Van Life Hacks & Tips

Welcome to our growing archive of helpful vanlife hacks & tips. On this page, you can find helpful campervan lifestyle articles such as “7 Tips For Women Starting Vanlife” & “Biggest Vanlife Mistakes”. You can also read about some of our favorite van life products & what crucial vanlife tools we carry with us on the road.

Over the 2+ years (and counting!) that we’ve been living and traveling in our DIY campervan, we’ve learned a few campervan living hacks, tips, and tricks to make life on the road less stressful, more comfortable, and more time efficient. If your van conversion is finished and you are already traveling on the road, or even if you’ve only just begun thinking about living the van life dream and looking for inspiration, this vanlife hacks & tips page is for you.

We’ve compiled a list of posts below designed to help you get the most out of your van life experience. Everybody’s campervan experience is unique and no two are perfectly alike, but we’ve realized that there are common vanlife hacks & tips that everybody can benefit from, no matter your background and lifestyle.

So if you’re ready to learn more great tips and tricks to level up your campervan travels, keep reading our archive below!

But First, What Are ‘Van Life Hacks’?

A van life hacks is any tip or trick that helps make living this nomadic campervan lifestyle easier, more enjoyable, and less stressful. These van life tips can be large & generic, such as how to maintain proper hygiene while on the road, or these tips can be small and specific, such as using a foldable clothes hanger to hang multiple items without taking up a large amount of space.

“Van life hacks” is such a wide ranging topic that we wrote a number of articles below that detail great campervan tips and advice on specific topics within the van life realm. Below you can read posts about some of the mistakes we’ve made while traveling in our campervan, important tips and advice for female van life travelers, essential van life gear and products, and even some of the crucial tools to carry along with you.We hope you learn a thing or two while perusing this section and be sure to contact us if you feel we left anything out!

Van Life Hacks and Campervan Lifestyle Tips (Post Archive)

Below are our top van life hacks and campervan tips below. We hope you enjoy!

Van Life For Women: Tips For Safety, Hygiene, and Long Term Travel

Sometimes van life is just plain hard! And this feels especially true for women who live and travel long-term in their campervans. I (Yuko) have learned a lot over the last 2+ years of living in my campervan and I want to share my 7 hacks & tips for women in van life. In this article, I talk about how to reduce stress while traveling in a van, important van life safety for women (important for solo female van lifers), and I even go over how to pee cleanly like a man!

For more information, head over and read my post!

Van Life Mistakes: Things We Learned About Life On The Road

Nobody gets vanlife right the first time around. In fact, getting really good and comfortable at this campervan lifestyle takes years to learn. We are far from perfect, but we’ve learned a few tips and tricks about life on the road and how to better enjoy vanlife over the long term. Vanlife is a marathon, not a sprint right? In this article, we talk about keeping your van clean and working right, stealth camping, and even about how to make sure your campervan’s electrical system can properly meet your energy demands.

To learn more, read our post below!

Campervan Maintenance Tips

We know, the topic of maintaining your campervan is such a snooze! But just because your van conversion is complete doesn’t mean you can throw away the gloves. In fact, one of the best van life tip we can give is to properly maintain your vehicle. Regularly maintaining your campervan with easy to do tasks will help keep your van running in top shape for as long as possible. In this post, we discuss important maintenance tips such as how to keep your vehicle’s starting battery healthy, the importance of regularly washing your van’s chassis, and how we always keep our van’s tire pressure right where we need them to be.

Vanlife Do’s and Don’ts: Be Considerate, Prepared, And Hygenic!

While there are no hard & set rules for vanlife, we’ve certainly learned a few hacks, tips, and tricks to make traveling in a campervan easier and more enjoyable. And as the number of us vanlifers increases every year, we’ve found that rules against campervan living are on the rise. So our Van Life Do’s and Don’ts article also touches on several ways to be considerate van travelers, such as how we treat our neighbors and surroundings so that we can continue to live the nomadic life that we love.

For more information, check out our article below!

19 Essential Van Life & Campervan Gear

Who doesn’t love a good list of van life essentials? We selected our top 19 essential van life gear that we use and wrote about them in this post. Some of these essentials could be classified as a ‘van life hack’, or tip, or trick, but in the end of the day, each of these products has helped to improve our van life experience one way or another. Whether it’s to help keep our campervan tidier, more space efficient, or even helping us solve our bathroom issues, these 19 products that we write about truly are ‘essentials’ to us.

For more information, check out our article below!

Must Have Tools For Van Life

We have over 20+ tools in our campervan tool box but if we’re being honest, not every tool is useful. We’ve never used some of the tools we brought. However, there are 5 tools that we use fairly regularly that help us to maintain the inside of our campervan. Whether we’re working on our electrical system, tightening loose screws, or keeping things together after thousands of miles on the road, these 5 tools have been invaluable to us. To read more, check out our campervan essential tools post below.

Proper Camper Van Battery Charging Tips

How you charge and discharge your batteries is crucial to their long-term health and lifespan. Surprisingly, different battery chemistries require different charging strategies.

Did you know:

AGM batteries should not be regularly discharged past 50%?
Lithium batteries don’t like to be constantly kept at 100% charge?

Doing either of the above can significantly reduce the lifespans of those batteries.

Have Any Van Life Hacks To Share With Us?

Though we’ve been traveling in our campervan for 2+ years already, we’re by no means experts when it comes to this lifestyle. Even today, we’re constantly learning new tips, and tricks that help make van life better and more enjoyable. And whenever we learn something new, we’re sure to share them on our blog.

But if you feel like we’ve left out an important hack or tip that you’ve learned from your own van life journey, please be sure to let us know! Either post a comment under one of our articles or send us a message through our contact form.

We appreciate it!

Not What You're Looking For?

Check Out Our Other Van Life Sections!

Build Your Own DIY Campervan

Our step-by-step campervan conversion guide takes you from start to finish. We cover all the important build topics, such as:

Learn More: Build A Campervan

Campervan Interior Design Guide

A graphic designer by trade, Yuko meticulously designed the interior of our campervan. In our interior design guide, we cover:

Learn More: Campervan Interior Design Guide

Van Life Costs & Finances

Learn about all the costs involved with our van life adventure. Full transparency. In this section, we talk about:

Learn More: Campervan Costs & Finances

Thanks For Reading Our Van Life Hacks & Tips

We hope you enjoyed reading through some of the articles in our van life hacks and tips guide. As we continue to travel and live in our self-converted campervan, we want to post more of our knowledge here in this campervan life guide.