Water Storage

Water Storage

Welcome to another instalment of our handy guides for your van build. Here we hope to explain some of the options available to you and share the knowledge we have learned along the way.

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Considerations

The first step in figuring out your water setup is to examine how you are going to use your van, considerations include:

  • How long will you be using your van for per trip?
  • Will you stay on campsites with facilities or wild camp?
  • Will you need to cook?
  • What kind of toilet (if any) will you have on board?

If you are intending only to use your van for a couple of weekends a year or to stay on campsites that offer facilities, you may only need a very small, simple setup.

Next you’ll want to think about what you would use the water for:

  • Drinking
  • Cooking
  • Washing up
  • Cleaning
  • Personal hygiene

If you only really drink sodas and don’t often touch water or hot drinks, then you’ll probably not want to be lumbered down with too much water for drinking. As for washing up and showering, some campsites provide on site facilities especially for this, which could save you the trouble and expense of provisioning a hot water system. As for cooking you may wish to take something pre-prepared and wash up when you get home, depending of course, how long you’re away for. Optionally you could eat out or pick up take-out and save on the washing up altogether.

The last point regarding the toilet is also another consideration. These days you can get some pretty fancy campervan and marine toilets, some of which still use either water or chemicals to flush. You will still need to consider how to supply and store water, chemicals and eventually waste.

Sizing the System

It is generally accepted in the UK that on average, each person uses around 140 litres of water per day. This is an enormous amount and you would most certainly need to scale this down, becoming far more economical with your water whilst on your travels. Two key reason for this are:

  • Storage space
  • Vehicle weight limits

Taking these concerns into account you would potentially need to allocate a fair amount of space to carry 140 litres of water, let alone double or triple that for family use. Certainly, relinquishing space for this purpose in a small wheel base van or other prime camper vehicle such as Mercedes Vito’s, Transit Custom’s or VW’s, would be impractical.

Of larger concern, would be the weight, 1 litre of water is said to weigh in at around 1kg, adding 140kg or more of water to your van, plus the weight of the tank would surely mean sacrificing in other areas such as furniture and home comforts to keep within the vehicles maximum weight allowance. That being said, window cleaners do generally have smaller, specially adapted vans that carry large amounts (650+ litres) of water, but of course this being the only thing in the van would satisfy weight requirements.

As you can see, the amount of water you use will have to be drastically reduced in order for it to work within the ‘van life’ setting, particularly if you are planning to go full time.


Tanks

Before starting we need to decided which of the tank types will be required, the three main types of tanks are fresh, grey and black.

Firstly let’s take a look at the black tank as this will be completely optional depending on the circumstances. Although it is common to have a chemical flushing toilet in campers these days, most contain their own black tank within the unit itself, so even though you would have a black tank to empty and dispose of the waste in a sanitary manner, you would not necessarily have to provision for this. We decided in the end to go for a composting toilet as we felt this to be the most eco friendly option, more on this in future build guides and blog posts.

As for fresh and Grey water tanks, these are the standard set of tanks that everyone should have, be it purpose made storage tanks, jerry cans or large bottles. Typically within a camper set up the tanks range in size for 40 – 90 litres each.

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