Shore power means plugging your van into an electrical outlet - at an RV park, a friend's house, or anywhere with grid power. The question is how much you should invest in this capability, and the answer depends entirely on how you'll actually use your van.
Most people overthink shore power. With how cheap solar panels and DC-to-DC chargers have gotten, the majority of van builders are better served by investing in more solar or a bigger DC-to-DC charger than by spending money on shore power equipment.
Use the decision tree below to figure out what actually makes sense for you.
Ask yourself these questions:
If you answered yes to most of those, you probably don't need to invest much (or anything) in shore power. Here are your options, from simplest to most complex:
Mostly off-grid, have enough solar/DC-to-DC?
→ Skip shore power entirely, or grab a general-purpose battery charger
Want faster built-in charging when you occasionally have access to an outlet?
→ Get a more powerful built-in converter/charger
Frequently staying at campgrounds with power? Have an AC or other high-draw appliances?
→ Get an inverter/charger combo
Before choosing a charger, you need to think about what kind of outlet you'll actually be plugging into. This matters more than most people realize.
The normal outlet you find everywhere - friend's garage, outside of a building, etc. Delivers about 1,800W max. This is what most people will have access to.
Portable chargers and the 55A converter work here.
Looks almost identical to a standard outlet but has a T-shaped slot on one prong. Common in kitchens, garages, and workshops. Delivers about 2,400W max.
The 80A converter needs this or larger. Its 20A plug won't fit a standard 15A outlet.
The dedicated RV plug found at campgrounds and RV parks. Delivers about 3,600W max. Completely different plug shape.
Inverter/charger combos benefit most from this. Only found at campgrounds.
Think honestly about where you'll actually be plugging in. If your "shore power" access is mostly going to be borrowing a regular outlet at a friend's house, at work, or from an exterior outlet on a building - you need equipment that works on a standard 15A circuit. Getting a charger with a 20A plug and then needing adapters and worrying about tripping breakers defeats the purpose.
If you'll mostly be at campgrounds with dedicated RV hookups, then bigger equipment makes sense because you'll have the circuits to support it. But if you're not sure, go smaller - a 55A converter on a standard outlet still charges a 280Ah battery from empty to full overnight, which is plenty for most people.
Bottom line: If you won't have regular access to 20A+ or 30A RV outlets, don't buy equipment that needs them. A charger that works on a standard outlet is more versatile and will actually get used.
If you mostly boondock or stealth camp and your solar panels and DC-to-DC charger keep your batteries topped up, you genuinely don't need any shore power setup. Don't spend money solving a problem you don't have.
If you do want the option to charge from an outlet on the rare occasion - say, at a friend's house or when you're parked somewhere with power - you don't need anything fancy. A general-purpose battery charger like the one below works great. You might already have one for car starter batteries. Just clip it onto your house battery terminals when you have access to an outlet.
Works with LiFePO4, lead-acid, AGM, and gel batteries. LCD display, trickle charge/maintenance mode. Not permanently installed - just pull it out when you need it. Plugs into any standard household outlet - no special wiring or RV hookup needed.
Cost: $0-80. This is the right answer for most people who camp off-grid. Don't let "but what if I need to plug in someday" drive you to spend hundreds of dollars on equipment you'll rarely use.
If you think you'll periodically want to charge faster than a portable charger can manage, and you want charging built into your electrical system, a dedicated converter/charger is the move. These convert 110V AC from an outlet to 12V DC and push serious amps into your batteries.
Wire it to a shore power inlet on the side of your van, and when you have access to an outlet you just plug in and it starts charging. No clipping cables, no pulling out equipment.
Which size you get depends on what outlets you'll have access to:
110V AC to 12V DC, 55A output, with a selectable LiFePO4 charge profile alongside the lead-acid one. Uses a standard 15A plug, so it works anywhere you can find a regular outlet - friend's garage, exterior outlet on a building, etc. Charges a 280Ah battery from 20% to full in about 5-6 hours.
110V AC to 12V DC, 80A output. Has a 20A plug (NEMA 5-20) - won't plug directly into a standard household outlet without an adapter, and even with an adapter you risk tripping a 15A breaker at full draw. Best if you have access to 20A circuits or dedicated RV hookups.
My take: The 55A unit is the better choice for most van builders. It works on any outlet you'll find in the wild, and 55A is still plenty fast for overnight charging. The 80A is only worth it if you'll regularly have access to 20A+ circuits and need the fastest possible charge time.
Total cost: ~$120-170. This is a great middle ground. Permanent, fast charging capability without the cost and weight of an inverter/charger combo.
A two-battery bank with 600W solar and a 30A DC-DC, designed for campgrounds where the plug carries the heavy AC loads. Hover the components to see how the shore feed integrates with the rest of the system.
Educational estimates only — not a substitute for a licensed electrician. Verify against ABYC E-11 and manufacturer specs before installing. See full disclaimer.
BETA — Educational estimate, not an engineered design.
Verify all wire gauges, fuse and breaker ratings, run lengths, and system sizing against ABYC E-11, manufacturer spec sheets, and a licensed electrician before installing or energizing. Ampacity uses ABYC E-11 single-conductor, free-air, 105 °C-insulation copper (typical marine BC-5W2); resistance is NEC Ch. 9 Table 8 at 75 °C; system is nominal 12 V DC and 120 V AC. Wire rated below 105 °C, ambient-temperature derating, and bundle derating are not applied. No code-compliance review or engineering sign-off is provided or implied.
Source: morevanlessmoney.com/tools/electrical/diagram · Full terms: morevanlessmoney.com/legal/terms
This is the option for people who will actually, frequently camp at campgrounds with power hookups and run high-power appliances like an air conditioner. An inverter/charger combines your inverter and battery charger into one unit, automatically switches between shore and battery power, and passes shore power through to your AC outlets.
2000W continuous (6000W surge) with a built-in 10/20/30/50A charger that has a dedicated LiFePO4 profile. Internal transfer relay hands off between shore and battery automatically. LCD display, remote control.
Total cost: ~$400 (including shore power inlet and wiring). This used to be a $1,500-2,000 proposition with Victron units, which is why I historically recommended against it for most people. At Vevor's price point, it's much more reasonable if you'll actually use the features.
Everything above is about what to buy. This section is about how the pieces connect — the inlet, breakers, transfer switch, EMS, and the grounding rules you have to get right. Most mistakes on the DC side show up as a dead battery; most mistakes on the AC side show up as a tripped GFCI, a burned-out inverter, or — rarely, but it does happen — an energized chassis. Accuracy matters more here than anywhere else in a van build.
Scope note. This is "understand your system" content, not a wiring how-to. If you have not wired AC before, hire someone who has or have your work reviewed. The consequences of an AC mistake in a vehicle are category-different from the consequences of a 12V mistake.
Every van shore-power install is the same three pieces in series:
The external plug socket bolted to the van's body. For 30A systems the standard is a Marinco-style twist-lock inlet (the Marinco 301EL-B is the canonical 30A/125V stainless-trim model). The shore cord plugs in from outside; hot, neutral, and ground run from the inlet into the van.
Sits immediately downstream of the inlet, sized to the inlet rating (30A breaker for a 30A inlet). This is the van-side equivalent of your house's main panel breaker — the single kill switch for all AC inside the van.
From the main breaker, AC goes either (a) into the inverter-charger's AC input, which passes it through to your outlets, or (b) directly into a small sub-panel with branch breakers feeding outlets and a roof A/C if fitted.
Signal flow, pedestal inward:
[Campground pedestal]
│
▼
[Shore cord, 10/3 marine grade]
│
▼
[Inlet on van body] ← Marinco 301EL-B
│
▼
[EMS] ← Progressive EMS-HW30C / Hughes PWD30-EPO
│
▼
[Main AC breaker, 30A]
│
▼
[Transfer switch OR inverter-charger AC-in]
│ ▲
│ │ (inverter output, when off-shore)
▼
[Sub-panel with branch breakers]
│
├──► 20A — Outlets (GFCI-protected)
└──► 20A — Roof A/CIf you have an inverter and a shore power inlet, you need a transfer switch. No exceptions.
The reason is simple. Your inverter outputs 120V AC on the same wires your shore power feeds 120V AC into. If both are energized at the same time, the shore power back-feeds the inverter's output, which is not designed to accept a source that big. Best case you pop the inverter's output fuses; worst case you destroy the inverter or start a fire.
There are two ways to handle it:
A dedicated device that watches both sources and hands whichever is active to the load. When shore is present, shore wins; when shore drops, the switch falls over to the inverter. Common hardwired products:
Blue Sea's 9093 is sometimes suggested here, but it is a manual rotary switch with OFF + two positions — the operator turns a knob to pick a source. That is reasonable on a boat where someone is always aware of switch position, but it will not fall over on its own if shore power drops.
Most inverter-chargers — Victron MultiPlus, Renogy REGO, the Vevor combo recommended above — include a transfer relay inside the unit. Shore goes into AC-in; the outlets downstream come off AC-out. When shore is present, it passes through (with the charger pulling a portion to charge the batteries). When shore drops, the inverter takes over — typically inside 20 milliseconds on the Victron, fast enough that most electronics do not notice.
This is the cleanest option: fewer boxes, fewer wire runs, one place for AC to hand itself off. If you are already getting an inverter-charger, you do not need a separate ATS.
Campground pedestals are wired by whoever wired them, which is often a long time ago and not always correctly. An Electrical Management System is a hardwired box that sits between the inlet and the rest of the van's AC system and refuses to pass power through when the pedestal is miswired or unsafe.
Hardwired 30A, roughly $275. 1,790J / 44,000A surge protection, cuts out on voltage outside 104–132V, detects open ground, open neutral, reverse polarity, and accidental 240V. Lifetime warranty. The 50A version is EMS-HW50C.
Hardwired 30A, roughly $300. 2,400J surge protection, Bluetooth app monitoring, replaceable surge module so a big hit only costs you the cartridge instead of the whole unit.
A surge strip from the hardware store is not an EMS. The EMS-specific job is detecting miswiring — especially an open ground — because an inverter-charger and a basic surge protector will both happily pass an open-ground pedestal through to your outlets. With an open ground, a fault in any AC appliance (a frayed laptop charger, a shorted A/C compressor) can light up the entire chassis at 120V instead of tripping a breaker. That is the failure mode the EMS exists to prevent.
Placement: between the inlet and the main breaker. Everything downstream of the EMS is protected; anything upstream (the inlet itself, the cord) is not.
Every AC electrical system has exactly one place where the neutral wire and the safety ground wire are connected together. That connection is called the neutral–ground bond, and the rule is blunt: exactly one bond per system, at the source.
What this looks like in three scenarios:
The bond is at the main service panel — once, where the meter comes in. Sub-panels downstream keep neutral and ground isolated from each other.
The bond is at the campground pedestal (or your house's main panel, if you're plugged in at home). The van's neutral and ground must stay isolated inside the coach — no bonding screw in the sub-panel, no jumper between the bus bars. This is the NEC Article 551 and ABYC E-11 requirement: the safety ground in an RV or boat must never carry load current.
The inverter is now the source, and the bond has to move to the inverter. UL 458 — the standard for inverters in land vehicles and marine craft — requires inverters to include an internal relay that closes the N-G bond when inverting and opens it when passing shore through. Victron documents this explicitly for the MultiPlus: the ground relay bonds neutral-to-chassis when no external AC supply is available, and releases as soon as shore is detected. Magnum does the same. Cheaper inverters vary — check the spec sheet before you trust it.
If neutral and ground are bonded in two places, some of the neutral return current flows back through the ground wire instead of the neutral wire. That ground current trips GFCI receptacles (both yours and the pedestal's), puts a small voltage on every chassis-bonded surface, and defeats the point of having a safety ground. In the worst combination — a fault in an appliance plus a bad bond — you can energize the van's chassis without tripping anything.
What this means for your build:
Two separate bonds, serving two different purposes, both terminating at the van's chassis:
Bonded at one point so that any fault in the 120V system has a low-impedance return path that will trip the breaker or the EMS.
Bonded at one point near the battery so the vehicle's existing body-return circuits (starter, lights, chassis accessories) share a reference with your house system.
These are not the same bond. The AC ground carries fault current; the DC negative carries operating current. Do not tie the two systems together at any other point — no shared lug, no jumper between the AC ground bus and the DC negative bus. Cross-linking them creates ground loops and hard-to-diagnose failures.
For a 30A shore power build with an inverter-charger:
For sizing conductors on the DC side of the inverter-charger, see the AWG tables in electrical fundamentals. On the AC side, 10 AWG is standard for 30A service over the short runs inside a van; a 50A build steps up to 6 AWG. To check total capacity across the whole system, the electrical planner walks you through load balancing and wire sizing.
For most people, I'd recommend against spending $1,500+ on a premium inverter/charger like a Victron MultiPlus. They're genuinely excellent units, but they're expensive and heavy. With how cheap solar panels and DC-to-DC chargers have gotten, most people are better served by:
If you're only plugging in a few times a year, you're paying $1,500+ for convenience features you'll barely use. That money goes much further toward solar, batteries, or just more camping trips.
The exception: If you're spending months at a time in RV parks with hookups, running an AC unit, and want a completely seamless experience - then yes, a Victron MultiPlus is a great product and worth the money. But that's a small minority of van builders.