In this video Kat from Wandering Bird answers a common question from van‑life followers: how to dry hair while living in a motorhome. She walks through several approaches she has tried, evaluating each for effectiveness, power requirements, and practicality. She starts with cheap 12 V travel hair dryers that plug into the van’s cigarette lighter, noting they only blow cold air, take a long time, and work only for very thin hair. Next she discusses a standard 2 000 W household hair dryer, explaining that while it can be used at campsites or with a generator, its actual draw (≈1 400‑1 500 W) exceeds the capacity of her EcoFlow portable power station (600 W continuous, 1 200 W short‑burst). She describes her search for an 800‑850 W dryer that would be compatible with the EcoFlow, mentioning the station’s “peak‑output” feature that allows brief over‑draw. She also tries hair‑turban terry towels, finding they only leave hair damp. Finally, she recommends a low‑wattage (≈300‑400 W) hot‑air brush that doubles as a styling brush; it runs comfortably off the EcoFlow and campsite power, dries her hair in 5‑10 minutes, and provides warm air, making it the most effective solution for her thick, long hair. The video concludes with a brief plug for the channel.
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It's the age-old question faced by women, and to be fair, men everywhere: how do you dry your hair when you're in the motorhome? Let's try and answer that for you today. Hey, I'm Kat from Wandering Bird, and on this channel we share tips and tricks for motorhomers and campervanners to help you make the most of your time on the road. And this is a video in response to, well, honestly, several emails and questions on social media asking me how I deal with this mass of hair whilst we're camping, especially when we're not on campsites. So I thought I would try and answer that, and the answer is not easily. There is no real solution that works for everybody, so let me share a few of the ones that I've come across and how they've worked for me, because as you can see, I've got quite a lot of hair. So the first thing that everyone goes for are one of these travel hair dryer-y things, um, with the little cigarette lighter on there, 12 volts, Honestly, they're a bit pants. Now, if your hair is really thin and you haven't got anywhere near as much of it as I've got, this might be enough for you. You just plug it into your van socket and use it for a few minutes, and it would certainly take the edge off. They're generally always cold. I don't think I found a single one that blows warm air, but they are not much better than nothing, in all fairness. I think this only cost me like £10, maybe £15 from Argos or Amazon or somewhere like that, but it's not great. It's really, really not fantastic. If I'm desperate, I will use it, but I have to be desperate to bother even trying with this thing. It will take me a good half an hour to even get this close to whatever. I'll be honest, generally when it's warm like it is at the moment in the summer months, I'll just let it dry by itself. Yes, it's not as nice and sleek and beautifully presented as it would be if I spent hours brushing it with a hairdryer, but quite frankly I don't do that a whole lot anyway unless it's a special occasion, so normally I would just let it air dry and that is way, way better than spending half an hour trying to dry it with this thing. Now option B is a bog-standard hairdryer. This one is by Phil Smith, there are thousands of other options available. This is actually a 2000-watt hairdryer. Now the thing to remember with hairdryers is although it says 2000 watts, it doesn't generally draw 2,000 watts. This one will probably only draw, I don't know, 1,400-1,500 as a general overview, and this works when we're on campsites if I want to be plugged in. The reason I got this one is because it's of course smaller and it's more compact. I have actually found a couple of other ones that I would probably choose above this now, a little bit lower wattage. I think they're either 1,600 or 1,800 watts, and also they're just a little bit foldable and easier to store in a cupboard, but I actually am carrying both of these on the van at the moment. Don't tell Mr. WB. I don't know why this one is still on the van because I never use it, ever. This one I do use on campsites occasionally, but honestly, if we're on a campsite, I tend to use their facilities, and most of the time they have the wall hair dryers, which are pretty powerful, and if they've got 2 of them quite close and there's nobody else in the toilets, I'll try and use both and that'll dry my hair quicker, and I just don't use this one all that much. But when we were traveling an awful lot, especially somewhere like Italy, And we had our generator. I used this plugged into the generator and dried that a couple of times. Actually, we used that in Norway. That was the one time we used our generator in Norway as well, so I could dry my hair because it was cold and it was damp. And this is the problem, it's just not fun having really wet, damp hair when it's not nice outside either. So I have used this a couple of times with our genset. The problem with that is it's a bit obnoxious to start your genset to dry your hair. So I was trying to find one that would work with the EcoFlow, which we've got. Now the EcoFlow that we've got only goes up to 600 watts. And you can get the bigger version, which will of course allow you to power more powerful devices, but the 600-watt version actually has a weird thing, and I cannot remember off the top of my head what they call it, but it allows them to draw double the power, so you can only get like 1,200 watts for a very short period of time. Now I understand peak output, but the EcoFlow, they have a thing where you can power a slightly more powerful device but at half of its power. They have a word, a term for it, I can't remember what they call it. Honestly, check it out on my website and you can tell me what it's called while you're there. So I am at the moment looking for an 800-850 watt hair dryer. I have found a couple, I just haven't bought them and tried them yet, but I reckon that will power off the EcoFlow. Again, haven't tried this. Now the nice thing with the EcoFlow is if you power— oh, if you plug in a device that's too powerful for it, you're not going to blow it. I hope. What it says was overpowered or over Drained or something like that, and it just switches off. It just won't work. But that won't, I hope, trash it. So that's what we're going to try. Oh, I'm going to get one of those and try that. And I have actually used also those hair turban things, which are like the terry towel things, and you wrap them up. Meh, they were, they were okay. They were not much different than wrapping your hair in a towel after you've used it, I'll be honest. They were probably around the same as this. They didn't get it really, really dry. It was a bit like damp. I mean, this has been now out the shower for what, 10, 15 minutes, and it's probably about this sort of— this is how it got when you had it in the hair turban thing. Better than nothing, but not the solution that I want. But the solution I have found, and frustratingly I have these with me that I don't use, but I don't have the one that I do use. The best thing that I found are one of those hot air brushes. I can't remember the name of the one that I've got. It's, it's like a big barrel brush that blows the air through it, and it's got several different attachments on it as well. It's only— I'm gonna say 300 watts, could be 400. I'm gonna put the link to it below here so that you've got the actual thing, and I'll put the spec up because I don't have it with me, because hey. But that's fantastic, and you can plug that in, that will work off the EcoFlow no problem at all. It'll also work when plugged in the campsite, not even worrying about that if they've got lower power output. And it blows, it blow dries my hair within about 5 to 10 minutes, and I use that all the time because the lovely thing about that is it's a brush and a hair dryer, so you style your hair at the same time. It's fab, and that is absolutely what I would recommend if you are— got hair even close to being similar in thickness and length to mine. I think they do a version as well for shorter hair. Obviously I've never used it, but I'm pretty sure my mum has one. She's got sort of bob chin-length hair, and I think she's got one that has a slightly smaller brush that you can style it as well. I'll try and find the link to that one and drop that below for you as well. But that, I think you can actually take the brush bit off and just use it as like a blow— blowing air device. But it gets warm, which is so much nicer than cold air, and it does actually do the job pretty well. Takes slightly longer than obviously like a 2,000-watt hair dryer would take, but so much better than nothing. So that was what I used when we were going off, certainly going off in the winter, and I hate having wet hair when it's cold outside. So that's definitely what I use, and as you can see, I use it at the moment. Because it's on the boat, not here with us in the van, and I wasn't expecting to film this video today, but somebody sent me an email. I was like, I'm gonna film that today and answer it. Right, I hope you found that useful. If you're new to the channel and you'd like to get more motorhoming and campervanning tips, then by all means hit subscribe. Thank you as always for your time, and I'll see you on the next video. Bye!
