Collection: Van Builds

You are building it yourself, you have read the threads, and you have seen enough posts from people who bought the wrong thing twice. Nobody wants to make a 300 dollar mistake. So here are the numbers before the marketing.

What a van actually pulls

• CPAP: 30 to 60W, more with a heated humidifier, and the reason you want pure sine wave rather than modified.
• Starlink: 45 to 75W in normal operation.
• 12V compressor fridge: 40 to 60W running, cycling.
• Roof fan: 10 to 30W.
• Laptop and camera batteries: 60 to 100W while charging.

Run all of that at once and you are still under 400W. A 1000W pure sine wave inverter carries it with margin. You need 2000W only when a microwave, an induction hob or a hair dryer joins the list, and those loads decide the size of your battery bank long before they decide your inverter.

The two things builders get wrong

Input voltage first: a 24V inverter will not run on a 12V bank and there is no adapter for it. Cable second: undersized battery cable is the most common fault in this category, and it is what makes an inverter run hot and shut down under load. Follow the gauge in the manual, keep the run short, fuse it at the battery.

Check us the way you check everything else

Full specification on every page, from the manufacturer sheet: continuous power, surge power, input voltage range, weight, and the PV window on controllers. Weight matters on a controller, because that is how you tell a real MPPT from a PWM with MPPT printed on the case. Where a figure is not published, we say so rather than guessing.

Support is support@prestonsupply.com, read by a person and answered within one business day, Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm ET, not a marketplace queue that closes itself. Stock sits in US warehouses. Orders leave in 1-2 business days and arrive in 3-7, free shipping inside the US, 30 days to return it.

Run your load list through the sizing guide, and size the solar side with an MPPT charge controller.