“Fresh” water

[rvkev]

What a great topic. Elemental but important topic for any camper. Yes we grew up drinking out of the hose. Even used to put the nozzle on and to floss our teeth to see who can the most pressure. Ha Ha.

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Running a little bleach through your connection hose is simple and effective. At the beginning of the season I add a quart of bleach to the fill hose and then rinse the tanks out.

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When camping I do not rely on taste or smell. I purchased a simple water tester. The cost is $20.00 give or take depending on what you want to spend. This electronic device will not detect anything good or bad. The tester will give you Parts Per Million PPM of total dissolved solids. My on board Reverse Osmosis tests at less than thirty PPM. You can test your bottled water too with the same tester. Most campgrounds I have been to test at 150 to 200 PPM. Tap water for many municipalities is about the same. I did drink from the hose 60 years ago. I am more careful now days.

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In short get Reverse Osmosis on board system or drink bottled water after you have tested the bottled water or RO water output. Showering with camp water is fine unless you have a compromised immune system.

 

[Phillbo]

If you use a filter, be it one you hook up to supply the entire trailer, or one for just drinking water.....if you store it between uses, you must put it in a refrigerator or you will risk contamination as bacteria can grow inside the membrane.

I keep mine in the freezer

 

[Kevin D Pem]

What a great topic. Elemental but important topic for any camper. Yes we grew up drinking out of the hose. Even used to put the nozzle on and to floss our teeth to see who can the most pressure. Ha Ha.

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Running a little bleach through your connection hose is simple and effective. At the beginning of the season I add a quart of bleach to the fill hose and then rinse the tanks out.

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When camping I do not rely on taste or smell. I purchased a simple water tester. The cost is $20.00 give or take depending on what you want to spend. This electronic device will not detect anything good or bad. The tester will give you Parts Per Million PPM of total dissolved solids. My on board Reverse Osmosis tests at less than thirty PPM. You can test your bottled water too with the same tester. Most campgrounds I have been to test at 150 to 200 PPM. Tap water for many municipalities is about the same. I did drink from the hose 60 years ago. I am more careful now days.

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In short get Reverse Osmosis on board system or drink bottled water after you have tested the bottled water or RO water output. Showering with camp water is fine unless you have a compromised immune system.

I use an RO unit, but, a few things you mentioned I have issues with. So I will bring them up again ( I keep doing that). First issue I will highlight is PPM is a solids test, not a contaminants test. Chemical testing is just as important, but not in the scope of most RVers.

Organic issues are real, and the reason filter maintenance is so important. RO removes the chlorine from your drinking water (chlorine is poison), so that is a good thing. Because chlorine is the control mechanism, storing water that has had the chlorine removed has it's own complications. So with the catch 22, what do you do?

As you mentioned, you use chlorine in sanitation of your tank and hose. This is the complications of that practice. Containers that are used with chemicals are never considered food safe. Disposal requires rinsing 3 times before proper disposal. Honestly? That tells me that your equipment is in a strict sense of the word, no longer food safe after chlorine treatment.

What can it hurt? People who are chlorine sensitive, are those people who have a chlorine overdose. The biggest organ of the human body is the skin. If you think the practice is harmless, you are mistaken.

So now with your own admission, just because you did reckless things when younger, you now know better. You now know more! What should you do going forward?

RO is 95% effective in removing most things that can kill you. That is one answer, but maybe not if you're going to store the water for very long. Most true RO bottled water go through UV treatment. What most people don't realize is the mechanism is really just one way to create ozone to kill remaining organisms in the water.

Ozone can purify 95% without other filtering. Bubbling ozone in water will not clear water up. But it makes the water safe. What makes it safer than chlorine is it is not poison. The half life is half hour. Although drinking freshly bubbled ozone water will increase blood oxygen levels. Waiting 2 hours to use the water will be drinking water that is so free of ozone, that it is as though it was never bubbled in.

A generator could be purchased a few years ago for less than 100 big ones. No more chlorine purchases. No more poisoning, just safe water!

But like some say. I grew up drinking from a garden hose! Well let me tell you. We grew up drinking from snow fed streams in Wyoming. That was until My Dad came back from a fishing trip telling us he took a long draw from the stream and the next bend presented him with a dead cow in the stream he was fishing.