The single most common question we get, by a wide margin, is some version of "but where does the water come from" or "what do you actually do about the toilet." So here it is, properly, in one place — no soft-focus filter, no pretending it's more glamorous than it is.
Bertha is fully off-grid. No hookup, no mains connection, nothing plumbed into anything external. Everything we use, we carry, generate, or empty ourselves. Here's exactly how.
Power: solar, a leisure battery, and a lot of respect for cloudy days
We run two 200-watt solar panels on the roof into a single leisure battery, with a small inverter for anything that needs a normal plug — laptop charger, phone chargers, the occasional hairdryer emergency. It sounds simple because, most of the time, it is.
The panels keep the battery topped up in anything resembling daylight, even flat grey Cornish daylight, which is more forgiving than people assume. Where it gets harder is a genuine run of overcast days in winter, when we have to start being disciplined — laptop use rationed, lights on only when needed, and an early night instead of burning through what's left in the battery watching something on a laptop.
We don't run a generator. We looked into it and decided the noise, the fuel, and the faff outweighed just being a bit more careful with what we've got. On the rare occasion the battery gets genuinely low, we drive somewhere — the alternator tops it up on the move, and a couple of hours of driving buys us a couple of days of normal use.
Water: it comes in containers, and so does everything that leaves
We carry a 100-litre fresh water tank under the bed, filled by hand from tap points — service stations, campsites when we stay on one, and a few Cornwall car parks that have public taps, which we've mapped out over the past few months out of necessity. Filling it is unglamorous: a hose, a funnel, and about ten minutes of standing about.
A hundred litres sounds like a lot until you're both showering, washing up, and Tilly's decided to roll in something on the coast path. In practice it lasts us four or five days if we're careful, less if we're not. We shower mostly at leisure centres or campsites rather than in the van itself — the van shower exists and works, but it eats water fast, so it's the exception rather than the routine.
Greywater — washing up water, shower runoff — goes into a separate tank underneath and gets emptied at designated disposal points, the same ones campsites and motorhome stopovers provide for exactly this purpose. It is never, ever tipped onto the ground. That's not a minor courtesy, it's the difference between van life being tolerated in a place and van life getting banned from it.
The toilet, since everyone wants to know
We use a composting toilet — solid and liquid waste separated at source, which sounds more complicated than it is once you've done it a handful of times. Liquid gets emptied regularly into any normal toilet. Solid waste, mixed with a coconut coir medium, gets emptied far less often and disposed of properly, never anywhere it shouldn't be.
It took about a week to stop feeling strange about the whole system and start finding it completely normal. It's cleaner and less smelly than either of us expected, mostly because separation is the whole trick — combined waste is where the smell comes from, and this system never combines it.
Heating and cooking
We run a diesel heater plumbed into the van's own fuel tank, which was one of the better decisions we made during the build — no separate gas bottle to run out of, no carrying spare fuel, just a thermostat and a genuinely warm van even in a Cornish January. Cooking is a two-ring gas hob on small refillable bottles, swapped roughly every three to four weeks depending on how much we're cooking.
What we'd tell anyone starting from scratch
- Oversize your solar and battery capacity if you can afford to — we'd go bigger if we were building again, purely for the buffer on bad-weather weeks
- Map your water and greywater disposal points for wherever you're spending time, before you need them, not during a crisis
- A diesel heater plumbed to the main tank is worth every penny compared to gas heating
- Don't skip the greywater tank to save money — it's not optional if you want to be a responsible guest wherever you park
- Give yourself longer than you expect to feel normal about the toilet situation. It does happen. It just takes a bit longer than the YouTube videos suggest
Is it worth it?
Completely. There's something genuinely satisfying about knowing exactly where every drop of water and every watt of power in your life comes from and goes to. It makes you careful in a way that, if I'm honest, I think everyone could probably do with a bit more of. It also means we can park somewhere with a sea view for a week without needing anything from anyone — which was rather the point of all this in the first place.
— Wild Coast Mama