Collecting rain water from the roof of your motorhome
For those who have never lived in a motorhome or caravan for an extended length of time, this must seem like a strange thing to do – why would you bother?
Well, like many full-time travellers, we like to spend time away from towns and people. In fact we just love to park up in a remote bush camp or on a deserted beach for weeks at a time.
Without exception, water is our greatest limiting resource. We make power from the sun, we can carry food to allow us to feed ourselves for months at a time, but we can only carry enough water for about 3 weeks. After about 3 weeks, we need to go and find water and re-fill the tanks.
Can you imagine how distressing it is to be standing under the awning during a rain storm and watch all that fresh water hit the ground when our tanks are almost empty?
The guttering
We have in the past rigged up a system to capture water from the awning – this however takes time to setup and sometimes the shower is over before we get it working. This is why we decided to install a permanent solution.
The solution needed to be both cheap and simple to install. For that reason we decided to use plastic extrusion – the kind you can find in most hardware stores. I first looked at using aluminium – however, this is quite expensive and is difficult to twist (twisting is required due to the curved edges of the roof). Plastic breaks down when exposed to UV – we therefore knew that the plastic guttering would need to be painted.
Because we do not always park the bus on level ground, we needed to put the guttering on quite an angle to make sure that the water would always run towards the back of the bus, into the collection funnels and down the hose towards the tanks.
The alternative to this large (and not so pretty) slope on the guttering is to place collection points at both ends of the guttering. For us it was difficult to get pipes down from the front of the bus so we decided only to collect water from the back.
The collected water flows from the funnels (that have a mesh cover to stop twigs and leaves) via some very cheap half inch garden hose to a series of valves. One valve (the dump valve) can be operated from inside the bus. In the normal position, water from the roof passes through this valve and is dumped onto the ground. This allows the first few minutes of rain to clean the roof. Once this valve is closed, the water flows via a course filter into the main water tank. It is also possible to direct the water into the drinking water tank.
So does it work?
Yes the system works well. We have had a few days of rain and each time we have filled the tank to capacity.
Comments. If I was doing this again there are a few changes I would make.
1. I would try to collect the water at both ends of the guttering – the slanted guttering really does look ugly.
2. I would use much larger hose to bring the water to the tanks. The half inch garden hose is quickly overwhelmed in heavy rain.
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I enjoy running the website - I like helping like minded people discover the wonderful lifestyle we live.
However it costs a lot of money each year to keep the site up and running. The advertisement that you see on the site
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Many thanks - Gavin & Tracey.
October 19th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Hi there hope your well.
I am soon 6months quiting work as a boilermaker and buying a bus and heading north for however long we feel,just wondering if you get a chance there is a bus bedford bus on ebay for $8500.00 would you have a quik look at it and let me Know wot u think.
with thanks.
john/cindy
October 20th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Hard to tell from the description/photos. A few comments…
The bedford 466 is a good engine – but very old (1950′s)
Mid mount engines are a pain due to the need to have access to the floor above them and they also hang very low causing issues with ground clearance.
Being a town bus, it has no outside locker space.
Please read my artical on build or buy – I always recommend you look at motorhomes already converted and carefully consider the cost and time involved in doing a conversion.
Hope this helps
Gavin