We are a two pop-top camper, 4 person, 1 dog family traveling through South America. Before we received our campers and had less control over our water in Colombia and Buenos Aires Provincia. We all had the runs at least once. We were told to just expect this while traveling. But, since getting the campers and having more control over our water, no one has been sick. Here is what we are doing.
We are currently in Argentina where people are confident that the water is safe to drink. It may be true that drinking from the tap won’t make you sick here but we found that water we pump to store in a tank probably needs to be filtered first: as evidenced by the wriggling water insects we shook from our pre-filter the other day from an established campground.
The insects from the hose was in a camp where the camp host told us the water was good to drink: potable. We filtered it anyway and so glad we did. I’m glad we don’t have bugs in the tank and here’s hoping whatever the bugs are eating was filtered out as well. Here is our system:
We have two tanks for water to use for drinking, cooking, and washing. Both of our vehicles hold 25 gallons each. We are able to fill them straight from a lake or a spigot or a hose run through our water pump and filter. When a source spigot is not compatible with our pump nozzle, we continuously fill a bucket and pump from the bucket through the filter into our tank. We also use the bucket method if the fresh water lake shore won’t allow us to get our trucks close enough to pump directly from the lake.
Water sources: we are able to draw from any water source we decide can be filtered like fresh water lake or river, camp supplied water or municipal source. No matter the source, we run the water through our Guzzle H2O carbon filtration filter. We saw a campervan filling it’s tank directly from a YPF water hose (large gas station chain) at San Martin de Los Andes. No doubt, this is possible but, with 2 rigs and our general impatience with manuvering in congested parking lots, we haven’t done this. So, obviously some of the water is safe, some of the time. But not all of the water is safe all of the time. We just are not going to chance it
In some of the established mom and pop campgrounds, the water source is right next to the bathrooms because that’s where the plumbing is. In those places, we don’t fill. The insect water was from plumbing next to a wood heated shower house in our camp at Lake Piagum. We just filled from Lago Guttiérez yesterday outside San Carlos de Bariloche, no insects.
How long to fill? It takes us about 1 hour to fill both of our tanks through the filter. 1.5 hours if the filters are filling with insects… We usually time our fills for a travel day after using both tanks down to near empty in camp. This has averaged every 5-7 days.
Problem solving: air in the pump, slow high pressure pumping, carbon filter full, electricity supply to charge pump battery to get complete fills for 50 gallons. We learned that air in the filter can be solved by turning the pump upsidedown, on its side and upright several times while pumping, just like our old backpack filter. We removed and replaced our first carbon filter when the pump started running super slow and seemingly under high pressure. The 2nd carbon filter ran much better but, we are not convinced the old filter is full so we are carrying it with us to dry and try again. The battery charge on the Guzzle H2O lasts us about 30 gallons of pumping so, we charge it for the rest of the fill off our solar charged battery to get our full 50 gallons.
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