What does going gasless actually need, electrically?

Going gasless means cooking, heating and hot water run on electricity and diesel instead of LPG. The appeal is real freedom — no gas bottle to refill or find abroad, no LPG safety burden — but it puts those loads onto the electrical system, so the battery and charging have to be sized to carry them. Done properly it is liberating; under-specified, it is a van that runs flat.

Why go gasless at all?

The big draw is freedom of movement. There is no gas bottle to refill, no hunting for the right fitting or adaptor as you cross borders — UK, French, Spanish and other systems all differ, and refilling abroad can be a real hassle. There is no LPG on board to inspect, leak or worry about. And it is simpler and cleaner to live with. For anyone touring across countries — Spain and Portugal in winter, Scandinavia, Morocco — removing gas removes a recurring headache.

What moves onto the electrical system

Three jobs that used to run on gas now have to be met another way:

• Cooking — typically induction, which is fast and efficient but pulls hard while it runs. This is usually the biggest single demand and the one that drives inverter and battery sizing.
• Heating — most often a diesel heater, which sips diesel from the vehicle tank and uses very little electricity, making it the efficient choice for space heating. Electric heating is possible but heavy on the battery.
• Hot water — either electric, or via a diesel heater that also does water, or a combined diesel unit. The right choice depends on the build.

Why diesel does the heavy lifting for heat

It would be easy to assume gasless means everything runs off the battery, but that is not how a sensible gasless van works. Heating and hot water are big energy demands, and meeting them purely electrically would need an enormous battery. Diesel heating sidesteps that: it provides the heat using fuel you already carry, with minimal electrical draw. So a well-designed gasless van is really electric-plus-diesel, with electricity focused on cooking and the everyday loads, and diesel carrying the heat.

The calculation that makes or breaks it

This is the heart of it. With cooking and the daily loads all electrical, the battery and every charge source have to be sized against the full, real load — not a headline figure. Induction cooking needs an inverter big enough, and a battery that can actually deliver the current without sagging. The battery has to store enough for your days off-grid. And the charging — engine, solar, hook-up — has to realistically refill it where and when you travel, season by season. Get this calculation right and the van is a pleasure to live in; get it wrong and you are rationing power and resenting the cooker. It is the single most important piece of work on a gasless build, and the part most often under-done by people who treat electrics as an afterthought.

Other things worth knowing

Going gasless can have knock-on implications worth raising early — for how a van is classified, insured, or how habitation safety is assessed — and these are worth getting straight at the design stage rather than discovering later. We will flag anything relevant to your build rather than leave it to surface down the line.

How we would help

Gasless is what we do — it is the core of every Fiadh build, and it leans directly on the off-grid electrical engineering we came from. We size the whole system around your real use so it works in practice, not just on paper. Whether it is a new build or converting an existing van away from gas, tell us how you cook, heat and travel, and we will tell you exactly what it needs.

Off-grid power systems · Converting an existing van to gasless · Ask us