This weekend I attended a large Scout Camp called Challenge 26 as a cub leader. As a scout group we brought 5 adults and 30 young people to join 5,000 others at Bramham Park for 2 nights of glorious but hot weather, after a particularly hot start on a Friday with 30 degrees C well into the evening.

The problem

Summer camps have been a feature of scout camps since the very start. Smaller camps occur on dedicated campsites with basic features including indoor cooking, refridgeration and power. Large camps are truely greenfield, where apart from water you need to bring everything you need.

Taditionally there have been two approaches to this problem. Some districts (a district is a collection of groups of around several hundred people) will provide central catering from large dedicated tents with lighting, large scale catering sized cooking equipment and refrigderated trailers powered by generators. The other approach is each scout group of around 30-40 people caters by group. This usually involves smaller cooking equipment and the extensive use of coolboxes. Generators provide plenty of power, but are noisy and require fuel. Coolboxes might have worked in cooler temperatures, but the reality of modern British summers where 30 degrees is increasingly normal mean coolboxes will probably be unsufficiently cool by the 2nd night. On this camp we saw plenty of examples of both.

Solar Curious

I have dabbled with different portable solar panels for camping, and then expanded out to include batteries and finally camping fridges. This gave me the opportunity to experiment, in the realive safety of family camping trips and smaller scout camps, where you are most concerned about keeping beverages cold, and are not dependant on the cold chain. Over time I assembled a collection of different panels and batteries and refrigeation. Through exper

A new approach

With confiddence in my ability to create a workable solution, and with a big camp coming up I was able to suggest to my fellow scoup leaders that we ditched the coolboxes, and used refidgeration. With the weather remaining warm, and the 3rd heatwave of the year predicted, this was going to be as the name suggested a challenge camp.

Scaling the solution

With some calculation aided by Copilot I was able to come up with a plan, and calculate a power budget for the weekend. Unlike a generator which once fueled is usually start and forget, there’s a certain amount