There you go, get yourself the above and you can be off grid, no problems.
Electric: I suppose you could have a USB adapter into your cigar lighter for your mobiles, and just run a positive and negative wire from your van battery for 12 volt lighting. However you will soon find yourself in nature, with a flat van battery. You’ll probably have a flat battery in your (Internet/GPS/Camera/Sat Nav/Video recorder/Facebook/YouTube) mobile phone as well, and unable to phone for help.
Let's start with electric.
When we bought our van it had a leisure battery that was charged as we were driving, or it could be charged by a mains inlet if we stopped at a campsite, we didn't want to use campsites so we added another battery and had a 160 watt solar panel fitted to the roof. NOTE in hindsight we should have had two panels, and a tilting frame, as our panel just lie's flat and can not be adjusted for the best angle to the sun, that's a huge lose of potential power.
Unfortunately this extra battery and solar panel was still not enough power for our needs, fridge, laptops, iphones, ipad, fans, batteries for the Ebikes, and other accessories we had forgotten to add to our ever growing list. So we were still using campsites at least once a week to cope with the demand on our leisure batteries.
A change was needed. Research, research, research! I'm sure most of you have perused various publications, websites and videos for "Portable Power Stations" there are plenty of them out there and choosing the right one for your needs is key. So do the research.
After hundreds of hours of videos, watching reviews on all the popular brands, Bluetti, Jackery, Joyzis, Oukitel, BigBlue, Ecoflow, and I'm sure there are more. We decided to buy the Ecoflow Pro (river series), it was a very close call between Ecoflow and Jackery.
I have to say, it wasn't cheap, but none of them are, so we paid 749€ (for the Pro) and 399€ for the 160 watt (Ecoflow) solar panel. We could have saved money on a cheaper solar panel, but we didn't want our guarantee invalidated in the unlikely event of the power station having a problem.
So in total we spent 1.148€, and if we had to sum it up we would say "it's bloody brilliant". We bought it 6th April 2022 and are still testing it, so will do a proper run down of all the pro's and con's, with videos, in the near future.
After a year of testing. Here is the long awaited video.
Ecoflow Products
to suit all your requirements. From small units to complete house installations. Look out for great discounts.
This is a US store, but should automatically detect your country, there is a drop down menu at the top of the page if it doesn’t. Everything you could possibly want, again look out for great discounts.