Off-Grid Water Supply

We enjoy Wild Camping in our Symbol, but the most limiting factor currently seems to be access to fresh water. We drink and make brews etc with bought bottled water, but still seem to deplete our 60 litre water tank in as little as 2 days.
I always carry a longish hose and opportunistically top up the tank whenever I spy a tap but, in the wilds of the UK, roadside streams are far more plentiful than taps. 
So I'm thinking of finding a suitable 12v pump to attach to the hose so I can fill up at will.
Has anyone successfully done this, and if so, what can they recommend?

Definitely not rivers!
Surprisingly, graveyards, not so surprising, petrol stations.
We are careful re what goes in the tank, but not obsessive as we never drink it. Always, like you, carry bottled water for drinking/cooking etc
Always drain fresh tank when back home, refill immediately prior to next departure

When I used to carry a 25l fresh water container* I used a Whale portable submersible pump like this:

https://tinyurl.com/y6esfvcu


on which I extended the 12V lead so I could pass it though a window and plug it in to a socket in the van; I also attached a sufficiently long clear hose to reach from the bottom of the tank up to the water filler cap.

I guess you could do the same but with a much longer lead and coil of hose.

PS I see something like this is already available as a kit but at a bit of a high price, I'm sure making it up yourself would be cheaper:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/25017004134?iid=114399698693


https://tinyurl.com/y36z32eq


*since this also required a trolley as it was too heavy to carry, I eventually came to my senses and now use a 10l container which I can carry and I just make more trips to the tap - much healthier and less bulky to store in the van!

IanH wrote:Definitely not rivers!
Surprisingly, graveyards, not so surprising, petrol stations.
We are careful re what goes in the tank, but not obsessive as we never drink it. Always, like you, carry bottled water for drinking/cooking etc
Always drain fresh tank when back home, refill immediately prior to next departure

Yes... agree... not rivers. As I've been recently thinking Scotland, it'll be burns, very few petrol stations and... even if I could find a graveyard, I'm sure the tap would be too far away for my hose to reach.
On our last Off-Grid jaunt in the Italian Dolomites, I'd disinfected our tank prior to departure and used a short hose to fill the tank from the public water "fonte" that are everywhere in the area. We drank it... from the tank... with no probs.

rogerblack wrote:When I used to carry a 25l fresh water container* I used a Whale portable submersible pump like this:

https://tinyurl.com/y6esfvcu


on which I extended the 12V lead so I could pass it though a window and plug it in to a socket in the van; I also attached a sufficiently long clear hose to reach from the bottom of the tank up to the water filler cap.

I guess you could do the same but with a much longer lead and coil of hose.

PS I see something like this is already available as a kit but at a bit of a high price, I'm sure making it up yourself would be cheaper:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/p/25017004134?iid=114399698693


https://tinyurl.com/y36z32eq


*since this also required a trolley as it was too heavy to carry, I eventually came to my senses and now use a 10l container which I can carry and I just make more trips to the tap - much healthier and less bulky to store in the van!

I had thought of a standard Whale submersible pump but, without going into any real in-depth technical analysis, had figured that the pressure and flow rate wouldn't be up to pumping water as much as 10 metres vertically upwards, which is the length of my hose but also what it could be if I were parked on tarmac above a burn flowing beneath the road. Whale do beefier high pressure pumps, but it's a bit too much to fork out on an experiment that may not even do the job. I was hoping someone might have been there, got the T-shirt, and could give me chapter and verse.

OK, I'm game for an experiment!

I'll have a look in the morning, Pilchard - if the Whale pump is still languishing under one of the seats in the van, where I think it will be, I'll try pumping some water from a bucket up through a garden hose to the top of our upstairs window (about 4m?) and see what sort of flow rate we get. (My wife will help, she's used to my daft projects!)

I doubt that you're ever going to be 10 m (30ft+) vertically upwards from a burn to the van - that's like a cliff, how would you climb down there?

Otherwise, might be better to just carry something like a 10l container and fill it up several times. 

In any event, always use fast flowing burns, preferably at the bottom of a vertical drop if possible otherwise make sure to check for dead sheep upstream.

rogerblack wrote:OK, I'm game for an experiment!

I'll have a look in the morning, Pilchard - if the Whale pump is still languishing under one of the seats in the van, where I think it will be, I'll try pumping some water from a bucket up through a garden hose to the top of our upstairs window (about 4m?) and see what sort of flow rate we get. (My wife will help, she's used to my daft projects!)

I doubt that you're ever going to be 10 m (30ft+) vertically upwards from a burn to the van - that's like a cliff, how would you climb down there?

Otherwise, might be better to just carry something like a 10l container and fill it up several times. 

In any event, always use fast flowing burns, preferably at the bottom of a vertical drop if possible otherwise make sure to check for dead sheep upstream.

Fair play to you Roger... you're my kind of man. Don't let the neighbours spot you.
As to cliff climbing... I'd just lower (or throw) the pump into the burn on the end of it's hose and 12v cable. Have done the same in the past to great effect with rope and bucket. Rough and ready works very well for me, but rope and bucket has limitations and am I'm hoping the pump might not.
Dead sheep... a common hazard best avoided.
Have fun... and let me know how you get on.

Regarding graveyard water, some may not be drinking water as they are only used to top up the flower urns

Sorry, Pilchard, the experiment has been delayed but not forgotten.   

Yesterday I admit to somewhat selfishly giving priority to my soap dispenser issue, the saga of which you may or may not have been following with bated breath on another thread.  

Today, I was keen to proceed with the water drawing experiment on your behalf, despite the even keener North-Easterly which has brought chilly conditions to the north facing side of the house, where the sun don't shine   

Nonetheless I was hoping my good lady wife would still be happy to hang out of a first floor window whilst maintaining a firm grip on the end of my extended hose for the duration of my pumping a few litres of liquid from below whilst carefully timing to establish the flow rate. 

However, she rather strongly demurred, using terms which I must say in 30 odd years of marriage I have never before heard pass her lips!     

Hopefully, sunshine and warmer marital relations will resume over the weekend and the project can be reinstated.     

I'll keep you posted.

rogerblack wrote:Sorry, Pilchard, the experiment has been delayed but not forgotten.   

Yesterday I admit to somewhat selfishly giving priority to my soap dispenser issue, the saga of which you may or may not have been following with bated breath on another thread.  

Today, I was keen to proceed with the water drawing experiment on your behalf, despite the even keener North-Easterly which has brought chilly conditions to the north facing side of the house, where the sun don't shine   

Nonetheless I was hoping my good lady wife would still be happy to hang out of a first floor window whilst maintaining a firm grip on the end of my extended hose for the duration of my pumping a few litres of liquid from below whilst carefully timing to establish the flow rate. 

However, she rather strongly demurred, using terms which I must say in 30 odd years of marriage I have never before heard pass her lips!     

Hopefully, sunshine and warmer marital relations will resume over the weekend and the project can be reinstated.     

I'll keep you posted.

Don't ruin your marriage on my behalf Roger.

To my surprise our Rienza has the same size tank as our Duetto had,60ltrs. Autosleepers  must have had a batch of tanks that size. We occasionally go off grid for a change before the present problems. 
To lengthen our time before needing water we carry a 20 litre container giving us one moe day. It fits in the under bed side locker. Also we carry a waste water container of the same size. 
I have looked into extending our tank capacity with an extra tank under the back seats but for now I havnt taken it any further.
The only problem with carrying extra containers with smaller vans is storage. I suppose they could go in the shower until you are parked up.

Just some quick thoughts, all the water you use doesn't have to be pure, you just want no bits in it. In households where there's been flooding they say boil all drinking water, and at other times abroad when you had to buy bottled water because you couldn't trust what came out of the taps. I suspect some people with a caravan in the UK don’t trust what’s coming out of their Aquaroll.

Consider, fill your tank with stream/river water, disinfect the tank when you get home. Have a separate plastic container for drinking water. This water can be sterilised with tablets, already boiled water, bought bottled water, or have a filter. Here's folk who sell filters for wild camping, I bought a small one a while back for my son but so far he hasn't used it.

http://drinksafe-systems.co.uk/products.php

(they don’t seem to have a secure https website)

It really HAS to be a "pump it out of the burn/beck/stream" solution, in order to extend wild camping days away from facilities. We won't drink it. My wife has become allergic to chlorinated water, so we always use bottled water for consumption purposes. The only time we didn't was when getting water from Italian "fonte" which are 100% free from additives or contamination, but which we drank only after boiling anyway.

Our 60 litre tank only lasts us 2 days, but with careful use can get the toilet to last 5 days. Our grey waste contains minimal residues as we wipe all dishes and pans clean before washing with paper towel, and the tiny quantity of detergents used (one or two drips in a bowl of washing-up) are fully biodegradable, so... we have little compunction about SENSIBLE & CONSIDERATE dumping of the grey waste in a verge where it can break down and filter long before any chance of it entering any water course. With 110 watts of solar panels and plenty of gas, our only real limit is fresh water.

Nobody seems to have mentioned it, but there are many companies offering water purification equipment to the off grid and hiking/camping folk. They are for turning stream and fresh river water into safe drinking water and range from £20+ to hundreds depending on the amount you want to purify. Typically the small portable ones are for supplying 2-4 litres to drinking bottles, although more expensive systems can use 12v or 240v for much larger volumes. Most of the smaller ones use hand pumping but some enable you to fill a container and hang it up for a few minutes to let gravity take the water through the filters.

Roger

pilchard wrote:

rogerblack wrote:Sorry, Pilchard, the experiment has been delayed but not forgotten.   

Yesterday I admit to somewhat selfishly giving priority to my soap dispenser issue, the saga of which you may or may not have been following with bated breath on another thread.  

Today, I was keen to proceed with the water drawing experiment on your behalf, despite the even keener North-Easterly which has brought chilly conditions to the north facing side of the house, where the sun don't shine   

Nonetheless I was hoping my good lady wife would still be happy to hang out of a first floor window whilst maintaining a firm grip on the end of my extended hose for the duration of my pumping a few litres of liquid from below whilst carefully timing to establish the flow rate. 

However, she rather strongly demurred, using terms which I must say in 30 odd years of marriage I have never before heard pass her lips!     

Hopefully, sunshine and warmer marital relations will resume over the weekend and the project can be reinstated.     

I'll keep you posted.

Don't ruin your marriage on my behalf Roger.

Sincere apologies, pilchard, but the desire to maintain marital harmony coupled with the atrocious weather have conspired to prevent me from carrying out the promised experiment.  I am about to be separated from the van by some 500 odd miles for the next few weeks so it ain't gonna anytime happen soon either I'm afraid.
Shame as I am genuinely interested to see the results. Sorry for letting you down.

rogerblack wrote:

pilchard wrote:

rogerblack wrote:Sorry, Pilchard, the experiment has been delayed but not forgotten.   

Yesterday I admit to somewhat selfishly giving priority to my soap dispenser issue, the saga of which you may or may not have been following with bated breath on another thread.  

Today, I was keen to proceed with the water drawing experiment on your behalf, despite the even keener North-Easterly which has brought chilly conditions to the north facing side of the house, where the sun don't shine   

Nonetheless I was hoping my good lady wife would still be happy to hang out of a first floor window whilst maintaining a firm grip on the end of my extended hose for the duration of my pumping a few litres of liquid from below whilst carefully timing to establish the flow rate. 

However, she rather strongly demurred, using terms which I must say in 30 odd years of marriage I have never before heard pass her lips!     

Hopefully, sunshine and warmer marital relations will resume over the weekend and the project can be reinstated.     

I'll keep you posted.

Don't ruin your marriage on my behalf Roger.

Sincere apologies, pilchard, but the desire to maintain marital harmony coupled with the atrocious weather have conspired to prevent me from carrying out the promised experiment.  I am about to be separated from the van by some 500 odd miles for the next few weeks so it ain't gonna anytime happen soon either I'm afraid.
Shame as I am genuinely interested to see the results. Sorry for letting you down.

No sweat Roger... you've been remarkably helpful with advice on my fridge niggles, so I'll let you off. Any... there's not a cat in hells chance we'll be tootling off to the Scottish Highlands within the next month or two. It's now looking like next spring for that NC500, but maybe a visit to Glencoe or Skye if they get a fine dump of snow.

The way the weather is just now, you'd only need to leave out a large open bucket or a container with a large funnel to collect a decent supply of fresh water.  

rogerblack wrote:The way the weather is just now, you'd only need to leave out a large open bucket or a container with a large funnel to collect a decent supply of fresh water.  

Or rainwater harvesting from van roof straight into onboard water tank. Why has no-one thought of that? Maybe because if it rained enough to keep us in water, we'd be driving straight home anyway.

Roger G wrote:Nobody seems to have mentioned it, but there are many companies offering water purification equipment to the off grid and hiking/camping folk. They are for turning stream and fresh river water into safe drinking water and range from £20+ to hundreds depending on the amount you want to purify. Typically the small portable ones are for supplying 2-4 litres to drinking bottles, although more expensive systems can use 12v or 240v for much larger volumes. Most of the smaller ones use hand pumping but some enable you to fill a container and hang it up for a few minutes to let gravity take the water through the filters.

Roger

I have considered getting a small portable filter... more for hiking purposes than for the van, although it would also serve for our 5 or 6 litres drinking water daily needs in the van. But my wife's acute allergy to chlorinated water is so debilitating that she's paranoid about touching anything other than bottled, or proper alpine spring water if boiled.

For anyone that also has probs with chlorinated water... these days the water authorities add ammonia plus chlorine to water which produces compounds called "chloramines". These compounds are much more efficient at killing bacteria and parasites, and have a far longer life before the become neutralised, meaning they remain effective all the way to the end of miles and miles of rotten and crumbling Victorian pipelines. 
Trouble is that Chloramines just add to the range and severity of digestive probs etc that ordinary Chlorine causes.

Tropical Fish fanatics know that tap (chlorinated) water kills their fish so they filter it with activated charcoal filters. But since Chloramines came along, they've found ordinary activated charcoal to be ineffective. Not to be beaten, they've found that a type of charcoal filter activated at much higher temps removes chloramines.
I fitted one of these under our kitchen sink along with a separate tap. My wife tried it, but never really felt 100% safe, so now only uses it for cooking water. You can lead a wife to filtered water, but can't make her drink.