfortably three or four days of normal living without starting the engine or plugging in.
LiFePO4 specifically, not lead-acid. The weight saving alone pays you back every mile, and you can actually use most of the rated capacity without halving the lifespan.
INVERTER & CHARGER
Victron MultiPlus-II 12/3000/120
3 kW inverter with an integrated shore-power charger and a proper transfer switch. Plug into a campsite and it charges the battery while running the sockets. Unplug and it silently flips to battery inverter mode without even blinking the lights. The MultiPlus-II is the heart of the electrical system and the reason everything else can trust it.
Why I swapped out my Renogy inverter. The Renogy worked but it was a pure inverter, no proper transfer switching, no Victron ecosystem integration, and the remote monitoring needed its own app. I ended up with three apps for one van. Going all-Victron meant one app, one set of cables, one set of behaviour. The Renogy went on Facebook Marketplace the week I installed the MultiPlus.
MONITORING & CONTROL
Victron Cerbo GX
The brain of the stack. It talks to the MultiPlus, the MPPT, the Orion, the BMS on the lithium, even the shunt, and gives you one dashboard showing what every watt is doing. Remote monitoring via Victron VRM portal, so I can check state-of-charge from anywhere in the world. Not strictly required, but once you have it you will not give it up.
ENGINE-TO-LEISURE CHARGING
Victron Orion XS 12/12-50
DC-DC charger between the starter battery and the leisure bank. Smart-alternator-aware, so it knows when the engine is actually generating and when it is just idling. Pulls 50 A while driving, which means a few hours on the motorway fully tops up the lithium without cooking the alternator or starving the starter battery.
SOLAR CHARGE CONTROLLER
Victron SmartSolar MPPT 100/30
Maximum-power-point-tracking solar controller. MPPT is roughly 30% more efficient than a cheap PWM controller, which matters a lot when the sun is weak. Same VE.Direct family as the rest of the Victron stack so the Cerbo can see exactly how much the roof is pulling in.
Solar
PANELS
Renogy mono-crystalline solar panels on the roof
Roof capacity wide open, so I filled it. In a full English summer it buys me a day of usage back each day. In February it is a polite suggestion. Mono-crystalline because I live in a country with thin light, not strong sun.
The one thing nobody told me about solar. Most panels are wired with all their cells in series. A single leaf, or a satellite dish shadow, or a branch dropping on one corner, does not just reduce that panel's output. It can knock it to nothing. The cells in the unshaded part of the panel cannot push current past the shaded ones. Bypass diodes help but they are not magic. Moral: clean the panels, move the van so no branch is overhead, and never assume "a bit of shade" is fine.
How long can I stay off grid?
Tick the devices you actually use, dial in roughly how long they are on each day, and the calculator totals up daily consumption against battery capacity. Default battery is my 300 Ah at 12 V. Change it to match your own setup.
How long will my battery last?
Off-grid time calculator. Rough Wh numbers, real-world tolerances. For estimating, not for rewiring.
Appliance
Watts
Hours per day
Wh / day
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Wh used per day
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net after solar
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days off grid
Cable sizing
My day job is full-time firefighter. Most vehicle fires we attend that are not arson turn out to be electrical, and those are on vehicles nobody has modified. Start adding battery banks, inverters, and long low-voltage runs and the margin for error shrinks. This stuff is worth getting right, and it is not a bad place to ask questions.
AC and DC cable sizing behave differently. Treating them the same is the quickest way to land in the wrong place.
Think of current as water. Voltage is pressure. A thin garden hose at mains pressure delivers plenty of water. Drop the pressure to a trickle from a rain barrel and the same hose barely flows. To get useful flow from low pressure you need a much fatter pipe. Low-voltage DC is the rain barrel. The cable needs to be fat.
AC cable (230 V) can be skinny. At high pressure a small cross-section moves plenty of current without losing much as heat. A 2.5 mm2 cable happily runs a kettle in your kitchen.
DC cable (12 V) has to be fat. The same current pushed at a tenth of the pressure means ten times as much resistive loss for the same cable. Under-size a 12 V run from the battery to the inverter and you lose voltage along the cable, the inverter shuts down early, the cable gets hot, and the terminals get hotter.
Current does not back off when the channel is too narrow. Picture a stream that usually runs a foot deep. A blockage forces it through a pipe half the width. The water does not politely slow down. It piles up, forces through, scours the banks, spills over the sides, and if there is nowhere for the energy to go the banks give way. Current in an under-sized cable does the same thing. It forces through. The cable heats up. Heat raises the copper's resistance. More resistance means more heat. That feedback loop is how insulation melts and how a short becomes a fire.
AWG and mm2 measure the same thing. AWG (American Wire Gauge) is the US shorthand, mm2 is the metric cross-sectional area of the copper. UK cable is labelled in mm2, so work in mm2 and use this table when a US guide quotes AWG.
AWG
mm2
Typical use
10
5.3
Low-current 12 V circuits, lighting
8
8.4
Mid-draw circuits, small inverters
6
13
Solar runs, fridge / pump branches
4
21
Battery-to-busbar on small banks
2
33
Mid inverter feeds (1000-1500 W)
1/0
53
Large inverter feeds, battery interconnects
2/0
67
High-current inverter feeds
4/0
107
Heavy-duty inverter / starter cabling
For the avoidance of doubt. I am responsible for my own van. If I am on shift I am responsible for putting your van's fire out. I cannot be responsible for your van. The numbers on this page are a sanity check, not a substitute for a qualified installer if you are unsure.
DC cable size calculator
Enter the current you want to carry and the one-way length of the run. The calculator doubles for the return and recommends the next standard size up from the theoretical minimum.
What size cable do I need?
DC cable cross-section calculator. Copper cable, 12/24/48 V DC. Target is a 3% voltage drop unless you change it.
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min cross-section
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recommended cable
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equivalent AWG
Fuse rating needs to be chosen for the cable you actually fit, not the current you planned. Ask if you are not sure.
Anything missing?
This page grows as I add or change things. If something on your own setup is mysterious and you would like a plain-English explanation, send it to [email protected] and I will add it.
Want to go deeper? The geek page covers the Home Assistant, Raspberry Pi, and networking stack that sits behind all of this.