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Campervans and motorhomes allow owners to live out the dream of a life on the open road. A few well chosen accessories can make that dream just a little bit sweeter.
The last few years have seen a meteoric rise in the popularity of, not to mention the prices commanded by, campervans and motorhomes. Between lockdowns, flight cancellations and border control issues, many of us have embraced the staycation as a great holiday option. Consequently, a vehicle that is both transport and a place to stay has become a massively appealing proposition.
Whether you’re already an owner or looking to take the plunge and make a purchase — we’ve done some digging, as well as spoken to a confirmed motorhome devotee to round up the most essential accessories for your vehicle.
Read more: 15 car accessories you never knew you needed
We asked seasoned motorhome owner Bryan Duncan who’s based in Argyll, Scotland, for his take on kitting your van out with the right gear. Bryan spends up to three months at a time, living and travelling in his Fiat Roller Team 590, a compact van that is not short on either luxury or amenity.
“Most owners will tell you that the ideal van size is under 6m long when you’re driving and over 9m when you’re parked up!” he said. “But that's not happening anytime soon, so all of your kit has to be well thought-out and will generally be a bit of a compromise. But you can still live comfortably from a van for extended periods with the right set-up.”
Scroll down to see a couple of Bryan’s top suggestions, as well as a host of items we've identified from our own research that we think are going to make your life on the road better in a variety of ways.
When asked about his number one choice of accessory, Bryan had no hesitation: a driveaway awning.
“It really helps keep things manageable, neat and tidy because you can store general clutter and any wet or dirty gear outside – it’s also a great asset if you have pets,” he says. Bryan invested in a Dometic Rally Air Pro 260 awning for his van and rates it very highly. Currently retailing for £1005, Dometic quality doesn’t come cheap but, thankfully, there’s plenty of choice out there and we’ve listed a couple of great alternatives below.
So what exactly is a driveaway awning? Essentially it’s a tent that attaches to the side of your van with a corridor-like opening onto your habitation- or sliding-side door. It gives you plenty of options to extend your covered storage, cooking, eating, sleeping and living space outside of your van.
Leave it erected for the day while you go exploring and simply park up alongside and reattach it when you get back.
We’re impressed by the size, price and functionality of this Labosco Cubo 2 Person version. It weighs 12kg, offers 9 sqm of ground space and has a maximum height of 2.2m. With its two fibreglass poles, it’s somewhat old school and can be pitched in 25 minutes.
If that’s too slow for you and you want a more modern version with a little more space, you could go for its (slightly) bigger brother the Labosco Cubo Breeze Inflatable 2 Person driveaway awning. Using the air beam system it inflates and can be fully pitched in just 10 minutes, though at £559 it is a step up in price from its lower-tech sibling.
A satnav’s, a satnav, and I don’t need one for my campervan anyway when I’ve got navigation on my phone, right? Wrong! If your vehicle is over a certain height, weight or width, then a satnav that sends you and your pride and joy on routes which turn out to be a one-way ticket to the body repair shop is worse than useless — it’s dangerous and potentially very hazardous to your wallet, to boot.
The TomTom Campervan Sat Nav GO Camper Max 7" HD is specifically designed to meet the needs of campervan and motorhome drivers. Once the dimensional and weight details of your vehicle have been uploaded, the device will take them into account before finding the most appropriate and time-efficient route to your destination.
That means no more low bridge and narrow country lane anxiety! If time is on your side, you can also opt for slower but more scenic routes which are still safe to use but will allow you to discover camping-related points of interest along your way. A lower-priced, 6-inch version is available too.
Unless you plan to spend every night parked up on tarmac, you’re going to find yourself needing to make progress on a variety of surfaces that offer, let’s say, sub-optimal traction. Whether it’s on wet grass, mud, sand, snow or a variety of other soft surfaces, the prospect of spinning your wheels and getting bogged down in a remote location is not an appealing one. Campervans are heavy, so it may require more than a friendly passerby with a tow rope and a Ford Focus to get you going again.
Consequently, most savvy owners carry grip mats to provide the driven wheels with additional traction in sticky situations. Depending on the weight of your vehicle and the under-wheel surface, you might get away with lighter, flexible plastic options but for more heavy-duty situations these Milenco extra wide grip mats at 106cm in length and priced at £26.92 will be a lot cheaper than a recovery job.
The pair can also be quickly linked together if, for example, you have some traction on one side but not the other. The best advice, however, is to not get stuck in the first place by parking your driven wheels on the mats whenever you stop in slippery conditions.
The call of the wild is strong for most campervan owners, but calls of nature are equally impossible to ignore when out on the road. There is a variety of portable toilet options that negate the need to set foot outside a campervan in the middle of the night. However, for let’s say, larger jobs in off-grid locations, the most environmentally friendly solution is often to dig a hole away from water courses before you do the business and then bury your waste.
A collapsible spade or shovel is essential for this exercise and this one from Gerber with a carbon steel blade is likely to be more useable than cheaper variants when the ground is hard going. It might also help dig you out of trouble in snowy, sandy or muddy conditions.
If you’ve ever tried to sleep on an incline you’ll know that gradients and a good night’s sleep are not the best of bedfellows. To avoid finding yourself curled up in the lowermost corner of your sleeping space when you’ve parked up for the night in less than horizontal conditions, you’re going to need a set of levelling ramps.
Even if they can’t flatten out the more extreme lumps and bumps of your pitch, they’ll generally allow you to get your van as close to level as possible. A level van is also far safer when cooking inside and, clearly, it also means other unsecured items are less likely to end up on the floor. With a massive 2,300 ratings at an average of 4.7 stars on Amazon, this Thule motorhome levelling ramps and storage bag set is both robust and reasonably lightweight — and at £35.92 it could be the difference between a decent kip and a night spent battling gravitational forces.
Enjoying hot food while out in the wild is one of the great pleasures, but also one of the biggest challenges for campervan owners. Sure, it can be done, but the trick is to do it using the minimum amount of energy while retaining maximum cooking flexibility. Ideally, you want to be able to use the three principal cooking methods: dry heat, moist heat and a combination of the two.
Dry heat in a campervan scenario is primarily going to be some variation of pan-frying or potentially even baking. Wet heat will be boiling up pasta, making soups, stews, sauces and anything where liquid covers the ingredients. As for combination cooking, that’s often a case of browning certain cuts of meat and then cooking them on a stovetop without completely immersing them in liquid, a process also known as braising.
Given all of the above, we reckon if you don’t have built-in cooking facilities you will definitely want to go for a sturdy, durable double burner set-up. Equally, if you don’t want to be carrying large gas bottles around with you then a Primus Tupike Stove could fit the bill. It is a solidly built unit, designed to last and will allow you to indulge in gourmet cooking en plein air. It comes equipped with a removable drip tray and a griddle plate that will toast bread, melt cheese or even fry up a steak.
The separately adjustable burners will boil a litre of water in just four and a half minutes and its side screens mean the wind will be kept at bay when cooking outside. You could even supplement it with our preferred plancha to work across both burners simultaneously - making a full British breakfast very doable.
It comes with a variety of adapters for different sizes and brands of gas bottles and canisters, it weighs in at just 4.5kg and its dimensions when packed are 47.5cm x 29.8cm x 8.2cm
The ability to bake food while using a campervan equipped only with gas burners may seem an impossibility, but trust us, with this clever device from Omnia it’s not. This oven sits on your stove top burner and, as long as you don't mind everything taking the form of an oversized bagel, it’ll bake anything from bread to cakes to cinnamon buns to lasagna and even macaroni cheese!
For those times when you’ve hooked up into the grid on a campsite, experienced motorhomer Bryan thoroughly recommends the Remoska Electric cooker. Its sheer versatility is astonishing, covering everything from baking bread and cakes to roasting chicken joints and making a traditional British fry-up.
Essentially it can do anything an oven can and be used as a pan for frying, sautéing and braising. It uses very little power – good for low voltage hookups – is easy to clean and, judging by its glowing online reviews, has an evangelical army of followers.
When your gourmet cooking aspirations are potentially hampered by storage space issues, it makes sense to opt for a space-saving nesting camping cook set. This one from Stanley is not cheap at £160, but it does contain 21 pieces that are designed to pack all of the convenience of a domestic kitchen set, including plates, chopping board and sporks along with a 3.5 litre stainless steel pot with vented lid and a 0.9 litre frying pan, in one incredibly compact nesting package – i.e. the steel pot itself.
As one verified purchaser put it: “The set is nice and compact and seems of decent quality. It contains everything one needs on a camping trip. We got this for our campervan and it’s saved us tons of room. It is pricey but I have the impression that it will last us a lifetime, which makes the price justified. Stanley make quality products that last for ages and those simply have to cost more.”
If combined with a plancha, a Remoska electric cooker and an Omnia stove top oven, we reckon you’d have most gourmet cooking and baking options well covered.
Of course, unless you’re planning to cook up dry food or eat out of tins, you’re going to need some way of keeping perishable ingredients cool. If you’re in a motorhome you’ll likely have a built-in fridge, but for everyone else, there’s a variety of solutions to this perennial problem. Some go for a simple cool box that’s good for keeping milk, cheese and meats cool for a limited amount of time and this might even be all you need for weekend trips in cooler weather.
But if you plan to do more — and who doesn’t? — then you’ll need a fridge and possibly a freezer of some sort. This Dometic CFX3 45 is a 45 litre portable fridge or freezer unit that’s a serious piece of kit, with a serious price to match. However, both the specifications and the many online reviews out there suggest that it’s an invaluable addition to any campervan set-up. It can run off mains or 12-volt power, and has a raft of smart features that help ensure it operates efficiently whether using a vehicle or leisure battery.
It can work either in fridge or freezer mode, down to -22 degrees C, and reviewers state that they’ve been impressed by the low draw it has on a leisure battery. With Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, you can set and monitor temperature and power consumption via an app on your phone and also charge that and other devices via a USB port.
Linked to a supplementary external power pack, this cool box will keep food chilled for days on end. If, when parked up, it’s connected to your van’s 12v cigarette lighter socket it will automatically shut itself down before draining the battery to a point where you can no longer start the vehicle. All in all, a clever and highly practical, if somewhat pricey, piece of kit.
We’ve covered quite a bit of ground with our top campervan and motorhomes accessory picks, but in reality we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what’s out there. However, you’ve got to start somewhere and we’re particularly impressed by the technology, build-quality and versatility of the Dometic CFX 3 45 fridge/freezer.
In terms of cooking devices, Bryan’s recommendation of the Remoska electric cooker based on his extensive use of it carries a lot of weight, especially when combined with countless glowing online reviews.
Meanwhile, on the driving side of things, to get you out of slippery situations, many owners agree that the Milenco extra wide grip mats are the way to go, or rather to get going, especially if you park your driven wheels on them when you first stop.
Although it might not be the most obvious campervan accessory, Bryan did have one parting recommendation — especially for those planning longer trips. He says some form of supplementary transport is all but essential when you arrive at your destination. It not only opens up the possibilities for visiting local attractions and hostelries, but who wants to have to strike camp and drive their motorhome to the local shop for a pint of milk? And one mode of transport has really changed the game lately.
“The popularity of electric bikes has exploded among the motorhome community in recent years,” says Bryan. “Previously owners who live part of the year in their van might have taken a motor scooter with them or even towed a small car, but electric bikes have largely changed that.”
Need a little assistance in choosing the right one? Check out our breakdown of the best electric bikes, out now.
In the meantime, we hope our picks have given you some inspiration and insight into how to make your van life experience, be it in a campervan or motorhome, all the more comfortable and convenient. Now it’s over to you to take your pick, pack up, buckle up and hit the road!
Prices were updated on 08/09/2022. We are not responsible for any changes made to the prices listed.
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