Getting a van level is not about the drinks staying on the table. An absorption fridge that runs off level can be permanently damaged, and the order you do the two axes in decides whether you get it right on the first attempt or the fourth.

Why it matters more than comfort.

Four separate reasons, in roughly descending order of how much they will cost you.

The fridge

Most caravans and many motorhomes have an absorption fridge — the three-way kind that runs on gas, 12 V or mains, with no compressor and no moving parts. It works by circulating an ammonia solution around a sealed loop, and that circulation is driven entirely by gravity and heat. There is no pump.

Run it off level and the liquid pools in the wrong part of the loop instead of flowing back to the boiler. In the short term the fridge simply stops cooling. Run it that way for long enough and the concentrated solution can crystallise and block the pipework permanently, at which point the cooling unit is scrap and the repair bill is a substantial fraction of a new fridge.

Manufacturers generally ask for the van to be within about 3° of level, and several specify 2°. Check the figure in your own handbook, because it varies and because the tolerance is usually tighter side-to-side than front-to-back. Compressor fridges, which are increasingly common in newer vans and most motorhomes, are far more forgiving — they will run happily at angles that would kill an absorption unit.

Drainage

Shower trays, sinks and washroom floors drain to an outlet at one point. Tip the van the wrong way and the shower tray holds water, the waste tank will not empty fully, and the residue in it turns unpleasant within a day or two in warm weather. A slight nose-down attitude usually helps, since most vans put their waste outlets forward, but check yours.

Doors and blinds

Internal doors swing open or refuse to stay shut, cassette blinds creep, and the entry door can bind against its frame. All annoying rather than damaging, and all fixed by the same levelling.

Sleeping

A bed sloping toward the feet is noticeably worse to sleep on than one sloping toward the head. If the pitch forces you to accept some front-to-back tilt, take it in the direction that puts your head at the high end.

Side to side first, always.

This is the whole trick, and it is why some people take five minutes and others take half an hour.

Side-to-side is corrected by driving a wheel up onto a ramp. That changes the height of one corner of the van, which also changes the nose angle. Front-to-back is corrected with the jockey wheel, which does not affect the side-to-side reading at all.

So one of the two adjustments disturbs the other, and only in one direction. Do the disturbing one first:

Level side to side while still hitched. The car does the work. Trying to push a van onto a ramp by hand, unhitched, on grass, is a job nobody enjoys twice.
Chock the wheels and unhitch.
Level front to back with the jockey wheel.

Do it the other way round and you will set a beautiful nose height, drive onto a ramp, and watch it go out again.

How much packing a reading needs.

Once the phone tells you the tilt, you can work out how far the low wheel has to rise instead of guessing at the ramp. The height needed is the tangent of the angle multiplied by the track width — the distance between the wheels, typically around 2 m on a single-axle caravan.

Reading	Lift under one wheel, 2.0 m track	Practical answer
0.5°	17 mm	A single thin board
1.0°	35 mm	One levelling ramp, part way up
1.5°	52 mm	One levelling ramp, part way up
2.0°	70 mm	One levelling ramp, part way up
2.5°	87 mm	One ramp, most of the way up
3.0°	105 mm	One ramp, most of the way up
4.0°	140 mm	Stacked ramps or a different pitch

Typical plastic levelling ramps give 30 to 100 mm depending on how far up you drive, which covers everything to about 3°. Beyond that you are stacking, and stacking ramps on soft ground is where they start to tip. If the pitch needs more than about 4°, it is usually quicker to move the van a couple of metres than to engineer your way up.

Measure your own track width once and keep the number: a twin-axle van or a wide motorhome will need proportionally more lift for the same angle.

Where to take the reading.

Put the phone on the floor, inside, near the middle of the van. Not on a worktop, not on the fridge shelf, and not on the drawbar.

Worktops and tables in vans are frequently fitted a degree or so out of true, which does not matter for anything except confusing you at this exact moment. The floor is the reference the whole body is built from. Pick one spot — a particular floor panel joint, say — and always use it, so that readings from different trips are comparable.

Worth doing once, on a pitch you know is good: rest the phone on the floor and note the reading, then rest it on the fridge's bottom shelf and note that. The difference between the two is your van's built-in offset, and from then on you can level the floor and know what the fridge is actually seeing.

Calibrate the phone before you start. Set Zero on a surface you trust at home rather than on the pitch, since the whole point is to have a reference that does not depend on where you happen to be standing.

Front to back with the jockey wheel.

With the van chocked, unhitched and sitting on its ramp, turn the phone through 90° so it reads front to back, and wind the jockey wheel.

Dead level is the default, but there are two reasons to deliberately choose otherwise. A very slight nose-down attitude helps the waste system drain on most layouts. And if the bed runs across the van rather than along it, front-to-back tilt affects nothing you sleep on, so you can spend it on drainage.

Watch the jockey wheel itself as you wind. It should stay vertical and its foot should stay fully on the ground or on its pad. On soft pitches put a spreader plate under it before you take the weight, because a jockey wheel sinking overnight is the usual explanation for a van that was level at dinner and is not at breakfast.

Motorhomes and levelling jacks.

A motorhome cannot be unhitched, so both axes get solved at once and there is more than one way to do it.

Ramps. Same as a caravan, with the advantage that you can drive on and off repeatedly under your own power. Drive onto the ramp with someone reading the phone and calling it, rather than stopping and checking.
Hydraulic or electric levelling jacks. Many larger vans have them, often with an automatic mode driven by an internal sensor. That sensor has the same fixed bias as any other, and it is worth checking it once against a phone on the floor — if the automatic system consistently leaves the van a degree out, the sensor wants recalibrating, and most systems have a routine for it.
Air suspension. Vans with rear air bags can trim the back end but not usually the front, so it is a partial solution rather than a replacement for ramps.

Whichever you use, leave the vehicle's own handbrake on and chock as well on any slope. Jacks are for levelling, not for holding the van on a hill.

Corner steadies are not levelling legs.

This one is worth being firm about, because getting it wrong is genuinely dangerous.

The corner steadies on a caravan exist to stop it rocking on its suspension once it is parked. They are designed to bear a small steadying load. They are not jacks, they are not rated to lift the van, and the chassis is not designed to be supported on them.

Winding one down hard to raise a low corner does two things: it puts a bending load through the chassis outrigger that the outrigger was never designed for, and it lifts weight off a wheel, which is precisely how a van ends up sliding off its chocks. Levelling is done with what is under the wheels. The steadies go down afterwards, wound until they just bear and no further.

Once they are down, take one last reading. If it has changed by more than a couple of tenths of a degree, you have lifted the van on a steady — back it off until the reading returns.

How to level a caravan or RV on a pitch.