VAN LIFE: Water Systems for Extended Off Grid Travel

We don't need to tell you that water is essential to life but it can be taken for granted when you live on the grid in a house with an endless supply. When you're building an adventure rig for extended off-grid travel like we are, water supplies become limited and that creates a problem. Often our time is limited when we're off-grid, not by the amount of food that we can take with us as there are always crafty ways to find food but rather by the amount of water that we can carry. So whilst building Boomerang, our 1973 V-Dub adventure wagon, we have taken what we've learned from our first five years living in a van and have built the best system possible. So let's get into that. So the first major difference with our water system is that we actually split it into two. Water you can drink and water for everything else. Typically what you'll see with people's water systems is they have one central tank for all of their off-grid needs. But when you're traveling you're often sourcing water from unknown and potentially unreliable places. We want to make sure that only the best quality water goes into our drinking water system. So by having two separate tanks, one we can make sure that our drinking water system is especially clean and two we're able to pick up water from a much wider variety of sources for our non-potable needs. We will talk about our UberCool ultra safe drinking water system later but first let's talk about our main water tank system. So our main water storage tank has been custom made to fit exactly the cavity under our bus. It's made out of a super strong food grade plastic and will provide us with just under 40 litres or 10 gallons of water which isn't a lot compared to bigger expedition vehicles but it's the most we can fit on our compact rig. It is super strong plastic even though just to protect it against abrasion underneath the van we've put some kind of extra like very thick rubber lining here where it's possibly going to contact the underside of the carriage and also we've put some rubber edging where it sits up against the under carriage of the combi. We'll be supporting said water tank with this plastic coated galvanized steel metal strapping which is for actually holding water tanks. This is a pretty good job, a little bit disappointed that the fittings aren't stainless steel because they're blatantly going to rust so hopefully we don't need to take this tank down in the future. This custom tank has basically been designed off of other tanks we've seen so it's only got a few outlets. One of them is a 40mm inlet for us to be able to fill the tank and we have a half inch or 13mm exit at the bottom of the tank which allows us to drain it so that goes directly to the water pump which will be sucking up from there. At the top we have a 10mm breather which allows the air to escape as we're draining it with the pump and also as we're filling it because otherwise if we didn't have the breather on there it would take a long time to fill. It would just chug chug chug chug and we've got this valve at the bottom which will allow us to purge the tank if we're winterizing the combi or we think we're going to hit some below freezing temperatures and we need to let a bit of water out to allow for expansion. We've got this. Because we are almost 100% off-grid we don't need to be hooked up to a water supply so we went for a gravity fuel only solution. This way we can fill our tank from a hose. As we often can't get close enough we'll use our collapsible water containers to collect water from a faucet or somewhere in nature. We use this funnel with a coarse filter built in to keep large particles out of the tank. Balancing the weight in the combi is a key concern that's why we've tried to put most of the weight with the batteries on the passenger side because most of our kitchen is on the driver's side. We have our water tank on the driver's side too but we worked out that the propane tank would be heavier on average so we've got that on the passenger side. When we're at full capacity with water it's likely that the driver's side will be slightly heavier but we're not at full capacity for very long because we use the water and we don't tend to drive long distances or off-road really too much with full water. So I've got this Dometic water pump here it's the smallest one they do it's the PP127, 7 litres per minute which should be plenty for our combi. This is a filter on this side which is like a coarse filter so it stops any crap from the tank going into the pump. Very cool. I'm also going to be installing this accumulator tank so that this pump doesn't have to go on every single time we open the tap and the faucet so this will store some pressure in the system and will make this run quieter and hopefully it will last longer as well because of that. Now just to find a home for it. So we have water in our tank and we can get it out but where does it go? Well it goes down the drain. Our system is actually pretty simple. Let me show you. We have a basic Y connector that you'd find on a garden hose which allows us to choose where the water goes from the drain so it can either go straight out under the combi which we can capture in a bucket if we need to or if it's clean water we can release it to the wild. If we are camping in urban environments we can use the Y selector to select to send it to a on-board tank which we basically store in a compartment at the back of this cupboard here. So normally this container lives within the bottom of our slide-out kitchen drawer which has been removed just so you guys can see everything that's going on here but yeah that's basically our drainage system. Pretty simple. As we're full-time kind of off-gridders we are quite sensitive to the environment. For the longest time we've been using eco products. It's not always easy to find it. We'll link below some of our favourite stuff that you can get on Amazon and we always order that when we are on grid but these are what we've been using for kind of cleaning surfaces and cleaning dishes so if any of our suds does make it out to the environment it is plant-based and not damaging to the environment at least but we do try to minimise as much of that as possible. Now that's our grey water. We don't actually have any black water in the combi i.e. pee and its ugly cousin poop. That's because we tend to use public facilities and we don't have a toilet facility in the combi mainly because we are limited for space. If you are interested in putting a toilet inside your off-grid tiny home then we have a blog post listing all of the best options for mobile living and how you can deal with not having a toilet inside your van too. Otherwise you can download our expert's guide to off-grid living on the website. I'll link it up there. Apart from our kitchen sink the other thing we have connected to our main water tank is our shower. Instant hot water. Previously we had a rack mounted solar shower on our roof. It did work great and held up to 10 gallons of water and we even showed you how you can build one yourself out of standard hardware store parts. The downside to having water up there is that it's a lot of weight to be carrying so high up and although the shower did get hot, a warm shower was dependent on good weather. When it got icy our showers were icy too. Our new on-demand propane heated shower is definitely a step up in luxury and now we can have a shower anytime, any weather. Perfect! We've got to say though even though we have a shower the reality is that we still use any available water sources that we come across to shower. We've found that when we use our on-board water to shower all the time we go through our limited supply very quickly. We do have some hacks which help us conserve water and we'll discuss those in a bit. Now our second water system is stored in here and it's quite exciting. This is our dedicated drinking water tank. It's 25 litres about 6.6 gallons and this lasts us a lot longer than our main water tank. So typically we might go through two main water tanks for each time that we refill this one. So this tank is all kind of connected up to quick release system. This is to allow us to connect to the power for our pump which is a submersible pump, very low power usage. It's just this little unit here that lives inside the tank at all times. This is our outlet which is a garden hose brass connector quick release system that then plugs into our water filtration system. So we take what we hope to be pretty good quality water and first of all send it through a standard five micron charcoal filter. This basically removes sediment. A lot of you have probably seen these kind of filters and some of you might even use them in a house. You often see them attached to fridges and they're great at improving the odour of the water and improving the clarity and basically improving the taste. However they don't remove harmful pathogens like E.coli, Legionella and Giardia to name a few that you might recognize and obviously we don't want to be drinking those kind of harmful pathogens so we have a two-stage filter system and this is really cool. This is our water sterilization unit. I cannot believe first of all how small this thing is. I mean I read the specs online and when I've got it in my hand literally it's like it takes up no space. It's absolutely phenomenal that they're taking advantage of LED technology. So basically what this is is a UV sterilizer. This unit sterilizes the water so it actually kills bacteria and viruses and sterilizes the water with a tiny little LED UV light. So you may have heard of using UV lights to sterilize water. It's used in many major cities like New York for example. It's a very effective way of making sure water is completely safe to drink but the problem for mobile living is that UV lamps are 1. very bulky 2. take up a lot of power 3. take a long time to initialize and 4. they have to be replaced every single year. This uses LED UV lights which basically take up almost no power, activate instantly and can be packaged into a small little unit like this. So our water goes first through our sediment filter to make it taste good, smell good, look good and to remove the bulk of any kind of particles that are in the water and then finally is sterilized by this Akuva system and basically then comes out of our tap up here. When you turn this tap on it has a blue light which indicates that the UV sterilization process is happening and is a dedicated water system so we know that this is always clean and it sticks on our countertop and gives us great drinking water. I will say this system is not designed for drinking out of rivers however they have actually done some tests and found that although it's not certified for drinking out of kind of rivers it it does actually kill enough bacteria and viruses to make the water actually safe for human consumption. Like many of you guys we don't know exactly where we're going to be sourcing our water from or what the condition of their systems are so having this is a real peace of mind for us not only that that we know that we're getting really high quality drinking water on board but also it reduces our environmental impact. We were going through a lot of plastic bottles just to ensure that we were getting good quality water and even then it's questionable you don't know for certain now we do know for certain now we're not using so many bottles. Full disclosure guys Akuva did give us this item we asked them if they would because we told them what we were doing and where we were going and they said you know this is a good system for you they knew that we would talk to you guys about it because we know that a lot of you will want it so thanks to Akuva for hooking us up for our expedition with this thing. We also are able to hook you up because we asked them if they could give you guys a discount code so if anyone does want one of these for their RV, boat, van they've got a $100 off discount code which is actually very reasonable if you use the code COMBILIFE so I'll link it down below you can go check that out if you like. This system's obviously already installed so we can't show you how we did it but just trust me it's super easy you can just integrate it into your existing system even if you have a single tank system which is what this is designed for it's just plug and play basically very very easy to install even for the complete novice so yeah if you want to get one of those systems I highly recommend it. A lot of people just have a fixed tank in their van but there is an advantage for drinking water being portable like this is often if you're going to proper fill up station to get decent quality water they don't have the facilities to run a hose out to you and you're supposed to take your tank to them so being able to remove this it's heavy when it's full but it's just about movable for us and it makes it possible for us to be able to get water in some of the locations that we'll be visiting. So obviously we don't have unlimited water storage so we want to be able to save as much water as we can use as little as we can and there are a few ways that we do that first is with the shower. So obviously the shower uses a lot of water so we have an economic shower head with different spray patterns and it also has importantly a stop button now this is important particularly when you're living off grid with a water supply so that you can be really economic and just wet yourself and then I'm not going to demonstrate right now if you don't mind I've already had a shower today actually and you can basically just stop it rinse down lather up and then rinse off and it's actually how you shower which contributes to how you save water significantly. We do have the option for hanging this shower head up we choose most of the time to not do that because it encourages you to you you can use more water when this isn't in your hand so basically having a handheld shower rinsing yourself putting it down lathering up rinsing off is the most economical way to save water. The other way is we're replacing the aerators on our tap here these taps came with the full flow aerator. Yes these ones are half a gallon minute or two litres a minute so that will force the the tap to basically put out less water let's see what the difference is. I just want to say if you're unsure of what kind of flow restriction you want get up the tightest one which is half a gallon or two litres a minute and then under here these are both the same aerators this is how this one is how it came and this one has been drilled out just slightly to give a better flow so you can adjust it yourself with a drill bit. Okay so we've got half a litre container here put that there 12.50 so that's one litre in 25 seconds. That was the one that came with the Dometic stove combo this is the 0.5 gallons per minute super tight so that isn't even quite half a litre it was over 40 seconds much more efficient. It's not really necessary to change these if you don't want to because you can if you do have a mixer tap you can control the flow with that sometimes it's not as easy to do but you can still have low flow to high flow if you don't want to exchange these. Okay so to a lot of you you probably think that that flow was a bit crap but we really need to save water and often when we're rinsing dishes we use way more water than we would need to use when we're using one of these right yeah so you know this is half a gallon a minute you might want to go for like one gallon a minute but changing the aerators on all of your faucets even at home is a good idea for saving water especially if you're living in an rv or motor home or a boat where you have limited supply getting different size aerators is a really cheap way to save a ton of water the other way we do that is down here so the last thing we did to save water was install a foot pump so we can go hands free with our tap we think it saves about 20% of water when we use the foot pump rather than turning on the tap and washing your hands while the tap's running it's honestly like who does turn the tap off when your hands are really soapy and you want to try to save water it really really happens so with the foot pump you do control it a lot more you do you know wash your hands while you're soaping your hands up you get your foot off the the foot pump it stops the water and then you put it back on when you're ready to rinse it and it does save a lot of water so technically it's not a foot pump it's actually a foot switch so it has a solenoid so when you do have your foot on it it releases water when you take it off it stops um so it's very handy to have we just got it down here it's quite discreet isn't it my love yeah so it's kind of out of the way where we're not going to accidentally step on it when we're walking around so it's just in this little corner here that you put your foot in when you're washing the dishes if you guys want to see how this system holds up as we drive all the way to australia be sure to subscribe for our travel series and if you want to see how this bus went together definitely check out our build series otherwise if you're into van life check out our van life guide below for all the tips and advice you need so that you can live off grid and on the we'll catch you next time guys until then happy travels that's right