240v electrics

I left the installation of the mains (and 12v DC) electrics until towards the end of the conversion on purpose – I hadn’t really bottomed out where things were going to go and I had no desire to ‘bury’ the cables and pipework (for water) behind the walls – whilst it looks neater, you need to plan exactly where the light fittings and power outlets are going to go a long way in advance, and if you change your mind, or want to install extra items, it can get messy.

The mains hookup requires, perhaps not surprisingly, a way of getting a mains cable from the outside world into the van.  I opted to route a cable in through the engine bay in an attempt to avoid cutting more holes in the bodywork of the van.  The cable was routed along with the supply from the starter battery under the passenger footwell and up through a pre-existing cable gland in the floor of the vehicle into the passenger seat base.

From there I routed the cable across to the driver’s seat base and up behind the seat to a standard ‘garage’ RCD/fusebox mounted above the driver’s seat headrest on the partition between the cab and living area.

The cable in the engine bay terminated in a ‘standard’ 16-20A 3 pin plug and I carried 2 extension cables which had a total reach of about 45m if joined together.  Even that wasn’t always quite enough, but only on campsites which didn’t really cater for mains hookups and didn’t have readily available sockets to connect to.

You may just be able to make out the white socket on the floor under the van in the picture above – the socket itself was stowed around the power steering reservoir when driving, and when parking up, I could just unwind it, drop it down past the radiator through the engine bay, then connect it to the relevant extension cable.

One thing I would do differently is carry the cable on a drum or something to wind it around – it gets quite heavy when you’ve coiling it up every day or so!  Its also a faff trying to get it into the bag I bought for storing it.

Mains RCD connected up and going up on the wall

The blue cable hookup cable, coming from the engine bay, went up the wall into the RCD along with the earth cable that came with it.  I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the earth cable, so connected it to an earthing point on the chassis under the driver’s seat along with some existing 12v connections.

The two white cables coming out from the bottom of the RCD box are the supply cables to two circuits.  One went to a couple of standard UK 3-pin sockets (one in the driving ‘cab’, the other in the living area) and the other was dedicated to an immersion heater mounted in the top of the calorifier/hot water cylinder via a separate isolation switch (which was almost always left ‘on’).

Once everything was installed (the 2nd box in the photo above is the monitor for the battery-to-battery charger and the water level monitor) I installed some ‘d-truncking’ which certainly improved the look of the whole assembly.  Unfortunately the self adhesive backing on the trunking wasn’t quite up to the job so I had to screw it in place.  No big deal though.

The twin 3-pin socket above is situated behind the driver’s seat next to the main 12v fusebox.

I had absolutely no problems with the mains hookup so I guess whatever I did must have been ok.

In terms of connecting to ‘foreign’ outlets, I made up a couple of converters, but used one almost exclusively – a standard UK 3-pin plug with a 20A round pin (camping) socket on the other end of a short length of cable.  In South Africa I just bought a local-to-UK adapter and that saw me through all of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana.

In Zambia they use the UK plugs, and if memory serves they did in Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya.  And if they didn’t, they used the South African plugs, so I had no problems at all for the whole trip.

I had made up a polarity reversing cable (connecting Live to Neutral and vice versa) on the advice of a book about converting vans, but never used it.  I took a socket tester and used it almost every time I connected up to a campsite’s power, but it rarely sounded off to warn me about issues and even when it did, there was little I could do about it.  The most common problem was ‘no earth’ – no really much I could do about that short of rewiring the campsite – followed by occasional polarity issues.  Even then, when I plugged in the polarity reversing cable, it didn’t seem to fix the issue so I just carried on using the electrics regardless.

I took a UK-to-European (2 pin) converter but didn’t use it at all.

Only one or two campsites had a European style 3-round-pin style camping outlet.