Campervan Heating in Iceland, Explained

Rent.is put the whole confusion into one sentence on their own FAQ: "all our campervans have heaters that can be used overnight. The heaters will use the auxiliary battery and diesel or depend on external campsite electricity." Both halves are true, and they describe two incompatible holidays. Go Campers' spec flags do the same thing — the same word, heater, for a unit that runs parked in a lay-by on the Snæfellsnes coast and for one that only runs on a powered pitch.

What separates them is architecture. A fuel-fired parking heater is a sealed-combustion appliance: it takes combustion air from outside the van, burns a trickle of the vehicle's own diesel, vents the exhaust outside and blows warm dry air into the cabin. It adds no water and no combustion products to the air you are breathing, and it needs nothing but fuel and a little electricity. That is why it is the right answer for Iceland, and why an unflued flame inside the cabin is the wrong one.

Our own catalogue groups the first two together, because the question that decides your night is engine-off versus plugged-in, not diesel versus gas. Most of the campers we have transcribed are in that engine-off state. The exceptions are few enough to name individually, which is exactly why they are dangerous to ignore: the listing that sells you a hookup-only heater looks identical to the listing that sells you a Webasto.

The diesel number is the one that surprises people. A full night at maximum output is under two litres, and the thermostat cycles the burner rather than holding it flat out, so real consumption sits lower. Against a 60 to 90 litre van tank that is a rounding error, and it is why Icelandic operators are relaxed about customers running the heater all night.

The battery is the real limit, and not because the heater is greedy. Nine to nineteen amp-hours is comfortably inside a healthy leisure battery even derated for cold. The failure mode is a battery that started the night half empty. Go Campers state plainly that customers must drive at least two hours during the day to recharge the leisure battery enough for the night; Kuku publish roughly three hours' driving for about eight hours of heating on their E Campervan. A day spent parked in one place waiting out a storm — an entirely normal Icelandic winter day — breaks that assumption, and it breaks it on the night you least want it broken.

Treat published run times as claims rather than measurements. Go Campers advertise "over 8 hours of strong heat without needing to run the engine"; CampEasy advertise 8 to 10 hours of full heating without starting the engine or plugging in, backed by two extra AGM batteries in the rear. Neither states an outside temperature, a thermostat setting or a starting state of charge, and all three of those change the answer.

Gas arithmetic is less forgiving. A 10 kg propane bottle feeding a Truma Combi at its 4 kW setting gives about 31 hours of burner-on time, or about 62 at the 2 kW setting. Elapsed time is longer because the thermostat cycles — but in an Icelandic winter, in a vehicle that is not insulated like a house, the duty cycle climbs towards continuous. Plan on a bottle lasting two or three cold nights rather than a week, and know where you can exchange one before you need to.

A campsite hookup is more limited than it sounds. Icelandic pitches use the blue 16 A CEE connector on a 230 V supply, which is a hard ceiling of 3,680 watts. That runs one 2 kW fan heater with headroom and very little else; put a kettle on at the same time and expect the pitch breaker to go. The figure of "approximately 11 kW" that circulates in travel content is a three-phase number and does not describe a standard Icelandic pitch.

For an electric camper the cost is range rather than fuel, and cold charges twice. CampEasy's own 10% overnight figure is the cabin heat alone; the broader cold penalty is real too, with the 2026 Nordic El Prix test taking 24 electric cars down to −32 °C and measuring an average 38% below their WLTP range. Iceland's winter is far milder than that, so treat 38% as an upper bound rather than an expectation — but plan the day's driving on the assumption that the heater and the weather have taken a bite before you set off.

The mechanism that kills people is specific and it is not exotic. Snow banks against the back of a parked vehicle, obstructs the exhaust, and the exhaust gas finds the cabin instead of the outside air. The US CDC documented a cluster of exactly this during the January 1996 blizzard in the north-east — three cases reported to Philadelphia poison control and twenty-two in New York City over 8 and 9 January — and puts unintentional carbon monoxide deaths not linked to fires at more than 400 a year nationally, with over 50,000 emergency department visits. There is no equivalent Icelandic series and we found no Icelandic case record, so those figures describe the mechanism rather than this country. What Iceland supplies in abundance is wind-driven spindrift, which banks against a stationary van quickly and silently.

It is also against the rules. Reglugerð nr. 788/1999, article 6, forbids leaving a vehicle running when it is left unattended, and forbids letting the engine of a stationary vehicle run "longer than a very brief moment" — örstutta stund — unless there is special reason. No number of minutes is specified. Enforcement sits with municipal health committees rather than the police, so in practice nobody is going to knock on your window at two in the morning. That is a reason to treat this as a rule about the air in your van, not a rule about being caught.

And it does not even work. Cabin heat stops when the engine stops, fuel burn is an order of magnitude above the parking heater's, and the entire reason a fuel-fired heater exists is to deliver heat with the engine off. If the camper you booked has one, you never need to turn the key. If it does not, the answer is bedding and a campsite, not the ignition.

One gap worth closing yourself: EN 50291-2:2019 is the European product standard for carbon monoxide alarms in caravans and motor caravans, adding vibration and movement testing that a domestic household alarm never faces. None of the Icelandic companies we checked states on its website that an alarm of any standard is fitted. That is not proof that none is — it is a question to put in an email, and a certified vehicle alarm weighs nothing in a suitcase.

Measured moisture release from a person indoors at low activity runs 0.8 to 1.7 kg a day, roughly 30 to 70 grams an hour from respiration and skin combined. Two adults asleep for eight hours therefore put something like 0.6 to 1.1 litres of liquid water into the air of a cabin of four to six cubic metres. There is nowhere for it to go. It condenses on the coldest surfaces available — the glass, the metal ribs, the ceiling directly above your heads — and once the surface is below freezing it does not run down the window, it frosts onto it. At Akureyri, where the 1991–2020 mean daily minimum sits near −3.5 °C through the winter months, that is the ordinary outcome rather than the bad night.

By the second morning the water is in the bedding, and damp bedding is the actual reason people are cold in a van that has a working heater. This is the failure that gets blamed on the heater and is not the heater's fault.

The cooker is what turns a manageable problem into a soaked one. Burning propane produces about 1.63 kg of water vapour for every kilogram of gas — stoichiometry, not opinion. Use the hob to take the chill off a cabin and you are pouring more than a litre and a half of water per kilogram of gas into a space of a few cubic metres, on top of the carbon monoxide risk of an unflued flame in an enclosed space. Cook with a vent open, and never cook for warmth.

The fix is airflow, and the trade is better than it feels at the time. Running the heater a notch higher with a vent cracked open all night beats sealing the van and running it lower, because a cabin you have to dry out costs you more than the heat going through the vent.

One claim about Icelandic campers deserves killing outright: that the water system is drained and the van "winterised" for the season. Checked against the public FAQs, camper specs and winter-travel pages of Go Campers, CampEasy, Cozy Campers, Happy Campers, Kuku Campers, Rent.is and Iceland Camper Vans in August 2026, not one of them publishes a dated winterisation or drain policy at all. The version of the story that names March and April traces back to a Canadian operator, not an Icelandic one.

The structural reason is that most small Icelandic campervans have no plumbing to winterise. Water travels in removable containers you lift out and fill at a tap. There is nothing under the floor to burst, which is good news, and the failure you will actually meet is much more mundane: a container left in an unheated van and frozen solid by morning.

Where real plumbing does exist, the Icelandic answer is withdrawal rather than winterisation. Höldur (Hertz Iceland) rent their gas-heated motorhomes only between 1 April and 7 October. McRent withdraw most of their motorhome groups for the winter and keep a single group running. Cozy Campers close rentals entirely from 20 December to 31 January. This is why a camper's published rental window matters as much as its heater — a Webasto in a van you cannot book in January is not a winter option.

And some of the water that is off is not yours to control. Skaftafell, which stays open year-round in Vatnajökull National Park, states that because of frost risk water is not available at the outdoor sinks in winter and that frost-free conditions are generally only expected after mid-May. It is the only site we found that publishes this. It would be optimistic to assume it is the only one doing it.