Mike ReyherOne of the great things about building a van to use for camping is that it can carry everything you need. And once of the most important needs when camping is water. Water for drinking, water for cooking, water for cleaning up after cooking and water for cleaning yourself after a long day of camping, hiking, and biking, etc. So it’s worth putting some thought into how you are going to carry the water you need and make it easy to get more water along the way. In this installment we are going to show you what we did to make a simple water system that meets our needs for road trips, camping, and adventures.
Our Requirements
First, lets share a bit of experience from our history with our VW camper van from the ‘90s. It was a Winnebago conversion built on a VW Eurovan that had a conventional fresh water tank with an electric pump to supply the sink much like most RVs out there. I had never owned an RV so no experience with them and things that can go wrong. Well, at some point we developed a leak in the water line and over time it slowly it rotted the subfloor and required taking the entire interior out in order to replace it. So this time around we are going to have a water system without pressure and the possibility of leaking.
Fresh Water Storage
After getting some inspiration from other builders we decided we would use a couple of 6-gallon plastic Jerry cans to store our water. This would also make it easy to get water on the go either from a spigot or from a grocery store, etc. because we can carry the cans to the water source and back to the van. We would build these cans into our “sink-pod” so they could be readily accessed from the sliding door and be close to the sink so we could run a hose directly up to a Whale Hand Pump next to our extra deep sink.
Hand Pump
We chose the Whale V Mk6 hand pump because of its reputation for reliability, good flow capacity, and precise control for things like filling the all important ice trays. We have discovered an annoying minor leak that we are going to address in a future video. But for the most part it is reliable and easy to operate.
Grey Water Collection
Now that we have water and can pump it to the sink we need a way to catch the grey waste water and hold it until we have an appropriate place to dump it out. We decided we wanted a translucent container so se could see the how full the grey water tank was getting and not risk an overflow. We found this “hedpack” container often used in beer brewing.
To make the connection from the sink to the grey water tank we found an adaptor that fits the bottom of a standard sink and adapts it to a standard garden hose diameter. We found some clear hose of the same diameter and made a loop in in it to keep smells from the tank from coming back up the sink train. The clear hose lets us also see if there is any blockage. We used a ordinary garden hose quick-disconnect fitting to make it easy to take the jug out and empty it.
Other Accessories
There are several water related items we carry with us. Obviously we need a short hose to refill the jugs from a spigot. And sometimes the spigots are broken or have a messed up spout so the Camco “Water Bandit” comes in handy. Even if the threads are messed up or you just want to quickly hook up and get water this little item is a real problem solver. And sometimes you come across a spigot where the valve handle is missing and then this water key comes in handy.
What about the shower?
We decided against a wet bath as most times we will be using other people’s bathrooms and showers but for extended off grid or extra dirty adventures we have a WaterPort outdoor shower.