Coping in a Heatwave in your Camper or Motorhome

There’s a heatwave across Europe at the moment. We’re in Switzerland which yesterday broke some all time temperature records, and it is set to get even hotter today. We thought we’d share what we are doing to keep cool, and give you our top tips on coping in your camper, campervan or motorhome in hot weather.

1. Retreat to a Campsite or go to High Altitude

We love free camping and staying on aires, but when the heat comes we either retreat to a campsite or (if we’re somewhere with mountains) get to as high an altitude as we can, like the time we stopped up in the Sierra Navada during a heatwave in Spain. Best of all would be a campsite at high altitude! If getting to altitude isn’t possible, we try to find a campsite close to water – sea, lake or river – where it tends to be a bit cooler. Let’s be honest here, no matter how much you love your home on wheels, when it gets hot (unless you have air conditioning – I’ll come on to that later) you won’t want to be sat inside a hot tin box. We tend to go for a campsite because it’s seen as acceptable for me to walk around in a bikini (not always the done thing in a car park), we can use our awning for shade, and they give us access to a constant supply of water and cool showers.

Of course we never learn and are not at altitude or by water currently! We were free camping up in the mountains around 1600m when the heatwave started. It was cooler up there,  but having already spent three nights ‘off-grid’, we needed to service the van. Swiss campsites seem quite expensive to us (although we met a Swiss chap who told how expensive he thinks Italy is!), so we picked a site from the ACSI discount scheme, which limited our options. Why didn’t we just service and go back up the mountain? Well it was already hot and forecast to get hotter (touching 35°C) – so we opted to stay on a campsite for a couple of days to ride out the worst of it. Ideally we’d have picked a site with shaded pitches, and we should really have done more research before coming here, but we’re doing OK.

2. Create Airflow and Shade

When parking up, we try to work out the route the sun will take (sometimes we even get the compass out!) so we park in as much shade as possible. If that isn’t an option we create shade. Rolling out the awning will shade one side of the van and helps keep it cooler inside, and also give us somewhere to sit outside. If, like us, you don’t have sides to your awning, as the sun moves it will eat into your shade. We peg sheets or towels onto the awning to hang down the sides or front to maximise the shade area.

Being on a campsite means we can open all the windows and skylights to get air flowing through the van (we installed a new skylight a while back which opens nice and wide). On the side without an awning we cover the open window to stop the heat getting in. You can buy purpose-made covers, but we’ve found that our quick dry towels from Mountain Warehouse are pretty much the exact size for our Hymer windows and four pegs easily keeps them in place. We put on our silver screens too. They do a great job of keeping the van warm in winter, but also reflect the heat and keep it cooler in the summer. The front blinds are quite good at that job too, but without the ‘silvers’ on, a layer of super-heated air is created between the screen and blinds.

If we aren’t able to get somewhere that we feel safe leaving our windows open, we keep them closed with the thermal blinds pulled up and curtains closed. We have thermal linings on our curtains which was done for their blackout for our trip to Norway (it’s not easy to sleep in the midnight sun!) and the cold, but they also help with the heat. We can still open the skylights to use those to get the air flowing (our main skylight doesn’t open enough for anyone to climb in, so this creates only a very small security risk, which we’re OK with).

3. Prepare to do Nothing

If we have things we need to do, we get up early and get them done before the heat of the day kicks in. As it warms up, we slap on some sunscreen (even if we’re going to be in the shade all day), grab a good book, plonk ourselves in our camping chairs, or on a lounger by the pool if we have access to one, and relax. It may sound obvious, but now is not the time to be sightseeing. We’ve tried that in the past and quickly found tempers fraying, to the point we almost drove to another country in a huff! We’ve hardly moved from our awning shade for two days, peering out only to get a few pics of the local birds of prey soaring around the campsite skies.

4. Help Your Fridge Freezer

Dips in the pool and cool showers help us cope in a heatwave, as does a steady supply of cool drinks with ice. Luckily in our motorhome we have a fridge with a small freezer compartment. We’ve found that our fridge has struggled in higher temperatures, which is another reason we try to get to a campsite as it seems to cope better in the heat when running on electric hook-up instead of gas which we use when free camping. We also try to shade the outside of the van where the fridge is, being careful not to cover up the air vents. We tend to use a blanket pegged onto our bike rack to create shade, and park so the fridge isn’t in full sun. We ensure the fridge and freezer are both full – even if it is just ice blocks or bottles of water, and open it as little as possible. Some folks install fans behind the upper fridge vent to try and help the fridge keep cold, but we’ve read mixed reports on how well this works and haven’t bothered doing it ourselves.

5. Travelling in a Heatwave and Air-Conditioning

Sometimes we do need to get from A to B when it’s really hot. When this is the case we drive during the day and use the air-conditioning in the cab to keep us cool/sane. We don’t have air conditioning in the van for when we are parked up. Our previous van, Dave, came with an evaporative cooling system on his roof. This would run off the leisure battery and reduce the temperature in the van by a couple of degrees. We probably used it twice in the two years we had him, as it would use a lot of battery power for very little benefit.

We have friends who have a personal air-con unit called a Transcool, which our pooch Charlie tested in Spain. It was another evaporation system which this time ran off either 12v or 240v. The difference to the one in Dave was that it wasn’t trying to cool the entire van, this blew a concentrated stream of cool or cold, if you used ice instead of water, air in one direction. This worked really well for keeping Charlie cool once he got used to the breeze on him.

Other friends survived a summer in their motorhome in Croatia with their young daughter and two dogs. Knowing it could be heatwave temperatures for days, before the set off they bought an air-conditioning unit for their van from coolmycamper.com. This hangs over the van window, and needs 230V to work. They reported back that it worked well for them and will be using it again this year.

We’re already on the road though, and as we only tend to travel out of season, we only have to take action to avoid the heat for a few days, so for us it’s not worth investing in either of the above.

6. Keeping your Pooch Cool

Our pampered pooch passed away a year ago tomorrow. While we still miss him terribly, we were only saying yesterday how much he would have hated this weather, and much how we’d be fretting about him if he was still with us. Having travelled to the Sahara three times and seen his fair share of heatwaves across Europe we found that Charlie was pretty good at keeping himself cool. He would head for shade, usually under the van, lie down and do nothing. We took a lot of our advice above from him!

That said, there were a few things that we could do to help him keep cool. Depending on where we were we would either wet him or put a cold damp towel on him and change it regularly. Charlie hated going for swim in the sea, so Jay would carry him in and stay with him while he cooled off.  We always made sure he had plenty of water available (we carried a collapsible water bowl on walks), and he would love to crunch on an ice cube or two (not sure if this helped him, but he enjoyed it). We kept his fur cut short, mainly because he would fur up the van, and we’re not sure if this help keep him cool or not, but it certainly stopped him smelling of wet dog once he’d been under a wet towel all day.

Finally… Ju’s No. 1 Top Tip for Keeping Cool

Ice cream! Preferably Italian stuff and as much of it as possible….

Keep cool everyone!

Ju x