Powering Your Vanlife

When I started out as a nomad I was in a different place every night. Each day I would drive a couple hundred miles which was enough to charge my phone and the laptop using the lighter (to AC power adapter---see picture at top). That lighter adapter was all I used for the first six months on the road. In November 2020 I made my first trip to Quartzsite, Arizona where, for the first time, I began staying in one place for days at a time. Since I wasn’t running the engine, I began using my Jackery Explorer 160 (middle picture) and its matching solar panel. It was a good system: The 160 was big enough to charge my laptop and phone and the desert had enough sun to recharge the Jackery during the day.

One year came to a conclusion and another began. I was well settled into living out of Pandette, dealing with the positives and negatives of vanlife. One hiccup in the experience was not having proper refrigeration: I am generally low maintenance but I like to have a few items on hand that require some sort of refrigeration. The first nine months on the road I had an Igloo ice chest; even with a quality ice chest, you only have a few days before the ice becomes water. Not only did this require a trip to a store---(a consideration during the pandemic)---but food could become waterlogged. I looked at the high rated 12 volt fridges and they were $1000 plus---how much of an investment did I want to make? For a few months I had been wondering how long I would be living out of my van full time; was it worth spending a grand on a fridge? It wasn’t just the fridge, my Jackery 160 was not powerful enough to run a fridge and a larger solar generator and it’s solar panels would be well over $1000. Again, I turned over and over in mind whether I wanted to make another large investment into vanlife.

I applied for a job as a camp host effectively committing myself to another few months living out of Pandette. I bought an inexpensive (under $300) 12 volt fridge. I planned to buy a Bluetti AC 100 but they were out of stock so I bought a Jackery Explorer 1000 (picture below) and the matching solar panels. My reason for buying a “plug and play” system versus something built into Pandette was this: I wanted a system I could take out and use in an off the grid cabin or another vehicle if something happened to my van.

I am currently in between legs of my ongoing journey; it will be interesting to see how life on the road changes with an actual fridge. I am planning on traveling to areas with little sunlight so charging to Jackey with the panels could present a challenge. Stay tuned, Izk