Electric hook-up on your motorhome site: how to manage (and charge for) it without being there

Picture a January evening with four motorhomes on your site. Electric hook-up is a flat £4 a night, as it always has been. On pitch 7 there's a couple running their heating on gas and using the hook-up just for the fridge and a phone charger: they cost you pence. On pitch 3 there's a motorhomer who has switched off the Truma to save gas and plugged in a 2,000-watt fan heater, plus the water heater, plus the TV. They'll be plugged in for twelve hours. By morning they'll have used as much electricity as a household does in a whole day, and paid you £4. You'll never know, because the pedestal doesn't tell you.

That scene plays out every winter on motorhome sites and campsites up and down the country, and every summer in a different form, with air conditioning. Electricity is the one service you sell without knowing how much of it you're selling, because measuring it and charging for what's actually used has always meant expensive hardware and someone going round to read the meters.

In this article we look at how much a motorhome on hook-up really uses, why a flat fee is so often a losing game, what Ofgem's resale rules mean for how you charge, what BS 7671 section 708 requires of your pedestals, where coin meters and card systems fall short, and how a connected pedestal switches on, switches off and gets paid for remotely, from the same dashboard you use for your barrier, bookings and check-ins.

How much a motorhome on hook-up really uses

Let's start with the numbers, because without numbers any decision about pricing is guesswork.

Campsite hook-ups in Europe typically supply between 4 and 16 amps per socket, according to the Touring Club Suisse's technical guide, and in the UK 16 A is the minimum for a new pitch socket (more on that below). At 230 volts that means, roughly, that a 6 A supply gives about 1.4 kW, a 10 A supply about 2.3 kW and a 16 A supply about 3.7 kW. That's the maximum instantaneous power: what the guest can run at the same time before the trip switch goes.

Actual consumption, meaning the kWh on your bill, depends on what's inside the motorhome and how long it's left on. Some real-world reference points, from people who use their vans every day:

• Three-way fridge on 230 V: around 140 W, running 18 to 20 hours a day. On its own that's 2.5 to 3 kWh every 24 hours, whatever the weather.
• Compressor fridge: 50 to 70 W for about ten hours. Less than 1 kWh a day.
• Electric water heater or Truma Combi on electric: 900 to 1,800 W while heating. A couple of hours is 2 to 3 kWh.
• Roof-mounted air conditioning: around 1,000 W while running. An August night with it on for eight hours is 6 to 8 kWh.
• Portable fan heater: 1,500 to 2,000 W. Twelve hours on a January night can mean up to 20 kWh.
• Leisure battery charger with lithium batteries: new motorhomes increasingly come with 200 to 300 Ah LiFePO4 packs. Recharging them from nearly flat takes another 2 to 4 kWh.

Put the pieces together. A "light" motorhome (fridge, lights, phones) uses 2 to 3 kWh a night. A "heavy" one in winter or high summer (fridge, water heater, air con or fan heater) easily reaches 10 to 15 kWh, with peaks above 20.

And what does a kWh cost you? For context, the Ofgem price cap for households from 1 October to 31 December 2026 is an average of 26.32p per kWh plus a standing charge of 54.83p a day, with VAT removed from electricity bills until 31 March 2027 (Ofgem). But businesses aren't covered by the price cap. According to the government's Quarterly Energy Prices (September 2026), the average non-domestic electricity price in the second quarter of 2026 was 24.51p per kWh including the Climate Change Levy, and that's an average across all sizes of business: small users on short contracts often pay more, and you also have standing and capacity charges. The most honest way to know your own figure is to divide your total bill by the kWh used. For the sums in this article we'll take 30p per kWh as a prudent reference.

The light motorhome costs you under £1 a night. The heavy one costs you £3 to £4.50, and on the worst nights £6. If you charge a flat £4, you're losing money on the second profile. And you don't even know how many of your guests fall into it.

Included, flat fee or metered: and why the UK has a rule you need to know

There are three common ways to charge for electricity on a site:

• Included in the pitch price, with no separate charge for electricity.
• A flat hook-up fee per night, the classic "EHU £X" on the price list.
• Metered, charging for the kWh each pitch actually uses, which needs a meter on every socket.

Before choosing, there's a rule that sets the UK apart from the rest of Europe. Under section 44 of the Electricity Act 1989, Ofgem sets a maximum resale price for electricity. Its current direction, issued on 14 March 2014, says the maximum resale price applies where electricity bought from a licensed supplier is resold "for domestic use, or for use in any form of accommodation (including that used for holidays)" (Ofgem direction). In practice:

• With meters, you can charge no more per unit than you pay your supplier, plus a pro-rata share of the standing charge.
• Without meters (and the direction expressly includes cases where the amount is "set in advance of consumption", in other words a flat fee), you have to estimate a fair share of your actual electricity costs for each guest, and you must not recover more than your costs over a period of up to a year.
• On request, you must show guests what you pay and how you've worked out the price.
• If you overcharge, the excess can be reclaimed, with interest.

Ofgem's guidance for resellers adds that the rule doesn't apply where an inclusive charge is made for accommodation with no specified charge for electricity (Ofgem guidance), and park-law specialists read it as covering holiday parks as well as residential ones (Tozers). The direction doesn't spell out how it treats a touring pitch sold by the night, so before you set your hook-up prices, get advice specific to your site. What's clear is the direction of travel: in the UK, electricity sold as a separate line is meant to be cost recovery, not a profit centre. The margin on your site belongs in the pitch price.

With that in mind, here's how the three models stack up.

The "included" model is the easiest to communicate and the most dangerous to manage. It only works if your pitch price is already high and your guests are mostly summer visitors using little power. As soon as your mix changes (more winter stays, more air con), the cost of energy eats into your margin without you noticing it month by month on the bill.

The flat fee looks like a sensible compromise but actually encourages waste. A guest who has paid £4 "for electric" feels entitled to use as much as they like: they've already paid. The light user feels short-changed, the heavy user is delighted, and you subsidise the second with the first one's money. And it's the hardest model to defend under the resale rules, because a flat fee is by definition an estimate: you have to be able to show it's a fair share of what you actually pay, guest by guest.

The metered model is the only one where the price follows the cost. Someone running a fridge pays pence; someone running a fan heater pays for the fan heater. It's the cleanest way to comply with the maximum resale price, because you charge each guest exactly what their pitch used at your own unit rate. The problem with metering was never fairness. It was the hassle of making it work.

An example on a typical site. A site with 25 pitches and around 3,000 pitch-nights a year, charging a flat £4 a night, takes £12,000 for electricity. If 30% of guests are "heavy" at 12 kWh and the rest "light" at 2.5 kWh, the site uses around 16,000 kWh a year, which at 30p is about £4,800 on the bill. On paper that looks like a nice earner. But a flat fee set at nearly three times the average cost is very hard to justify as a "fair share" if the resale rules apply to your pitches. And if you cut it to a level close to cost, around £1.60 a night, every heavy night costs you money while the light users pay for electricity they didn't use. With metering, every guest pays their own kWh at cost, nobody subsidises anybody, and usage falls, because people who pay for the fan heater use it a little less. Electricity stops being a hidden cost, and the value of the hook-up (the infrastructure, the convenience) sits openly in your pitch price.

Coin meters, card meters, manual readings: the limits of "dumb" hardware

If metering is so much better, why are so many sites still on a flat fee? Because until recently it meant installing pedestals with coin or card meters, and those pedestals come with a list of problems that anyone who has them knows by heart.

Coin meters have to be emptied. Someone has to come round, open the box, count the coins and take them to the bank. On an unstaffed site that means a physical visit every few days, and in high season often every day. The guest arrives at 10pm with only notes, the meter only takes £1 coins: no power, and a review tomorrow. Coins jam, damp corrodes the contacts, someone jemmies the box for £80 in change and the repair costs ten times that. We went into this in detail in Payment kiosks on a motorhome site: why you don't need one, and the logic is the same: every box that collects cash on your site is a target and a running cost. Coin meters also sit awkwardly with the resale rules, because a pound buys a fixed number of units that you have to keep in line with what you pay your supplier.

Prepaid cards and tokens move the problem rather than solving it: you have to sell them, so you have to be there, or have a machine, which is more hardware. Manual meter readings only work if someone writes down the number on arrival and departure: on a site with automated check-in, they simply don't fit the way you operate.

And then there's the biggest problem, which no coin meter solves: the socket stays physically available to everyone. The guest on pitch 3 hasn't paid for electric, but the socket for pitch 4, which is empty, is two metres away. Without a control that ties the supply to whoever has actually paid, electricity on your site is common property.

What the rules require: BS 7671 section 708

Before we talk technology, one essential stop: safety. Electrical installations in the UK are designed and installed to BS 7671, the IET Wiring Regulations, currently the 18th Edition, BS 7671:2018 with Amendment 4:2026 (IET). Section 708 covers "caravan/camping parks and similar locations", meaning any place that provides connection points for leisure accommodation vehicles and tents.

The main requirements for pitch socket-outlets, as summarised by the IET in its Wiring Matters articles (IET, Wiring Matters), are:

• Industrial CEE sockets to BS EN 60309-2, interlocked, so the contacts aren't live when they can be touched, two-pole with the earth contact at the 6h position to match the standard hook-up lead;
• a current rating of at least 16 A, and at least one socket per pitch;
• no more than four sockets grouped in one piece of pitch supply equipment;
• IP44 as a minimum degree of protection;
• individual overcurrent protection for each socket, so one overloaded motorhome doesn't trip its neighbours;
• an individual 30 mA RCD for each socket, disconnecting all live conductors including the neutral (regulation 708.415.1 in the 18th Edition).

Then there's the uniquely British point every site owner should know about: PME earthing. Most UK supplies are PME (TN-C-S), and regulation 9(4) of the Electricity Safety, Quality and Continuity Regulations 2002 doesn't allow a PME earth to be connected to any metalwork in a caravan or motorhome. If your site supply is PME, the earthing at the pitch supply points has to form part of a TT system, with its own earth electrode, separated either at the main distribution board or at the pedestals themselves. Get it wrong and a fault on the supply network can put dangerous voltages on the body of a guest's van.

On the guest side, the hook-up lead should be a single continuous length of 25 m (±2 m), with a BS EN 60309-2 plug: in practice, that means your pedestals need to be close enough to every pitch to be reached with a standard lead without extensions. The IET also recommends periodic inspection and testing, with the recommended intervals for caravan parks set out in its Guidance Note 3. The regulation numbers and details above should always be checked by your electrician against the current edition.

Why does all this matter, beyond staying legal? For one simple reason. If you need to replace or add pedestals right now (because the old ones are failing, because you're adding pitches, because an inspection has flagged the earthing), you're about to make an investment that has to meet these requirements anyway. It makes sense for the same pedestal to solve the management problem too, rather than buying a compliant pedestal today and a system to charge for it in two years' time.

The connected pedestal: how remote management works

And here's the part that changes the game. A connected pedestal is, in essence, a compliant pedestal in which every socket is controlled by a relay with a built-in meter, connected to the internet. The relay does three things: it switches the socket on or off on command, it measures the kWh going through it, and it reports everything to a piece of software.

It isn't science fiction, and it isn't just for big holiday park groups. Pedestal manufacturers such as Rolec were already offering systems back in 2017 to monitor and control each pedestal individually from the site office, with guests able to manage their own consumption from their phones (Almarin). What has changed is that the technology now fits the budget of a 20- or 30-pitch site.

On a motorhome site with 20 to 40 pitches, the flow looks like this:

1. The guest books or turns up, checks in from their phone and chooses whether they want electric hook-up.
2. The socket on their pitch switches on automatically. All the others stay off.
3. The meter counts. They can see how much they're using, and so can you.
4. At check-out, or when the stay ends, the socket switches off and the kWh are charged to their payment method, together with the pitch.
5. If they want to stay another night, they extend from their phone and the power stays on. If they don't pay, the socket doesn't come back on.

Meanwhile, you can be anywhere. If a guest rings because "the electric's not working", you open the app, see that their socket is off because the stay ended at noon, and explain it in thirty seconds, or switch it back on with one tap if you decide to do them a favour. If you see a pitch drawing 3 kW at three in the afternoon in August for six hours, you know there's an air conditioner running in an empty van and you can send a message. If a relay stops responding, you know before the guest does.

One site, one dashboard: why your pedestals shouldn't live in a separate app

There's a mistake we often see when owners start automating: one app for the barrier, a portal for bookings, a system for the pedestals, another tool for guest records and a spreadsheet to hold it all together. Each piece works, but the owner spends the day jumping from one to the next, and when a guest asks "so have I paid or not?", none of the five systems can answer on its own.

Electricity only makes sense as part of the stay, not as a separate product. It needs to switch on when the stay starts, switch off when it ends, and appear on the same receipt as the pitch. That's why we've integrated connected pedestals directly into CamperGate, working with a specialist hardware partner: from the same screen where you open the barrier, read your bookings and check arrivals, you also see the status of every socket, the kWh used on each pitch and the amount building up. The socket comes on by itself for whoever has paid and stays off for everyone else, metered charges go through in the same transaction as the stay, and if you need to, you switch a socket on or off by hand from your phone. No second app, no second login, no second invoice to reconcile.

That changes the job of running a site in a very concrete way. The private owner with a day job during the week no longer has to drive over "to check the hook-ups". The council has a monthly report of kWh sold, ready to show how the charge was worked out. The farm with six pitches stops giving electricity away in the pitch price. And the per-pitch kWh records are exactly what you need if a guest ever asks how their electricity charge was calculated. In every case the site works even when the owner isn't there, which is the only serious definition of an "automated site".

Moving to metered without losing guests: a five-step plan

The most common worry for owners thinking about dropping the flat fee is how guests will react. It's a fair concern, and it can be handled with a little care.

1. Set an honest price per kWh and explain it. In the UK, the cleanest approach is to charge each guest's kWh at the unit rate you pay, plus a pro-rata share of the standing charge, and recover the cost of pedestals, cabling and maintenance through your pitch price. Guests pay for their electricity at roughly what they'd pay at home, and you can say with a clear conscience: "you pay for what you use, at cost".

2. Publish a short table of typical usage. On your website, in the welcome message, on the sign at the entrance. At 30p per kWh, for example: "Fridge for one night: about 2 kWh, 60p. Air con for 8 hours: about 7 kWh, £2.10. Fan heater all night: up to 20 kWh, £6." Guests see in ten seconds that on a normal stay they'll pay less than the old flat fee, and that they only pay more if they use more. Transparency defuses the argument before it starts.

3. Make hook-up optional at check-in. Guests with solar panels and lithium batteries (more and more of them, especially in campervans) don't want it and appreciate not paying for it. Those who want it switch it on with a tap. Nobody feels forced.

4. Show guests their usage in real time. Most complaints about electricity come from a surprise at the end of the stay. If guests can see the kWh as they use them, there's no surprise.

5. Start with new pitches or replacements. You don't have to change everything in a day. If you're replacing two old pedestals or adding four new pitches, make them connected. After one season you'll have your own site's real figures to decide whether and when to convert the rest.

Imagine doing it on eight "premium" pitches for a season. In September you compare the kWh used on those eight with your bill and find out what the other twenty-two on a flat fee really cost you. With that data in hand, the decision about the rest of the site makes itself, before the winter. It's what happens every time someone starts measuring.

In short

Electricity is the one service on your site you've sold for years without measuring it, and with a guest mix that's changing (more winter stays, more air con, more lithium batteries to charge) the flat fee is ever riskier. A light motorhome uses 2 to 3 kWh a night, a heavy one 10 to 15 and more; with a real cost of around 30p per kWh, a flat fee either loses you money on part of your guests or is hard to justify under Ofgem's maximum resale price rules. BS 7671 section 708 sets out what a compliant pedestal needs, PME earthing included, and if you have to invest, it pays to do it once, with connected pedestals that switch on for whoever has paid, measure the kWh and charge them with the stay. All from the same dashboard you use for your barrier, bookings and check-ins, wherever you are.