GORV - Digital Magazine Issue #24 | Page 10

PLAN YOUR WATER SOURCES In order to solve this issue, many people will install additional water tanks in their RVs. I’ve heard of caravans with as many as five 95L water tanks. That’s a lot of water and, more critically, a lot of weight to tow around. Given the issues many caravanners have with keeping their weights within legal limits, it’s worth remembering that 1L of water weighs 1kg. Therefore, those five water tanks filled to capacity will weigh 475kg! For the vast majority of the time, there simply is no need to fill all our water tanks. It’s just dead weight. It makes sense to plan your water requirements ahead of time and have the facility to use local water sources as and when you need them. My wife and I are living in our van for at least 12 months. We intend to do a lot of free-camping in that time. Our caravan has three 95L water tanks. One is dedicated to storing fresh drinking water and has a single filtered outlet in the kitchen. The other two tanks are plumbed into the remaining outlets including the shower and toilet flush. This ensures we have good quality drinking water anywhere we go and we can utilise any 10 \ other water source, such as a river or lake, for personal hygiene. By carrying a suitable pump and filters, we can replenish our stores as and when we need to. If we run out of drinking water, we have additional specialised filters that can be plumbed into the pump outlet to purify the local water source. We also carry two different types of pumps. One is powered by 240V and is basically a ‘sump rat’ style of pump that can be used to draw water from any source, even if it is contaminated with debris. It has a large sediment filter to remove debris in the water before it is fed into our tanks. The other pump we carry is a 12V pump that is identical to the water pumps in the caravan. So in addition to being able to pump water using battery power alone, it serves as a spare should one of our caravan’s pumps fail. We also carry three food-grade water hoses and sufficient connections to join all three to form a single long hose. Even at caravan parks, it’s amazing how much hose is often required to reach the water source.