Product Reviews
Power, batteries, water, awnings, storage and safety gear — assessed the way an experienced RV owner actually shops: on durability, install effort, and whether it earns its space on board.
Follow The Journey

Electrical fires in RVs and boats tend to start where nobody is looking - battery compartments, inverter bays, fuse panels, storage lockers and engine bays.

Most RV owners heading off for a walk end up juggling a water bottle, a first aid pouch, hand sanitiser and, if there's a dog along, a bowl as well.

A 72-gram rechargeable headlamp built around a dual-lens system - a spotlight and a floodlight run separately rather than as one blended beam.

A gas-free hotplate that packs down to 31mm thick and cooks a full mixed meal at once — steak, veg and spuds side by side with no cold spots.

Handheld UHF radios are usually a trade-off between range and everything else — battery life, waterproofing, how easy the channel setup actually is.

Airing down for the beach or an unsealed track usually means kneeling at every valve with a gauge, guessing when you've hit the right number.

Folding solar blankets promise the output of a full-size panel without the bulk of a rigid one — but that flexibility usually costs you somewhere, whe

A fixed roof panel only ever sees the sun the van is pointed at.

Every cassette or portable toilet needs something in the tank, and Aqua Kem Green is Thetford's septic-safe answer — a step away from the older blue,

A slow leak on tow is rarely dramatic until it suddenly is.

A basic antenna amplifies whatever signal is already there, weak or not.

Not every tap at a caravan park or bore tastes the way you'd want it to.

A washing machine that needs an inverter or a powered site isn't much use free camping.

Guessing a gas bottle's level by weight or by shaking it is imprecise at best.

Induction heats the pan directly rather than the air around it, which is the difference owners notice first when they switch over from gas — faster bo

Airing down for a beach or unsealed track is the easy half of the job — getting all four tyres back to road pressure afterward is where a weak compres

Airing down four tyres to an even, repeatable pressure by eye and a gauge is tedious and easy to get wrong.

Most RV electrical headaches come down to one thing: too many separate boxes doing jobs that don't talk to each other.

There's a reason the MultiPlus-II shows up so often in higher-end van builds and caravan refits: it isn't just an inverter, and it isn't just a charge

Lithium conversions are one of the most common upgrades in Australian RVs right now, and Enerdrive's B-TEC Ultra range is one of the more established

Not everyone wants to cut into their van's wiring loom to get off-grid power, and that's the gap portable power stations like the AC200L fill — a self

Compressor fridges changed the way Australians travel off-grid, and the CFX3 range is Dometic's current flagship expression of that — a 53-litre compr

An awning is one of those additions that changes how you actually use your van or caravan day to day — shade, weather cover, and a bit of extra "outdo

Modern vehicles with smart alternators have made basic split-charge systems unreliable, which is exactly the problem DC-DC chargers like the IDC25 wer

Factory headlights are designed around bitumen and legal beam patterns, not the unlit backroads and station tracks that come with serious touring, whi

A good MPPT controller is one of those quiet, unglamorous upgrades that pays for itself in charging efficiency, and Victron's SmartSolar 100/30 is one

Guessing at state of charge from a row of LEDs is one of the more outdated habits still hanging around older RV electrical setups, and Redarc's Smart

For owners running more than one battery bank, or wanting the kind of precision a serious off-grid setup deserves, Enerdrive's ePRO+ takes a more trad

BMPRO has replaced the entry-level BatteryPlus35-II-SI with a genuine high-amp version — same basic footprint and mounting, but with real MPPT solar r

Dometic's PLB40 takes a similar idea to a portable power station but strips it back to just the battery — a self-contained, carry-handle lithium unit

Before DC-DC chargers became the default recommendation for every setup, electronic dual-battery isolators like the DBC100K were the standard way to k

Victron has moved on from the Orion-Tr Smart in the mid-range of its DC-DC charger lineup, and the Orion-XS 12/12-50A is where most owners upgrading w

External storage is a constant negotiation in any motorhome build, and the Ultra Box 500 is Fiamma's larger rear-mounted answer to it — a genuinely si