Extra Water

If you are going to extend stay somewhere, one thing for sure you need to do is have extra fresh water for your RV. This is certainly something we thought about before we started doing the RV full time.

As the wife puts it, “you can never have enough water”. I agree. Most RVs tend to have small water tanks. I think only a few Toy Hauler RVs have tanks larger than say 50 Gallons of Fresh Water. While I have no idea what others usage is, ours is about 8-10 gallons of Fresh a day between food prep, showers, cleaning, and toilet. We don't use our fresh water tank drinking water, for us that water is carried in separate 5 gallon jugs. With our 45 gallon fresh water tank, the water lasts about 4-5 days depending. This means if we want to stay a week or longer, we need more water.

In our current configuration, that problem is solved by having two 55 gallon fresh water barrels in the back of the truck. We get maybe 50 gallons in each barrels, so we fill up completely we have about 140 or gallons of fresh water that we carry. That will roughly last us 14 days (unless we do laundry). We have a water transfer pump that we use to pump the water out of the barrels into our 45 gallon holding tank. The only downside to the pump of course is that uses power to run it, so I make sure we only do a transfer during the day when either there is full sun or we are running the generator.

There are of course other ways to do this besides the barrels and the pump. I seen some people just carry a bunch of 5 gallon just that they use to fill the fresh water tank. Or could have your extra water tank could have a valve at the bottom of the tank so gravity does the work to empty it and fill your tank. No matter which way you go, I would certainly recommend carrying at least some extra water, even if you don't think you will be out as long as you think because you never know how much water you will really need or if you will be forced to stay somewhere an extra day or two.