AMAZING DIY WATER SYSTEM For Van Life In A Sprinter Conversion Camper Van

[Music] hey guys hope you're all doing well thought I'd make another video for you today I'm just out here hanging out in the van it's pretty nice day out sighs a little bit windy though so I've got the side door open getting some fresh air inside I can't open the roof fence at the moment unfortunately because it's so windy that it makes them flap around and it possibly can damage them I've actually already had one get damaged in the wind so if anyone out there has got a fantastic vent fan just bear that in mind it's really windy you might want to put him down my front one one day I came in to the van and I've been raining and there was water on the floor and I figured out where it would come from basically the the lid the smoke lid on the fantastic vent fan was cracked in quite a few places it kind of like fractured off and gone branched off and yeah I had to I was gonna buy a new one but they're quite expensive is like $70 Australian or something and yeah I just thought it's too much I'd rather try and fix it if I can so I ended up managing to fix it and it cost me a total of five dollars worth of epoxy I think and yeah I just took the lid off cleaned it all up and I got a soldering iron and kind of reweld 'add where the cracks were on both sides put some epoxy on it Sika flex put it back on it's been perfect ever since but since then I've been a bit more careful in the wind so yeah it's it's kind of warm here too which sucks but yeah having the side door open with the amount of wind that we got today is not too bad so I'm just hanging out here and if you haven't seen not too long ago there's a couple of weeks ago now I made a tour of the van is just a basic tour and I said I was gonna go into more depth with the different systems in the van and that's what I thought I would do so I'm going to talk about the water system today which is under my kitchen bench I so I've had to clean all that out and it normally has a whole load of junk under there so I've cleaned out underneath the bench so you can see I'm going shucks a couple of lights on in there and I'll explain how it all works here so yeah it's what we're doing today stick around and have a look so as I was saying before my water system is all under my kitchen counter it's directly under my sink in fact and I put quite a bit of thought into how and where I was going to build it and this was what I came up with a walk you through it basically it's in the cabinet underneath the kitchen counter and to access it I've got this what I call a bifold door so it's just a normal sort of door that opens up but it also opens up further if you have the room and the reason that I did that is because when the bed is down it actually comes all the way up to here so you can only open half of the door but then I wanted to have good access so when I put the bed up I can open it all the way up and I normally use this area just for storage and stuff there's normally a bunch of mess in there that I cleaned out and I also keep my LPG or propane depending on where you're from tanks in there for the stove now you can see underneath here that's the bottom of the sink that sticks down and then that's the water tank itself the water tank is a 70 liter fiamma tank you might have seen in because I have seen quite a few other vans using the same tank everyone seems to use them different you can actually mount them in a lot of different ways they're designed to kind of fit your needs which I really like and the other thing that I really liked about this which is one of the big reasons I chose it is this big red lid here actually unscrews and it's quite a big hole and you can fit your whole arm in there so if you want to clean the tank out at any point you just drain it out open up that and you can get in there and scrub it which most water tanks you can't do with you know they only have the small holes in them that use for the hoses so that was one of the big things that I liked about this not that I have to clean the tank very off but just if you want to you can so basically I'll show you from the sink first underneath the sink I've got this attachment here which connects to just some clear hose and the clear hose goes all the way down and I drilled a hole through the floor to get rid of all the sink water it just drains outside which it's not really a problem I use biodegradable detergents and things and and I my dishes are pretty clean anyway because I wiped them first before I wash them in the sink so yeah I just thought do that keep it simple rather than putting a gray water tank in which is something else to maintain and cause smell so that's the sink that's how that drains and then if you look under here just up here this is the filler hose for the tank for the freshwater tank it's just clipped on there but basically if I bring this down you can see it's got a little cap on it pop the cap off and it's just got a I don't know if you can see that just a quick release just typical garden hose connection so you can connect the hose to it and then just clips up there the reason it's up so high is obviously just so that it's higher than the water line so that when the tank is full if you're driving it's not going to slosh out so I did it like that and then this here is an overflow so that when I'm filling it as it fills up it becomes pressurized and it pushes the excess water out and goes down and drains out of the floor as well so it allows me to fill it up it allows the air to escape as it's filling and also when it does finally fill up the water escapes out there as well this is the hose that I use to fill it I actually put a lot of thought into the hose as well I'll just put that in the light so you can see it so on one end I've got this connection here just just standard hose connection I've got a valve that I can turn on and off this is the inside connection so that I can control the water from the inside so I connect that to there first and I go outside and making sure that this is turned off I'll turn on the hose from outside and then I can come inside and open it up and control the flow as it fills up when it fills up I can turn it off go outside turn the hose off and disconnect it now I could have just done what most people do which is you add a sort of fill point on the outside and they just have a little door that opens up and a screw cap and you fill it up like you fill up your petrol but I didn't want to do that for a couple of reasons I didn't want to have to cut holes in the outside of the van and I also wanted to keep the van as plain and stealth on the outside as possible so I made the filler on the inside it also just keeps the whole install simple it's not quite as much cutting and things involved so that's how I did that and this one here is actually a one-way it's got a little stopper valve in there so that if for whatever reason this pops off like hoses do sometimes and it's inside the van it's not just going to spray everywhere it will just stop so I put quite a bit of thought into the actual hose itself but that's what I use and I just keep it up the top there I'll move it out the way for now so then we have the fill the overflow access for cleaning and down the bottom we have two more connections now this one at the back here this one comes out and goes up to my electric pump which is a flow jet that's the brand and that one is it's quite a small pump but it works really well I didn't want to go to overkill when I worked at motor home company they used quite a bit bigger pumps but they were also using them for showers and things mine's just for the sink I wanted to keep the energy consumption down the noise down and also the price so that just goes basically you can see the just comes up the back and round the top there that's my torch it's lighting it up for you but it connects underneath there and that actually just connects to this tap and what you might notice about this tap is it's quite a small tap it's actually designed for water filters but I chose that one on purpose because I was using a small pump I want it to use as little water as possible but still get decent pressure and it comes out with good pressure so that's why I chose that it's got a small opening you don't need to have the pump turned up as much to get the pressure out that you want and as you can see it actually comes out pretty well it splashes everywhere so that's the tap and it works really well with this little pump the second connection down the bottom of the tank is this one here and it's a larger pipe than the connection at the back that runs into the water pump it's basically a drain and it comes from the lowest point of the tank here runs to this valve so at the moment the water is held inside but if I cracked that valve open all the water from the tank would run out it would run through here and it tees into the same drain line as the drain from the sink and it would just go underneath the van so basically the the thinking behind this one was there's a couple of reasons actually number one was just when I want to clean the tank I just cracked that open drain all the water out open up the lid at the back there and I can scrub inside and rinse it all out and as I'm rinsing it it'll all just run out and go to the bottom of the van so that's the first reason the second reason was more of like a fail-safe it was just in case at any point I get a leak in the tank or and anywhere in the water system and I have to drain the water out so that it doesn't spill out onto the floor so if I ever get a leak or any of the pipes or anything or there's a crack in the tank something like that I just crack that open and instead of having 70 litres of water on my Vande floor it'll all just drain out to the ground outside I haven't had to use it yet luckily touch wood but it's just there kind of as a fail-safe and if I ever do need to clean out the tank so that's what that one is also under here you can see I've got this cable coiled up there's actually two cables there there's a 15 amp and a 7.5 amp they're not connected to anything yet but when I was running the power for the pump and also there's a couple of outlets that you can see there's outlets on that side and then outlets on that side when I was running the power for those I had to run this kanjou underneath the van floor into my electrical cabinet and I just thought ahead I thought just in case just for future proofing if I ever want to install anything else I'll run a couple of spare cables because once this conduits run you can't really run any more cables through it it's too difficult and yeah I didn't want to have to run a second conduit in the future so it's really just future proofing I just thought it just in cases anything else they install so we've got that that's something to bear in mind when you guys are building your vans just try and think ahead of anything you might need in the future I've also got my Shore power cable up there which I've never used but it's there just in case my fridge is just here you can see it strapped down there to a brace the tank is braced it's actually I don't know if you'll be able to see from here but there's four sort of threaded bars that have washers and nuts on them and that's bolted to the frame of the cabinet at the back it basically goes through here but then also just in case I installed this brace across the front just because basically this this direction is the front of the van so if you hit the brakes really hard I just wanted to stop the water tank from wanting to come forward and also installed this here this is just where I keep my cooking oil and cleaning stuff underneath the sink so yeah that's my water system guys let me know what you think about that and let me know if you have any other questions I feel like I covered pretty much everything I guess another thing to bear in mind is water you have to take into account levels so you see this is my overflow it's higher than the level of the water but it's lower than the level of the filler so the filler is up here so that if any movement of water or anything happens it overflows it's going to go out there first rather than out here so that's the highest point as the filler then you've got the overflow and then the level of the tank just bear that in mind when you're installing it it's kind of a bit of a puzzle that you have to solve in your in your head before you install this stuff so I know it's probably super windy and you might have trouble hearing me at the moment I don't have a little fluffy wind cover for the mic but I just thought before I go I would show you underneath the van where the water actually drains out and quickly explain that too so I'm just gonna climb down and have a look see if we can find it for you should be able to see the pipes coming down just from the floor this I've got the black one is the electrical conduit and then the clear ones the overflow is a small one and the drain is the big one and the drain I actually ran towards the center of the vehicle as far as I could and just put a little ninety degree on there so it doesn't drain onto the exhaust the reason why I ran the drain along towards the center of the van as you could see underneath is actually because when the waters draining out I didn't want you to be able to see it from sort of the side of the van I wanted to try and conceal it as much as possible it's just running with the whole idea of stealth if the water isn't draining in the middle of the van and you're less likely to see I didn't want people to see water pouring out if I drain my sink so that's why I did that and I put that little ninety agree on it because before I put that on there the water was just going straight into the exhaust and I just thought you don't want to do that for a few reasons but anyway so I I was weird so anyway I just I put a 90 degree on there and it just drains straight down and I've had no issues with it so far it's been really good anyway guys for now that is my video I hope you all got some value from it or some entertainment if you did don't forget to like it and leave your comments below letting me know what you think and also what you'd like to see next time and if you're watching this and you haven't already subscribed first of all that's insane but secondly you should definitely do that now so just go below the video and hit the subscribe button and also hit that notification thing that everyone talks about because otherwise it doesn't really mean much to subscribe these days for some crazy reason I don't know ask YouTube they just they like to change things and not always for the better anyway I'll see you guys soon [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Freedom In Mind

Views: 279,892

Rating: 4.7921686 out of 5

Keywords: sprinter conversion, diy sprinter, sprinter camper conversion, van tour, water system, water storage, water tank, camper van water system, camper van water storage, van water system, fresh water system, electric water pump, van life, van life australia, sprinter, conversion, diy, camper, diy sprinter conversion, vw crafter, stealth camper, stealth van, off the grid, off grid, tiny home, home on wheels, wheel estate, motorhome, life, urban, stealth, australia

Id: HjkVxWWxa7Y

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 20 2018