Human Comforts for your van

We are living in such an awesome time right now. Technology these days makes vanlife so accessible. For instance, this website is connecting like-minded kookz to the knowledge needed to build a van, solar is readily available, affordable, and flexible, 12v fridges exist for us, 12v battery systems make our days off the grid no sweat, apps help us to stay connected, find new routes, and find camping destinations, etc. Think about it, there has been no better time to vanlife! Here we compile all our favorite human comforts for all you vankookz. These are some of the things you do not want to live without. We talk about our favorites and things we wouldn’t use again or recommend.

12v Fridges

While there are a lot of people out there using Dorm Fridges, we like the efficient 12v Fridges. The less efficient fridge you have the more you will have to spend on batteries to power it. I know a lot of people see the price on 12v fridges and get pretty turned off. But, have you seen the price of batteries?!

Anyways, we are cheap, so we will show you the best knock offs and then we will show you the other brands you’ve probably already read about. But if you know us kookz, we never pay full price. We are gonna share our favorite fridges that don’t break the budget. Remember, that your layout has probably already decided whether you will have a front-loading fridge or a top-loading fridge. If you are here to compare, you are in the right place.

Propane Fridge

Propane fridges, aka 3-way fridges, are very popular in typical RVs. Like the name explains, you can run these fridges off of three sources of power: propane, 120v, and 12v. I have never had one of these besides the RV that I lived in, but I know they come in cooler styles as well. So if you are looking for a 3-way Toploader, now you know this hybrid exists! But, having a three-way fridge comes in handy when you are low on sunlight (i.e: a couple of days of rain) when you are parked at a campsite and would like to plugin, or if you have tons of propane then you have no worries.

120v Fridge

If you have noticed, you may have to pay a pretty penny to purchase a 12v Fridge.

If that isn’t in your budget, but you still want a fridge. The dorm-style fridges are used in a lot of builds out in the wild. But, what you may be saving on your fridge, you’ll most likely be trading off in your battery bank and solar array. Running a 120v fridge requires you to have an inverter running full time. So that the power you are collecting in your battery bank needs to convert to 120v to run your fridge.

Things to keep in mind when going this route:

• There is the loss of energy in power in the conversion.

• Have a large enough battery bank to afford to lose energy 24/7 thru conversion loss.

• You can always think of it as investing in your battery bank and having a big fridge