Best power station for a campervan (UK 2026)

The RIVER 2 Pro hits the campervan sweet spot: 768Wh covers a full off-grid day including the fridge, it’s light enough to lift out one-handed, and the 70-minute mains recharge means a café stop or an hour on EHU fully refills it. The built-in MPPT takes up to 220W of solar — a single portable panel on the dashboard or roof keeps the fridge running indefinitely in a UK summer.

X-Boost stretches the 800W output to run a 1,600W kettle or travel hairdryer — genuinely useful in a van where every appliance battle is fought at breakfast. LiFePO4 chemistry is rated for 3,000+ cycles, so daily van-life use won’t wear it out for a decade. The app’s live wattage readout also settles every ‘what’s draining it?’ argument instantly.

If the van is your office or your home, step up to the Explorer 1000 v2. The 1,070Wh capacity gives you headroom for winter heater running, camera batteries and a proper laptop workday, and 1,500W continuous output runs an induction hob or coffee machine — things the 800W class can’t touch without boost tricks.

It’s still one-person liftable at 10.8kg, charges fully from mains in about an hour, and takes 400W of solar input, which is enough to fully recover a day’s use from a UK summer’s sun. Jackery’s 5-year warranty and the v2’s move to LiFePO4 fix the biggest criticisms of the older 1000.

The SOLIX C800 gives you RIVER 2 Pro capacity with 50% more continuous output — 1,200W runs most travel kettles and hairdryers natively, no boost mode needed. When it’s on offer (which is often) it’s the most watt-hours per pound in the 768Wh class, and Anker’s build quality is excellent.

The trade-offs against the EcoFlow: it’s 3kg heavier, solar input tops out at 300W but the app is less polished, and there’s no equivalent of X-Boost above its rated output. As a set-and-forget van battery that mostly lives strapped under a seat, none of that matters much.

For weekend and festival vans that don’t run a fridge full-time, the RIVER 3 Max covers lights, phones, laptop and a camera kit for two days at a noticeably lower price. It’s the smallest and lightest unit here, slides under most van seats, and keeps the same LiFePO4 longevity as its bigger siblings.

You give up sustained fridge-plus-everything endurance — with a compressor fridge on board expect a nightly top-up from driving or solar. If a fridge is central to your setup, spend more on the RIVER 2 Pro; if it isn’t, this is all the battery most weekenders ever use.