The honest answer to “what appliances should I take on the big lap” is not a shopping list, it is a power budget. Every appliance you pack is a claim on your battery, your inverter, or the 15 amps coming out of the park bollard. Work out your limits first, then pick the gear that fits inside them. Here is how the appliances break down across the kitchen, the laundry and everything else.
Start With Power, Not With The Appliance
Almost every appliance worth arguing about is one that makes heat. Toasters, kettles, air fryers, microwaves, coffee machines, induction hobs, washing machines with a heated cycle. And anything that makes heat is hungry. As a rule, food-heating appliances draw somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 watts, and induction cooktops can spike past that.
Two numbers govern what you can run. Plugged in at a caravan park, your van is limited by its 15 amp inlet, which is roughly 3,600 watts for the whole van, shared. That sounds generous until you put a 2,000W air fryer and a 2,000W kettle on together and trip the lot while someone is mid-shower.
Off-grid, the limit is set by your inverter and your battery bank instead. The maths is simple and unforgiving: watts divided by volts gives you amps, so an 1,800W appliance running off 12V pulls over 150 amps out of your batteries, before the inverter’s own losses of roughly 10 to 15%.
Your caravan runs on a single 15 amp circuit, so everything in the van shares one 3,600W budget. Two heating appliances at once is the classic way to trip a park bollard. Never modify a 15 amp lead to fit a 10 amp socket: use a proper adaptor with a built-in RCD.
The Three Power Realities You’ll Be Cooking In
Work out which of these you will actually be living in most of the time, because it changes every decision below.
Powered sites most nights. You have 3,600W to play with and can run essentially anything from home, as long as you do not run two hungry things at once.
Off-grid with a serious setup. Lithium and a big inverter, typically 200Ah or more paired with a 2,000W-plus inverter. This is what lets you run a 240V air fryer off the batteries. It is also a five-figure electrical system.
Off-grid on a modest setup, or gas only. A smaller battery bank, a small inverter or none at all. Far more common than the YouTube builds suggest, and a perfectly good way to travel. It just means your cooking happens on gas and your appliances are 12V or nothing.
Kitchen & Cooking
The Fridge
The one appliance that is not optional and the one that runs 24 hours a day. A 12V compressor fridge is the default for off-grid travel because it keeps working in outback heat and at an angle, where a 3-way struggles. It is a modest but constant draw, and it is the baseline everything else sits on top of. The Dometic CFX range is the benchmark most people compare against, with variable-speed compressors and low draw, though you pay for the badge. Budget from around $700 for a 35L up to $1,500 or more for a big dual-zone.
An Air Fryer Or Multi-Cooker
If you take one 240V appliance, take this one. It bakes, roasts, fries and, in the multi-cooker versions, pressure cooks and slow cooks, replacing an oven you probably do not have. Draw varies a lot between models and that difference matters: a large Philips unit can pull over 2,200W, a Ninja FlexDrawer around 1,670W, and a Ninja Foodi multi-cooker around 1,460W. Buy the efficient one, not the biggest one, and check the wattage before the capacity. Retailers like My Generator’s caravan kitchen range stock the van-friendly sizes.
True 12V Cooking Appliances
The option most people never consider. There is now a growing range of appliances built to run on 12V rather than 240V, and because they skip the inverter entirely their draw is in another league: 12V air fryers around 250W, sandwich presses around 250W, pressure cookers 150 to 200W. Less power means slower cooking and smaller portions, so you are picking short-cook meals, but if you travel off-grid on a modest setup this is the answer nobody sold you. Look at the 12V appliance range at Caravan RV Camping or the RockArmor 12V cooking range, which covers air fryers, pressure cookers and toastie makers.
The Kettle And Coffee
An electric kettle’s problem is not total energy, since it only runs three minutes. It is the peak: 2,000W means it needs a big inverter just to switch on. A stovetop kettle costs nothing, weighs nothing and never trips anything, which is why most full-timers end up with one. Coffee runs the same spectrum, from a plunger that draws nothing to a pod machine that spikes past 1,300W. Worth deciding deliberately rather than by habit.
A BBQ
The most underrated cooking appliance on the road. It runs on gas, keeps the heat and the mess outside the van, and does the job of an oven you do not have. For plenty of travellers it does more cooking than the cooktop. The Weber Baby Q (Q1000) is the default for a reason: cast aluminium, roasts a whole chicken, and a 9kg bottle will run it for dozens of cooks. Around 10.75kg all up, so it is a real payload decision, but few pieces of gear get used as hard.
Laundry & Cleaning
A Washing Machine
The big one, and it is a water decision as much as a power decision. A compact caravan machine uses 20 to 40 litres a cycle, which is a serious chunk of a 90 litre tank. A 240V unit like the Sphere 3.3kg automatic mini runs a full wash-rinse-spin in about 38 minutes and suits couples and small families, but it wants mains power or a decent inverter.
The one worth knowing about if you free camp is the Sphere DC 12V 3.5kg, which runs straight off your house battery via an Anderson plug with no inverter at all. It is cold-wash only, which is exactly the trade-off that makes it work off-grid. Outback Equipment carries the wider range including twin-tubs and manual washers, which are lighter, cheaper, and put you in control of exactly how much water goes in.
Drying
The bottleneck nobody budgets for. A dryer is rarely the right call in a van: heavy, power-hungry, and a lot of real estate for a problem you can usually solve with a fast spin cycle, a folding airer and some sunshine. The wet season is the exception that makes people reconsider. A retractable line that clips to the van and a decent airer that sets up under the awning will cover you almost everywhere, and both live in the caravan laundry range at Caravan RV Camping.
A 12V Vacuum And Cleaning Kit
Small, cheap, low draw, and it does the one cleaning job that is genuinely miserable without it. Sand and red dirt get into everything and a dustpan stops cutting it about a month in. Detergent belongs in the same decision: van wash water ends up in a greywater tank, a bladder, or on the ground, so low-suds and greywater-safe matters in a way it never does at home.
Everything Else
Fans
Pound for pound the best power-to-comfort ratio in the van. The Caframo Sirocco II is the one you see in half the vans on the road, and the numbers explain why: it draws 0.35A on its highest 12V setting, which is nothing, has a gimbal so one fan can serve the bed and the kitchen, and has 3, 6, 9 and 12 hour auto-off timers. It is also stocked at Anaconda. It is a hardwired fan, so factor in the install.
Air Conditioning
The hungriest appliance you will own. Most units pull over 2,000W under load and settle somewhere between 700 and 1,500W once they are just holding temperature. Running one off-grid is an electrical system decision, not an appliance decision, and it needs planning from the start rather than bolting on later.
The Microwave And Everything Factory-Fitted
Many vans come with a microwave already installed and it is fine on a powered site. Off-grid it is a big, heavy appliance you will rarely be able to run, so treat the cupboard it occupies as the real cost and decide whether that space is better used for something else. The same logic applies to any factory-fitted 240V appliance: it is only an appliance when you have the power for it.
Starlink And Devices
Not a kitchen appliance, but it belongs in your power budget. A Starlink Mini draws around 20 to 30W and the larger dish more, running for hours at a time, so it adds up quietly in the background alongside laptops, phones and camera gear.
Working Out What Your Setup Can Actually Run
Do this before you buy anything. It takes two minutes and it will save you real money.
Take the appliance’s wattage, multiply by how long you run it as a fraction of an hour, and you have watt-hours. Divide by 12 to get amp-hours out of your battery, then add roughly 15% for inverter losses.
Worked example. A 1,670W air fryer running 20 minutes is 1,670 × 0.33, or about 555 watt-hours. Divide by 12 and that is roughly 46 amp-hours, and with inverter losses call it 53Ah. Out of a 200Ah lithium bank, one air-fried dinner is about a quarter of your usable battery, and your solar has to replace it tomorrow.
Now run the same sum on a 12V unit. 250W for 30 minutes is 125 watt-hours, or about 10 amp-hours, with no inverter loss to add. That is a twentieth of the same bank for a meal.
That comparison is the most useful thing in this guide. It is not that one is right and one is wrong. It is that the appliance you choose decides the electrical system you have to build, and it is a great deal cheaper to choose the appliance first.
Do a lap of your own kitchen at home before you buy anything. Whatever you have not used in a fortnight, you will not use in the van either, and it will cost you payload for a year.
- Appliance choice is a power decision. Work out your limits before you work out your shopping list.
- On a powered site the whole van shares roughly 3,600W. Two heating appliances at once will trip it.
- In the kitchen, the fridge is the constant and an efficient air fryer or multi-cooker is the one 240V appliance worth its space.
- True 12V appliances, including 12V washing machines, draw a fraction of their 240V equivalents because they skip the inverter entirely.
- Drying is the real laundry bottleneck, not washing. A fast spin and a good airer beat a dryer in a van.
- Do the watt-hours maths before you buy. One 240V air-fried dinner is about a quarter of a 200Ah battery.
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