Our overall philosophy about living in the van is that we want freedom; we want to be able to spend time in wild or remote places; we don’t want to be limited to visiting tourist destinations or places that cater to motorhomes and caravans. So we have big solar panels for electricity, and a large refillable LPG tank for cooking and heating.

That being said, sometimes you need to make use of the facilities – for a hot shower, a tumble dryer, or to top up the batteries with shore power. For those occasions, we bought this campsite hookup cable. It has a large standard weatherproof hookup plug at one end, 20m or thick orange cable, and a circuit breaker and 3 UK power sockets at the other end.

We can plug this into the campsite hookup, run the cable into the van, and then plug AC devices straight into this supply as well as plugging in the battery charger to fill up our batteries.

A more elegant solution would be to fit a hookup socket on the outside of the van, and hardware a 230V AC circuit with breakers and sockets. But that’s a lot of kit to buy and install, and so far this has been a good solution for the few times we resort to staying in campsites.

£35 from Amazon (affiliate link)