23 February 2026

Lighten Your Load: 6 Essential Tips for Reducing Caravan Weight

No matter how new or experienced you are at caravanning, managing your towing weights can be a problem. If you’re wondering how to reduce caravan weight, it’s not just the big external items you need to think about—it’s all the seemingly small things like food, clothes, and so on. Here are some of my favourite tricks and weight saving tips I use to keep our caravan payload down.

Tip 1: Reduce Your Caravan Weight by Scaling Down Clothes

You may think that clothes don’t weigh a lot, but try this out.

Stand on your bathroom scales, fully clothed, shoes, hat, coat, carry bag/handbag/basket and make a note of the weight. Then strip off (you may like to do this in private), stand buck-naked on the scales and make a note of the weight. The difference is clothes. I’m pretty sure their weight will surprise you, mine were 6.1kg.

Think of all the clothes you plan to take, and cull it down.

Alison Huth stands on scales fully clothed. Step one to calculating the weight of her clothes

Tip 2: Understand and Manage Water and Gas Weight

Water, or any liquid really, weighs like for like. If you have a litre of liquid, you have a kilo of weight. When you pick up your van from the dealer or wherever, the van weights do not include water in your tanks or gas in your cylinders. We have a payload of around 900kg, and take 300kg of that in water and gas, which leaves us with 600kg to use to stock the van. You need to know the remaining payload after you’ve filled your tanks so you know how much you have to play with.

Two photos of a jug on a scale, with the jug weight zeroed, illustrating the weight found in water helping caravanners visualise the impact of storing liquids. Condiments next to the scale help caravanners make that connection

Tip 3: Account for Heavy Drink and Wine Bottle Weight

Do you like a wine, maybe a beer? Maybe you go for a G & T. Whatever you like, remember the weight of liquid. But there’s an add on for wine or whatever you’re drinkng and that’s the weight of the container. If you like a wine, most bottles have 750mls of wine. Now weigh an empty wine bottle, as more often than not they will be between 500 and 750gms. As a rule of thumb, we calculate 1.5kg for a 750ml bottle of wine.

Tip 4: Choose Smaller Containers for Sauces and Condiments

I like tomato sauce, sweet chili and a range of wok sauces like sweet soy, my list of sauces goes on for a long time. I also like some balsamic vinegars for salads, they are delicious. But, the weight is the same as with wine. The best way to deal with these is to have the smaller sized bottles where possible. This still gives me the sauce or dressing I want, reduces the weight and takes up a lot less space.

Common condiments in six small bottles illustrating how you needn't forgo flavour to save on space

Tip 5: Save Space and Weight with Squeeze Tubes

Convenience is one of my aims in our van. So, I have made the switch to squeeze tubes where possible. I do a lot of stir fry, and find the range of squeeze tubes really handy, so handy in fact that I use them at home as well. Add in the freeze-dried herbs and I have a fully flavoursome kitchen in the van.

Eight different spice blends and flavouring in squeeze bottles and freeze dried herbs

Tip 6: Declutter Your Van with This Simple Red Spot Trick

No matter how experienced you are, there’s always time for the red spot. Stick a red spot on your appliances and equipment, both inside and outside the van. When you use that particular item, take the red spot off. At the end of the trip see how many red spots are still on things. Do you really need that thing? It pays to go through the van from time to time and see what has appeared in it. Sometimes things just appear from nowhere! Decluttering is the big thing for houses, it works in vans too.