from jerrys to tank
via a water filter

topping up the water tank after a week bush camping

It wasn't until Colin Hopgood's talk at the Australian CamperTrailers Group's 2012 Wellington national meet that the importance of having safe drinking water hit home & just how easy it was to achieve. Colin is the owner of BEST Water Filters & was invited to attend the event to host an information workshop.

The water filter uses SilverSafe technology, silver coated crystals at each end & carbon/charcoal in the middle to produce safe drinking water filtered to one micron. This process eliminates chlorine, chemicals, odour, sediment & bacteria such as giardia & cryptosporidium from town, tank, creek or bore water & is useable for 5000 litres plus.

There are a number of ways you can connect the filter for use depending on your situation. For example you can simply fill your water tank from a town water supply with the water filter on the end on the hose like we do at home or place it inline between the camper trailer water tank & a 12volt water pump tap outlet.  A hand or foot operated water pump does not have enough force to push water through the one micron filter, therefore a 12volt water pump is needed to produce approximately 35psi.

We mainly bush camp & use the camper trailers 65 litre water tank as our main drinking water supply via a handpump. On an extended trip we do not know where we will be getting the next reliable water from so we tend to fill up when we can. We carry three jerrys of water as backup which are also used for showering & washing up etc. The jerrys are handy to fill up from a tap or creek when we cannot get the hose directly to the water tank.

I mounted a 12volt Flojet pressure pump in a protected position from the elements behind the wing of the jerry rack on our Track Trailer Eagle. The water pump has a flow rate of eleven litres a minute & a 50psi pressure cut off with a useful three metre dry prime height. We can fill our three jerrys from wherever & then pump water through the Best Water Filter into our water tank.

The pump can also be used for showering from the jerrys through our Glind hot water heat exchanger. The water transfer system has proved very useful on a number of trips. There is minimal setting up. It is just a matter of connecting the hoses to the pump using garden hose quick connectors & plugging in the power lead. We do not have to take the jerrys out of the rack. It only takes just under two minutes to transfer twenty litres of water into the tank.

For a no brainer setup I have used a brass male hose connector on the pumps inlet hose & a brass female hose connector on the pumps outlet hose.

To prevent dirt getting into the hoses I have placed rubber chair ends over the hose fittings which have a length of small gauge wire through the middle. This way they cannot be lost.

transferring water	water pump

january 2016