It was quite windy on the drive home and we had a few spots of rain, but the main body of the storm came in the afternoon. Our house is so sheltered that we have to read news reports to get a feel for how bad it is. The van’s parking bay has brick walls around it and it is safe from anything except flying debris.

We stopped for coffee and Anzac bickies on the way home. It is so nice being able to use small kitchen appliances in the van. We are still using our gas cooktop for most things, but it saves switching the gas on when we just want a hot drink on the road.

I ordered an ordinary electric one burner cooktop after finding our induction cooktop didn’t work off the inverter. The new cooker has a ceramic top with red light underneath. (my mother had that sort of cooktop in her house at Kingswood Street). It heats up quickly and takes quite a while to cool down, so is a good source of heating for the van. However, it does draw a lot of power and we would only want to have it on for about 20 minutes.

How did our new power system go? Really well. We still need to monitor our use of the inverter with kitchen appliances, but we can do all of our charging and use lights as much as we want without significant draw on the batteries. Our adventures in free camping will continue in much more comfort.

We found we didn’t need to use the heater. Even though we had temperatures down to about 3 degrees overnight the little van heats up enough from cooking and two person body warmth to keep us reasonably comfortable. We try to park where we get maximum morning sun for the solar system and that also helps with warming the van.