Designing the electrical system for your campervan is one of the more daunting tasks of a van build. You will be dealing with potentially high voltages and currents. If you don’t properly size your wires and fuses or have poor connections between components, you could have a fire risk inside of your living space. If your battery is undersized or you do not have enough solar panel capacity, you risk depleting your battery and not being able to use any of your electrical appliances (refrigerator, water pump, lighting, vent fan, etc.). There are a lot of things that can go wrong, and you should make sure that you do a ton of research before starting this step of the van conversion process. And, if you still don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, consider getting a professional to design and build it or buy an all-in-one kit. There’s no shame in getting help, we all need it some time!

The goal of this article is to give you an overview of the different components involved in the design of the van’s electrical system so that you can become familiar with how the whole system works. This is not a step-by-step how-to guide on designing, building, and installing a campervan electrical system. I do plan to write a step-by-step guide in the future, and once it is done I will update this page with a link to that article. You can think of this as the background information that you will need prior to the detailed step-by-step guide.

Another disclaimer: each of the topics below can be discussed in far greater detail than what I have written; you will find all kinds of information on the internet if you go searching. My goal is to try to focus on the information that I think is the most helpful and useful. I am always trying to improve; if you feel that there is something that is missing, incomplete, or incorrect in this article, please reach out and I will address your concerns.

In a campervan electrical system such as the one we have in Dolly, the system can be divided into the following subcomponents:

1. Power Generation and Energy Storage: this is how you generate and store the electricity that you use in your campervan. It includes charging your house battery from sources such as the alternator, solar panels, and shore power (optional – we don’t have it).
2. Power Consumption: this includes all the electrical loads that you install in your campervan. Common items include refrigerator, lights, water pump, vent fan, etc. The main items that need to be considered are correctly sizing wires and fuses, and how to make good connections between wires, busbars, fuses, etc.

This page discusses some of the basics required to understand electrical systems. If you are already comfortable with calculating power and energy from voltage and current you can skip this entirely.

Table of Contents

Volts & Amps & Watts, Oh My!

Not everyone who builds a campervan is an electrician or has a background in engineering, but it is possible to learn enough to understand the basics. A lot of people get very intimidated by the electrical stuff; they hear Volts, Watts, Amps, kiloWatt-hours,...

Power Generation and Energy Storage

Now that we have covered some basics, let’s talk power generation… Before vanlife, I (Andrew) was an engineer designing power generation systems so this subject is right up my alley. Of course, the scales were a bit different; it would take roughly 1 m...

Power Consumption

Power consumption refers to all the DC and AC loads that are powered by the house battery. Accurate knowledge of what these items are and how much energy they will consume in an average day is required to properly size your system’s house battery (and f...