Water Ideas

In the interest of having plenty of drinkable fresh water, these things need to be true:

1) There actually needs to be a source of water
2) You need to be able to store enough between sources
3) You need to be able to treat any water to make it drinkable

We proved on our last trip that we can be very frugal with our water. However at one stage we were not consuming enough water... all the warning signs came on very quickly. Although we did carry enough, we were a far too economic with it. This was due to the difficulty of retrieving our stored water and naivety on how much our bodies were using.

So in the interest of improving our situation I've devised a possible solution which merges convenience, accessibility and reliability - comparable to the luxury of town water that we take for granted.
The solution will use three 20L jerry cans stored in the car. The jerry cans will rotate between the 'active' position under the sink position and the two 'standby' positions just behind the front seats.
Connected to the 'active' jerry can will be a fairly low flow (4.7L/Min) electric water pump which will pump out of the jerry can, through a mesh filter, through the pump, through a .5 micron water filter and out the tap on our sink. The mesh filter is only fine enough to protect the delicate membrane in the pump from sand and debris.
The ceramic filter however is fine enough to filter chlorine, bacteria, Giardia and Cryptosporidium, dirt, rust, sediment, slime, heavy metals such as lead and foreign organic compounds. In summary... improving taste, odour and purity without necessarily having to treat our water with chlorine.

Don't get me wrong, we'll certainly be taking the chlorine tablets with us, but we'll save those for drinking out of puddles. If we use chlorine pills, the water will taste horrid and the resulting meals and beverages that include water will also be horrible.

Where the idea gets clever:
A) We can pick up nearly any water source provided it's fairly clear and not sludge and it will still filter it.
B) If we get a bad batch of water, we have 40 litres of known good water to fall back on.

Filter, hose, tap and fittings

Electric water pump

Of course this isn't worth doing unless you have a reason to use this cool blue push button switch for the pump.

One would argue that storing water outside the car must be a better solution but it has a wealth of drawbacks.
Just to list a few:
-Risky keeping all your water in one source with regards to contamination, damage or loss.
-Difficult to retrieve if it's on the roof, or difficult to fill if it's mounted to the car.
-In most cases the water tank doesn't permit the fitment of a towbar.
-Would need to drill a hole in the body for the water pipes - not cool.

Keeping everything 'factory' with my last car paid off. I was very close to throwing out all the unused seats, seatbelts, carpets from my old car because I thought we were taking it around the world and dumping it. My car would have been virtually worthless to another buyer in this state. You can see below the location beneith the sink. A door will cover these jerry cans normally.

Not visible in the picture above is the connection from the sink to our 'Grey Water' tank. Our Grey Water tank is simply what goes down the sink. Depending on the weather, we would typically wash up outside, but if the weather is rough we can be self contained. We'll need to be mindful to use environmentally sensitive soaps as I imagine we'll be emptying it randomly along the roadside and we certainly don't want to damage any waterways. The sink does give us a great deal of flexibility for washing dishes, clothes, self etc.