water water water

When you live in a house, you take little things like water draining into the sink and “disappearing” for granted. The water goes down that hole and for the most part, you never have to think about it again. That doesn’t hold true for folks living in an RV. That water going into the drain isn’t even where thinking about the water begins.

First, you have to know whether that water is coming in—in what quality, quantity, and what manner (main tank? Bypassing the tank?). Some places we stay have a ‘city water’ or other hook up. That hook up bypasses the fresh water tank and goes right to the tap—sort of like the water to your home. The quality varies—though honestly all of it is supposedly ‘potable’ and covered by whatever local agency regulates the water quality. [Side humorous note: Greg and I were surprised when staying at the last place that the fresh tank wasn’t filling when we were hooked up to a constant water supply—I had this vague idea that the water came in, filled the tank then the excess was pressurized water to your system. Come to find out—there is an entirely different inlet into your fresh tank—we had been plugging into the ‘city water’ inlet before. Only luck that our tanks were full before Burning Man because he tried to fill through the city inlet! Though truth be told—we would have figured it out when checking the tank level inside and had to read the manual then. Read the manual! (heard that before?)] We have a sediment filter on the water coming in just in case and a high tech water filter (Nature PureÒ, www.generalecology.com) installed for drinking water at the tap (another day I’ll post the links about bottled water—it ain’t as great as you think!).

Once that water is IN your RV, it has to go someplace when you let the water run or flush the toilet. Our RV has 3 tanks—galley, grey, and black. Some just have two—black and grey. Grey is the water from your kitchen sink, shower, and other sinks. It has the food particles, soap, etc. Black is the yucky stuff from the toilet. Obviously, these tanks have limited capacity. Many RV parks have sewer hook ups—when you are hooked up, again its like a house—all the tanks drain all the time into the ‘sewer’. But places like the Moose Lodge where we are now have only electric and fresh water—no drainage. So you have to spend a lot of thought thinking about what is going into those tanks lest you fill up before you need to leave the park.

We are not entirely new to water conservation, but backpacking you can just dump that grey water into the woods and dig a hole for the poop. Both of us are already longing to be where it is warmer and neighbors not so close so we can just take showers outside (our RV has an outdoor shower, but even without it is simple to set up an outdoor shower system). We haven’t done too badly so far—4 days in and our tanks are all registering at 1/3 full. Visiting a friend last night though I realized how quickly I dropped into conservation mode and what a luxury to let water run and run!