VAN FEATURES - Water & Plumbing

We’ve updated our water & plumbing system, check out the updated info here

A rather important ingredient in well, staying alive, is water and it’s a BIG factor to consider when you live on the road. Since there’s not a seemingly endless supply of water that “magically” appears from the taps like when we were living on-grid, our water supply plays a big part when it comes to planning and how long we can stay in an area.

We can carry up to 130 litres of fresh water with us, which depending on how we use it, can last up to 3-weeks. Our water is stored in 5x food grade BPA-free plastic containers in total; Our main water tank is a 30lt container under our sink and we carry another 2x 30lt tanks and 2x 20lt tanks in our under-bed “garage”. We don’t normally fill all of our tanks unless we’re going somewhere remote or we plan to camp in one sopt for long time. This water is used for everything from drinking, cooking, washing up and showers. We decided to use individual water tanks as they’re cheap and available almost everywhere in Aus, so if we need to add an extra tank or if we break a tank it can be easily replaced.

Fresh water is stored in the 30lt tank (left) and greywater is stored in the 20lt tank (right)

Greywater from our sink is stored in a 20lt water container under our sink. We chose to use a smaller grey-water tank deliberately so we’re forced to empty the tank more often, which means the water doesn't sit in the tank for very long and therefore doesn’t get all smelly and gross. Here’s a little tip for those who might be researching there very own van build, make sure you have an s-bend or a p-trap in your waste water plumbing to avoid any bad smells coming back out of your greywater tank. Also to be classed as “fully self-contaned” you’ll need a greywater tank and we’ve found that the requirements for a few self-contained campgrounds are for a 20lt tank or bigger.

We decided to use a very basic low-pressure water system over a more complicated constant-pressure water system so we could keep costs down when purchasing components and to limit the chance of any leaks throughout the system. We manually transfer water from our storage tanks into a front tank, which then connects to a cheap 12v water pump (controlled by a foot switch), water then flows through our water filters to a small tap mounted on our benchtop. For washing dishes we’ll boil the kettle on the stove and use the hot water from that.

Is it easy to find drinking water while travelling in Aus? We’d say so, even in remote communities we can generally source fairly good quality water. Some places charge a small fee to fill up water tanks, usually only a couple dollars which is fine.

We filter all our water through a Stefani 2 stage filtration system. For stage one we use a 5-micron sediment filter for removing dirt particles, then stage two is a 5-micron carbon filter that removes chlorine and bad tastes/odours and these filters really work but remember to change the cartridges. If we’re ever uncertain about the quality of the water we’re collecting we also carry water treatment options like Aquatabs.

Thats our water system for now, it’s not pretty… But it works. Theres a good chance we’ll upgrade later depending on how we feel this system goes.

We’ve updated our water & plumbing system, check out the updated info here