Wild campers are now being fined, perhaps a campsite with EHU would be better for you.
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Not knowing your set up, using your kettle would need a very powerful inverter and would probably drain your leisure battery in less than 5 mins.
People who are more technical will work out the maths.
Thank you for your help, I'm new to all this, we do have gas so can use that for kettles ect, I'm not sure what the inverter is, we just have a mazda bongo friendy and are looking forward to getting out and about on the island, we bought it just as the lock down started, but thankfully on the island we are covid free and are back to normal apart from opening our borders, I'm glad I found this forum you ate very helpful
ehu = electric hook up unit, runs any of your mains powered items
invertor = generally used for low powered items for short periods of time, so that means anything witch involves heat of any sort is out of the question, what it does is take 12volts from the battery and boosts it up to 240volts, but in doing this it will drain the 12 volt battery very quickly
your leisure batter will run the likes of the water pump, lights 12volt tv/radio
An inverter will take 12 volt from your leisure battery and convert it to 240v which allows you to use normal house hold appliances, they produce a lot of heat in the process and waste a lot of power, many people only use them for short bursts where 12v or gas wont do i.e hair straighteners or similar.
Your bongo should be fitted with a leisure battery which will power most things in the van like your lights, fridge, water pump for taps, night heater if fitted.
If the van is fitted with 240v sockets these will only work when you are on hookup though you could power them via generator, though in a bongo your limited for space to carry one and they are rather antisocial.
Best bet is to look at what you need to use and then see if they are available in 12v, i.e. TV
If your planning on doing a lot of wild camping I would consider fitting a solar panel and possibly a second leisure battery though this may not be possible in a bongo due to lack of space.
There are loads of Free/wild camping groups on Facebook which are a huge source of information.
As for the ridiculous comment above about fines being issued, there are many reasons why people wild camp- festivals/following sport events/ rallies to name but a few where hook up is unavailable, I regularly travel all over Europe using stelplatz and Aires which is perfectly legal and encouraged but hookup is simply unavailable at many, comments like this are completely unhelpful and show a total lack of understanding and ignorance of the subject.
Without knowing some details it's technically impossible to answer your question absolutely, but a rough answer is, almost certainly not!
The dumbed down technical explanation may well be gobbledegook to you, but here goes!
Firstly, an inverter converts low voltage DC electricity (12v car/leisure battery) into high voltage AC electricity (something akin to 240v domestic mains). They come in a variety of power ratings and with varying sophistication as to 'quality' of AC voltage they deliver, things like accuracy of 50hz frequency and how close to true sine wave.
Even a low powered mains electric kettle is likely to be 1kW (most are 2-3kW), inverters are also inefficient in their conversion, so the load on the battery would be about 1.2KW, that's a current draw of 100A. A good healthy fully charged typical 100Ah leisure would pretty much be killed dead by a couple of uses of the kettle!
You may have a high powered inverter fitted and a bank of batteries to support it, but I very much doubt it in a Bongo!
I suspect your inverter is a low powered one more suited to charging phones etc. Your lights would most likely be low voltage and run off the leisure battery, you may have a mix with some mains powered from the EHU (Electric Hook Up - a mains electric connection point, which allows you to feed 240v mains electricity into your camper to power whatever mains rated equipment there is, usually as a minimum, leisure battery charger and a few mains outlet sockets, maybe a microwave oven).
EHU's are available on some (if not all) pitches on most camp sites, but usually have a higher pitch fee or are metered for payment by use.
I run a 550watt (VonChef) kettle from a Mercury 12v 600 watt Pure Sine Wave 230v ac inverter, kettle takes 6 minutes to get 500mls of cold water to a rolling boil.
The leisure battery I use is a cheap 120Ah LEOCH 12v Adventurer SFL-120DT.
Each time I boil the kettle, it uses about 5% of the battery, so basically if I boil the kettle 10 times the battery will need to go on charge as you should not run a Leisure battery to below 50% of it’s Ah capacity otherwise you will shorten it serviceable life considerably.
Obviously it makes more sense to boil water using a gas stove, if you have that option, I don’t.
I wondered about that too. Seemed a bit of a sweeping statement. I googled & found a recent case of N Yorkshire police issuing penalties to a group of people in tents, but they had committed offences unrelated to their sleeping under canvas off a site.
Responsible (stress on responsible) overnight parking in a MH or campervan (aka wild camping) is very unlikely to get a penalty from the police. The responsible bit relates to emptying your toilet and waste water at a campsite or harbour which has facilities, probably every 3-4 days. And leaving your overnight place clean of litter - ideally taking away other rubbish too if you can. Dumping chemical toilet contents can lead to a fine under other legislation (pollution, but I can’t quote the specific Act, certainly not in the Isle of Man).
Thank you for your help, I do have EHU but we have some lovely wild camping spots on the island and wasn't sure what the inverter would power, wild camping on IOM is allowed some spots we have to have a permit some we don't, we are very lucky here, although when all covid is gone from everywhere else we want to do some camping in u. K and Europe, so glad I found this forum, everyone has been very helpful, thank you all
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Topic: Campervan what does inverter run?
via mobile 30/6/2020 at 8:22am
