If you have visited a weighbridge and found your ‘van is overladen, you are most likely going to be asking ‘how to reduce the weight of your motorhome’.

After all, safe and legal driving is not just about ensuring you know ‘what driving licence do I need for a motorhome?’ – it’s also about adhering to the relevant motorhome weights. One thing you’re going to want to ensure you avoid is overloading your ‘van, which is why heading to a weighbridge is so important.

If you’re caught with an overladen motorhome, you fixed penalty fines of between £50 and £300, as well as three points on your licence. You could even be prosecuted if your ‘van is heavily overloaded – and if you’re caught twice within a 28 day period, it will almost certainly result in a summons. Driving an overweight vehicle is very likely to invalidate your insurance, too.

If you’re wondering how to reduce the weight of your motorhome, the good news is there are lots of free things that you can do.

Over time, ’vans tend to fill up with clutter and the first thing to do is to get everything out of your vehicle. A spring tidy up doesn’t just have to extend to cleaning a motorhome with products – it’s also well worth choosing a dry sunny day and carrying out some spring cleaning with everything laid out on the ground.  You’ll be amazed at all the stuff you have amassed over the years.

This is particularly true in ’vans with large garages and A-class motorhomes with double floors, which offer lots of extra lockers to cram with kit. Motorhomers can rarely resist filling all the lockers to capacity with ‘useful’ items that are only ever used once in a blue moon.

When I cleared out my coachbuilt to sell it on, I found a heavy inflatable boat – punctured in several places and clearly useless – I had been lugging around in the garage for years.

Even in my current camper, I came across lots of useless items during a spring clean – including a replacement gas hose, particularly pointless because the vehicle is gasless!

If you happen upon items that you can’t remember when you last used, simply leave them at home. There’s no point kitting out a motorhome with accessories you’re not using. Instead, you’re just carting around extra weight needlessly and burning more fuel, hardly ideal if you’re looking for better motorhome fuel consumption.

The golden rule is to sort through your touring kit on an annual basis – at the start of the season in spring, perhaps – and ditch any item that wasn’t used in the previous season.

It can be quite cathartic to clear the useless clutter that motorhomes seem to attract magnetically over time!

It’s not practical to travel with a partially filled fuel tank, but you don’t need to carry a full tank of water. It’s generally safe to assume a litre of liquid will weigh about 1kg, so a full water tank can be as much as 120kg.

A water tank
Travelling with an empty water tank is an easy way to save precious payload

Driving with an empty fresh-water tank can save a lot of payload and also reduces fuel use on the road. Check that you can fill up at the campsite you’re going to, though – most have easy-access taps, but some will charge you to fill the tank completely.

If you source food and drink local to where you’re staying, this can avoid having to transport a fridge bursting at the seams. Drink can be a bit of an issue, too. It’s often tempting to stock up with a box of water bottles when you leave home, while buying a crate of wine at a French hypermarket can easily tip your payload over the edge.

Knowing how to load a motorhome will also help. If you have a large overhang on the garage, try to place items as far forward as possible to avoid the cantilever effect increasing the weight on the back axle.

If the weighbridge ticket indicates that you’ve exceeded the weight of one of the axles (usually the rear one), but the total weight isn’t over the vehicle’s maximum weight, it might be possible to reposition some of your kit closer to the front to reduce the axle weight.

Once you are ensuring you’re driving safely, you can start thinking about where you will be pitching up at – the next important step is to ensure you know how to level a motorhome, so you can enjoy a flat and level ‘van.

Future Publishing Limited, the publisher of Practical Motorhome, provides the information in this article in good faith and makes no representation as to its completeness or accuracy. Individuals carrying out the instructions do so at their own risk and must exercise their independent judgement in determining the appropriateness of the advice to their circumstances. Individuals should take appropriate safety precautions and be aware of the risk of electrocution when dealing with electrical products. To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither Future nor its employees or agents shall have any liability in connection with the use of this information. Double check any warranty is not affected before proceeding.


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