Camping Gadgets Worth the Cupboard Space (and Ones That Aren't)

I strip and rewire caravans for a crook, so I see the inside of a lot of cupboards. Most of them tell the same story: two or three gadgets that get used every single day, and a graveyard of impulse buys that came out once, disappointed everyone, and got shoved to the back. I'd rather you spent your cupboard space and your money on the first pile. So here's my sorting of what earns its keep, judged the way I judge anything, on what it actually draws, what it actually does, and whether the marketing survived contact with reality.

The ones I'd fit to any rig

A proper 12V compressor fridge isn't a gadget so much as the heart of the setup, but the pairing that goes with it is: a decent battery monitor with a shunt. Most people fly blind on power, then wonder why the fridge died overnight. A shunt-based monitor counts amp-hours in and out and tells you the truth, unlike the little green-light gauges built into a lot of vans, which measure voltage and lie to you under load. It's about $150 to $250 of the best information you'll ever buy.

An air compressor that can do real work, not the cigarette-lighter toys, is the other non-negotiable. If you're airing down for sand and gravel (and you should be, my colleague's piece on tyre pressures for corrugations explains why), you need to air back up before the bitumen. A twin-cylinder unit or a solid single that pushes decent litres-per-minute turns a twenty-minute chore into five.

A headlamp per person, rechargeable, on a USB. Cheap, tiny, and it means nobody's holding a torch in their teeth while the other person fumbles a hitch in the dark. I put this above almost every fancier thing on the list.

The genuinely clever ones

• USB-C power bank that does laptop wattage. A 100W-class bank runs phones, camera batteries and a laptop for days off a single charge, and tops back up from the van's 12V system. It replaces three chargers and a pile of cables.
• Collapsible silicone kettle and containers. Not exciting, genuinely space-saving. In a small van, the thing that folds flat beats the thing that nests, every time.
• A cordless handheld vacuum. Sounds soft until you've had red Simpson Desert dust in every crevice. Fifteen minutes of a small vac keeps a van livable on a long trip. Pick one that charges off USB or 12V so you're not hunting for 240V.
• Bluetooth tyre pressure monitor (TPMS). Little sensors on each valve, including the van's, that warn you before a slow leak becomes a shredded tyre at speed. For anyone towing on remote gravel, this is closer to safety kit than a gadget.
• A quality water filter setup. Not glamorous, but a decent inline filter and a way to treat tank water means you can fill from more sources without gambling on your guts a long way from a doctor. Cheaper and lighter than carrying every litre from town.

What ties that list together is that every item does a real job every day and none of it fights your power system. The battery monitor tells the truth, the compressor undoes what airing down did, the headlamps end the torch-in-the-teeth dance, the power bank collapses four chargers into one, the TPMS watches the wheels you can't see, and the filter widens where you can safely take water. Boring, useful, and the stuff that quietly rides along for years without ever being the thing that let you down.

The ones I'd leave on the shelf

Here's where I'll annoy some people. A stack of the "must-have" camping inventions are solving problems you don't have.

Portable washing machines (the hand-crank tubs and the little spin barrels) get gushing reviews and then live in the boot. A bucket with a lid and a plunger does the same job for a tenth of the space, and a laundromat in the next town does it better than both. Solar shower bags are fine in theory and lukewarm in practice; a $30 12V pump and a bucket of water you warmed on the stove beats them most days. Novelty multi-tools with forty functions do forty things badly. A decent knife, real pliers and a proper socket set will always win.

Fold-out solar "generators" marketed as do-everything power stations are another one to think hard about. For a caravan with its own house battery and DC-to-DC charging, a big portable power station often just duplicates capacity you already have, at a premium, in a box that lives on the floor. They're brilliant for a tent or a car-based trip with no fixed system; on a properly wired van they frequently ride around unused. Buy the one that fills a gap in your setup, not the one with the most impressive front panel.

And the big one: gadgets that need 240V. Every pod coffee machine, air fryer and toaster sold for "van life" assumes you're on a powered site or running an inverter that'll punish your battery bank. An air fryer can pull well over 1000 watts. Off grid, that's a huge bite out of your storage for a bit of convenience. If you're serious about free camping, my rule is simple: if it only runs on 240V, it's a caravan-park luxury, not a touring tool.

The one everyone argues about: coffee

No gadget starts more fights at a caravan park than the coffee setup, so let me put my numbers on the table. The pod machines and the pump espresso units are 240V, high-wattage, and off grid they're a genuine drain through an inverter, plus they're fussy and they break. A stovetop moka pot, by contrast, uses no electricity at all, packs into a mug, and makes a strong brew on the same burner you boil the kettle on. It's the answer I give nine times out of ten. If you want milk foam, a hand-pump frother or a tiny 12V one draws almost nothing.

The exception I'll grant is a small 12V-native kettle or a low-wattage element built for the job, because those are designed around the power a van can actually spare, rather than a kitchen appliance dragged into a vehicle and asked to behave. That's the test in a sentence: gear built for 12V from the ground up tends to earn its space; a house appliance on an inverter tends not to. I'd rather carry the moka pot and spend the saved battery on another night off grid, which is the whole point of building the power system in the first place.

How to judge one before you buy

I ask three questions of anything electrical before it comes on board. What does it draw, and can my system feed that without me thinking about it? Does it earn its volume, or is there a flatter, lighter, dumber thing that does the same job? And is the marketing making a claim that physics has to obey? A "1000W solar blanket" that's the size of a placemat is lying to you; panel output is bounded by area and sun, no matter what the label says.

Run those three questions and most of the wall at the camping shop sorts itself. The gear that survives is boring: monitor, compressor, headlamps, a good power bank. It's not a coincidence that the boring stuff is what long-termers actually carry. If you want to see how power draw shapes the whole build, the comparison in lithium vs AGM is where the numbers live, and the wider gear hub has the setups we keep coming back to. Buy the three things that get used daily, borrow or skip the rest, and your cupboards (and your battery) will thank you on a long lap of the country.