ENDLESS WATER | OFF-GRID CARAVAN/CAMPING | 12V Pump Box | Filtered drinking water | Homemade DIY

g'day guys and welcome back to the channel so today i'm going to talk about a solution i came up to pretty prolong one of our most precious resources when we're off at camping and caravaning and that is being water so today we're going to talk about what i've done here to uh extend our stays when we're free camping how to go about building one of these for yourself and all the statistics and facts you need to know about it in terms of power usage and it's time to fill so let's get straight into today's video [Music] okay so there's no doubt about it the most limiting factor for us when we're off grid caravaning or camping is water we seem to go through it quite quickly and also it's one of those things that you don't want to carry too much in your setup because obviously it weighs it down and they're bulky items to carry now what we've also found in our few years of carrying and camping as well is you often park and camp next to bodies of water whether or not that be cow dams creeks rivers streams whatever it is is often a fresh water source not too far away so what i've come up with today is a solution to get that fresh water source filter it and then put it into our caravans or into jerry cans and to extend that time we can stay in off-grid location so this box here is self-sufficient in terms of its power it can run off the vehicle and all the filters that we've got here i'll go into in a bit of detail but first of all let's go through all the tools and what parts and how i went about building it and then we'll come back and we'll do all the testing for it okay so these are some of the basic tools that you're going to need to use to put this box together if you want to build one for yourself so let's get some basic hand tools things like wire cutters now long nose pliers i've got some wire strippers as well but they're not necessary if you just can use the cutters there i've also got some solder and a little butane torch i don't actually use a soldering iron i just use a torch to heat the wire up and then some solder there i've got some screwdrivers um a hole saw here for cutting a hole inside the box for the outlet hoses got some drill bits and a drill obviously and a very sharp standing blade so if you use a really sharp one you can actually use that to cut some of the holes in the plastic that you need and does a fairly good job there i've also got some super glue which will be used to attach some of these small brackets that we're going to be using to hold over the electrical wiring and the conduit that we've got here and then i've got some thread tape for all the plumbing fixtures as well just got some sort of heat shrink here and some wiring uh bits and pieces that i might use as well so overall you don't need a whole lot of stuff just some basic tools there and let's get straight into it okay guys so here we are in the shed and these are all the things that you might want to think about getting if you want to build one of these boxes for yourself so let's go through each of the items and i'll tell you why i chose them and how everything here works so i'll start with the most obvious which is the box itself okay so this particular box here i bought from bunnings it's a tactics box now when i was looking at buying boxes i was looking for something as small as possible that would fit all this gear in there but would still fit the pump fairly well and fit away quite comfortably in the van so this box here may look quite big and look it probably is a little bit taller than it needs to be however it does fit all the extra hoses that you're going to need to put in there to connect to your water filter and your suction hose and things like that so it does keep everything you need inside the one box the other event about this particular box as well is the top flaps up here do open up and i've chosen to mount my anderson plugs and my switches inside those flaps which means they're not accidentally going to get knocked when the box is packed away so moving on from the box there i have chosen to run a twin water filter here so this is a twin carbon and 0.5 micron water filter now look it might reduce the flow of the pump a little bit however that's something i'm willing to compromise with to make sure i get some good quality water going into into either jerry cans or the caravan tank whichever way i choose to go so these are replaceable and it's fairly simple obviously it's quite a large unit but you simply plug one side in and the water comes out the other side so it's super easy connects onto the normal things that we already have in the caravan and that's going to filter our water really really well now alternative for this is just a regular carbon uh inline water filter if you want to do that as well i just tossed it over this i'm testing this out for the first time and we'll see how it goes with the water pump so all the plumbing inside the box itself is going to be using this sort of 16 mil it's called the smartex p line of a plumbing pipe so it's a plastic pipe it's fairly rigid it does have a little bit of flex in it but not a whole lot the reason i went for this sort of stuff is because of the availability of the connectors it has with it so there's a whole lot of connectors that go with it and it's simply a push-in and lock-in system so they don't leak they're really reliable and they're super tough when they're all put together so that brings me on to some of the fittings that we're going to be using today so we've got a bunch here and i've kept all the packets and all the details so i can put all the uh detailed item descriptions in the description of this video so you can go and buy all this stuff for yourself if you want but what we have got in the nto is a couple of male fittings which are going to come out the side of the box which is going to be inlet and outlet hoses for the water and then we just got a couple of elbows and a couple of adapter pieces that are going to go around the pump and you'll see that when you put the pump together just to make it all work now obviously we've got our normal garden hoses we have a couple of male fittings now i've chosen to go for male fittings on the outside of the box just because they are physically smaller than the female fittings which means the box and these are going to be less vulnerable for damage and being knocked around on the outside of the box and it's going to keep the box as small as possible [Music] now i've got a couple of uh pipes here so this is just a normal sort of garden hose type pipe it's made by a company called nylex this is their particular anti-kink line they call it so there's a couple of reasons i went for that first of all it actually ended up being just as cheap as your normal garden hose stuff because it came with the fittings already included on it and the second reason is that you want the suction side to have a little bit more strength as the pump pulls the water through the suction hose you don't want the hose collapsing on itself and starving the pump of water so the other pipe uh hose here they're both two meter lengths has just got a normal fitting on one end and i've taken the fitting off the other end and that's where we're going to fit our strainer so it's just a 12 mil barb strainer and it is also a screw type fitting so it's nice and easy to uh to clean out if that's the case and that will just simply fit onto the end of that hose with a hose clamp there now going along with the water pump itself so i have chosen to go for a sureflow so this is the 4009 and there's a couple of reasons i chose to go for this particular water pump first of all it's 11.3 liters per minute so it's got a fairly decent flow rate nothing that's going to blow you away but it's going to be adequate enough for what i'm going to use it for now probably the main reason i bought this is it's because it's identical to the pump that i run in the van which now means that if anything goes wrong with the pump in the van while i'm on a trip and i'm carrying this box i can simply replace it with this pump and it's not going to hold me up when i'm out and about so having a backup pump is a great idea yes i could have found something that's much bigger but do i really need it no the other thing about this one here is you're only using uh well less than seven amps it recommends a seven amp fuse so it's not going to draw a huge amount of power obviously the bigger the pump the heavier larger in size and the more power they're gonna draw so that pump there is gonna be perfect what we need and it's a good option there for replacing the van pump if anything were to go wrong with that now in terms of electronics it's gonna be a basic system being only a low draw system there's not going to be a whole lot involved now i'm going to be using an anderson plug off the back of the car to power this box and that line is already fused and that's going to go through into an answer plug on top of the box through into another fuse which will be a 7.5 amp fuse inside the box and then wire up to a switch that will stick inside the box as well now that switch is already rated to 20 amps so we're not going to need to stick a relay or anything like that in there and this is going to be a simple open and closed circuit that will control the pump now in addition to that i've also got here a pre-cut set of five meter uh anderson plug wire so it's just heavy duty wire obviously it's rated for 50 amp not that we're going to need that but this will mean that i can just plug this into the back of the car move the box away from the car and then plug it into the box so the car won't have to be right up along what side the water's edge the great thing about this i did get this online just off ebay and you can buy as much or as little of it as you want i only chose to go five minutes to start with i'll see how we go if i need another five i can just simply add it into the anderson plug that brings me to the point you will need another anderson plug so you just gotta buy one separately again just bought that online and that'll be the one that you fit into the box itself for this cabling to connect to in addition to that you'll just need some little bolts screws and bits and pieces as well that will hold down the anderson plug switches and the wiring and whatnot so as we go through i'll set up some time-lapse as i start to build the box and we'll talk about it as we go now obviously once we're finished we'll go how i've set up all up and how it all works and we'll see how it works so let's go so the first thing i decided to start with was the wiring so i've cut a small hole in the center compartment on the top of the box and that's where i've mounted the rocker switch i've then mounted the anderson plug to the top compartment you can see there the two bolts holding that down and then wiring the positive and negative to the switches and a positive negative coming out of the switch down to the box itself the little box in the center compartment there is just the uh 7.5 amp inline fuse uh we're using in this instance and then i've covered it all with a corrugated split tubing just to make sure it's nice and neat and nice and protected from any abrasions or water we then move on to building the pump itself so it's just a matter of using a couple of elbows and a couple of adapters to fit in the inline filter there now that filter strainer has to be used on the inlet side of the pump just in order to keep the warranty so that will filter out any pieces before it goes into the pump anything that does go through there the pump should be able to handle as you can see here as well i'm using thread tape on all the connections there just to make sure there's going to be no leaks then move on to the side of the box and just going to drill those couple of holes into the side of the box where the exterior hoses will connect so just on that line of sight nothing too fancy there and cut a couple of holes into the side of the box i then used a drill just to widen out as i didn't have a file that was suitable once they were the correct size just clean them up with a stanley knife and i have them fitted then screwing onto the male screwing the male fittings on to the exterior moving inside the box it's just a matter of determining where the pump needs to go now near both those elbows facing towards those two outlets we've just put into the side of the box the pump is amounted to rubber mounts so it was just easier to do one at a time to make sure the mounts didn't move around as i was drilling them into the box so once the pump was mounted it was just a matter of figuring how long i needed these cables i had set up earlier and again corrugated split tubing was used over the wires to protect it and the pump was wired in all the electrical connections in this instance were used using crimps and then covered with uh heat shrink so it's gonna make a waterproof connection and also very strong connection as well now for the plumbing it was just a matter of measuring the distances between the outlets on the exterior box there and the outlets on the pump and cutting them to shape now even though this plumbing is quite hard you can use heat there just to make it a little bit easier to bend and mold to shape it's not the easiest thing to mold but with a bit of heat and a bit of persuasion it will mold to a uh a slight bend there for you now in this instance i've cut that uh top hose there a little bit too long just a matter of taking a couple of mil off the end there and putting it back in so these hoses push into the fittings about 22 mil and that's a permanent fitting once it's in they can come out with a special tool but once they're in they're pretty difficult to come out it's very important to get those lengths of hoses correct as you want to make sure that they're pushing correctly but don't push against the box and the mounts of the pump itself so you can see there the hoses are splitting apart just a little bit towards the end of the box uh tried to bend it there a little bit more with some heat but in the end i end up using a cable tie so originally i was going to super glue some little black clips to hold the corrugated tubing down to the top of the box however i decided against that just due to the lack of surface tension on the polished plastics on both surfaces it just wasn't holding too well so a drilled hole and top compartment there and for both of those clips there worked perfectly it ended up being underneath the handle so you can't see it from the top and it didn't affect the function of the handle at all for the right hand side there i just used a couple more of those clips and that was just drilled into that right hand side compartment so again you can't see it from the exterior of the box and doesn't affect the function of that little storage box either okay guys so there you go you saw how i put that box together and here is the final product here so this box here comes in a weight of six kilos or just about there and uh in terms of dimensions you've got 507 mil across 259 by 254 so it's almost square in terms of its depth and height the only thing on the external part of the box are these two water filler points here and they come out four centimeters from the edge of the box otherwise it's just a stock standard tactics box you'd get from bunnings in terms of its dimensions now i chose this particular box because it fits everything i need including the suction hose the outlet hose the wiring the pump itself and all the switches and other electrical gear in the top of it and it fits really nicely and keeps everything in one central location so in the top of this box here on the left hand side i have the power input so i've got an anderson plug mounted in there and that simply connects to a 12 volt source whether it be from the caravan or from the car and then the box then has power in the center compartment here i have the 12 volt switch and that is just simple toggle switch back and forth and in the right hand side i've just cleared an area there for some accessories so all i've got in here is an anderson plug it to see your uh converter so if i do want to plug off just a cigarette plug i can do that as well opening the box up we obviously have all that wiring that we've just fitted but we keep our 10 meter medicine plug lead and this connects to the back of the vehicle or to a cigarette plug if you're using that converter we then got a that two meter hose and then the other two meter hose with the strainer on the end as well for that fresh water source now i have just put a cloth in there and that's just to absorb any moisture humidity or any water leakage from those pipes while the pump's not in use and then obviously we've got the pump in there itself which is firmly made up mounted to the base now using shallow bolts on the bottom it means that those bolts are no longer they're not on the base they're not going to rub against the carpet or the surface you put them on the feet of the box are still going to be the lowest part on this particular setup you'll notice there's a strainer as well and that's on the input line so the strain is required to be before the pump and that ensures the warranty and the pump is still good to go anything that passes through there is acceptable to go through the pump itself so the other thing that i have here is a couple of filters so this particular inline filter i've got here just connects to your normal garden hose fittings and this is the filter i normally use on our caravan to fill up the water tanks so this is just a one micron carbon filter it's just an inline simple filter it can be reversed flush through as well we're going to test that out today in terms of its speed with the water coming from this pump we've also got here a twin canister pump as well now this one's a little bit more uh involved there are two sediment filters in here so you've got one which is a carbon filter similar to that of the inline and one which is 8.5 micron which will start to get rid of some of the bacteria and the harmful stuff in the water that you're sourcing so this one here is definitely going to be a little bit safer for drinking water if that's what you're seeking and again you've just got your normal garden hose fittings now the only negative with this one is it does fill up with a bit of water and when it's full of water it is a total weight of about six kilos as well so this alone when it is full is going to be equal to the weight of the box there the other thing as well these don't really like being stored as the water just keeps dribbling out of these so you've got to find some way to try and uh block that water from coming out when you're moving around so one thing i mentioned as well guys is i'm going to put a detailed description in this video in relation to all the components i used to build this box including the water filters and the hoses as well so i found that most of the electronic components the pump itself and a few bits and pieces were bought off ebay just because they were nice and cheap and the rest such as your water fittings like your brass fittings the pipes themselves um the hoses and the box were all bought from bunnings and again it's just because the lowest price i could find so again all those products going to be linked down below so if you want to build one of these for yourself you should just better purchase one of each of below and you should better build one of these boxes for yourself so we're going to go down to a little stream that i've parked next to today and we're going to test out how well this pump system works we've got a little 10 litre jerry can here and we're going to do a couple of tests in terms of how quick it feels using no filter the inline filter and the twin canister see whether that puts any additional load onto the pump and slows it down at all we're also going to have a look at the power usage and just have a look at the general operation how it works so let's set up down there and let's get straight to it so when building this box i want it to be convenient and simple as possible although the box is a little bit large at least it fits everything inside so we're going to unpack it now and get it set up ready for use the first thing to do is get out that power cable and the two hoses that are inside chuck them aside for now get rid of the cloth that we've got in there and we're gonna plug the box in to start with so we're gonna do in this particular instance i'm gonna use the anastasia cigarette plug adapter i'm gonna run off the back of the drawer system so uh let's get that chucked in okay so going back down to the box we'll plug the box in open up that left flap dropping on the other end of that anderson cable there and then just plugging that straight in now you know you've got power there because there is a blue light on the switch that lights up when there's power connected so the second thing we're going to do is get our inlet and outlet hoses ready so obviously the inlet hose is going to be the one with the strainer on it then you want to try and make sure that strain is sort of sitting midway in the water you don't want it in the bottom picking up all the dirt you don't want to top picking up any air so that'll be the trick to it just getting that sorted so there's a little pocket of the water here which i'm going to stick it in and we are in a fresh flowing uh stream here so it's going to be reasonably fresh water here i'm going to grab the other side hose as well just another 2 meter hose and plug that into the outlet side of the box and there you go essentially you're ready to go now keep in mind it's going to take a couple of minutes or a couple of seconds just for that water to come through as the pump primes but if we hit that switch now [Applause] we've now got water coming out of the pump you see there's a fairly decent strain a bit of pressure to it i'm gonna be pretty happy with that [Music] so while we're here we're going to set up a couple of tests and time how long it takes to fill up 10 liters with this particular pump so the pump itself is rated to 11.2 liters per minute so we'll give that a test with this particular setup there we go so it's about 10 liters there and it took one minute and 10 seconds to fill up so i look not too far off whether or not it's the hoses or the the voltage of the car or the strain that slows it down a little bit but overall about 10 liters in just over a minute pretty impressed with that so we're going to do now is we're going to set up the inline filter just the plain caravan one i normally use and see if that affects the flow at all okay so here we are for the second test this is the inline filter this particular filter quotes that it can do up to 20 liters per minute but keep in mind the more resistance we put in this line the slower it's going to be so it's just a matter of simply plugging that in and you are going to have to get an additional hose if you want to direct the water so i have this one i normally keep in my caravan which we're free camping with at the moment we'll chuck that down there we'll let it prime like we did the other the other setup [Music] okay stick it in this into jerrycan so we'll stick it in that empty jerry can there get that timer ready we'll see how long this takes okay so we stopped there roughly the same point on the jerry can so roughly 10 litres and it is a minute and 22 seconds so adding 12 seconds there for the inline filter so that's not too bad at all so let's set up for the third test which is using that twin canister test between the canister filters okay back to our third and final test now is the twin canister so keep in mind this is a carbon filter and a 0.5 micron the advantage of using something like this is not only is it going to ensure there is no sediment and bits and pieces inside your water but it's also going to start to eliminate some of the bacteria in that 0.5 micron now again the more resistance you add the slower it's going to take so i'm expecting this one to be a little bit slower so let's plug this up bring back our 10 litre jerry cam and give it a test [Applause] now again just going to prime this before we start to make the test fair [Music] this will take significantly longer to primer it's going to fill up those canisters with water first now noticing as well i actually heard a change in the sound there of the pump it does sound like it's working a little bit harder trying to push through that finer filter so we've got the pump all primed up there get the stopwatch ready and we'll get this jerry can filled up so there you go twin canister filtered water 10 liters there in one minute and 34 seconds so that is really not much that different to the inline filter and about 24 seconds different to no filter at all and i'd be pretty confident there to drink that water straight up as it is so um [Music] look at that it's filling up your caravan or filling up some supplies for your camping setup this little pump is going to do the job really really well [Applause] tastes alright to me if there's no more videos after this one you know why so one thing i should also mention with this box as well as you probably noticed while we did all those tests which we just finished doing is the box was closed these water pumps don't require a lot of ventilation they don't get overly hot in use so this one here has been running now for those three minutes solid doing those three tests and it is not hot to touch at all it's barely even warm so that's why they're i'm confident in keeping that box closed there's no water inside no leaks we're all looking really good on the outside here as well so you guys guys you've seen how effective this pump is now the good thing about us caravan is that we usually carry a little bit more gear and we carry plenty of hoses because when we are carrying camping at caravan sites you're going to need a couple of hoses to plug into mains water so the advantage of that is if you do choose to free camp and you're down near a river providing you can get the power to this box whether it be by a portable power pack or bringing your car down there's nothing stopping you putting 10 or 20 meters of hose on the end of this pump and turning it straight into your tanks so to fill up both the tanks in our jayco journey which are 90 liters each you're looking at just over 20 minutes uh and you're gonna have two full tanks of relatively fresh water that i'd personally be happy to drink out of so that's probably the biggest advantage to having a pump box like this and the reason i built one for our purposes okay guys so the last thing i want to test here is just the amount of power this pump draws and whether it's viable to use while the car's not running or you're not getting any inputs at the moment uh the crews are sitting at 99 battery capacity and a secondary battery there is at 12.69 volts we're just going to be running it off the standard cigarette lighter there's no voltage step up converters or anything so the plug that i'll be attaching it to so we're looking at the uh the current draw here at the moment we're drawing at 0.46 of an amp and that's just some things i've got going in the car at the uhf because we are on a trip at the moment i'll make sure that the the fridge is off in this test as well so it won't come on at any point during the test now the pump's down by the water behind the camera and it's already switched on so as soon as i plug the cigarette plug into the drawers it's going to start up and we'll be able to see how many amps it draws so there we go there we'll give it a couple of seconds just to uh go through and cycle but straight up there we're drawing 3.17 amps the water's going in the background there so take away that 0.5 of an amp and you're looking at just over two and a half amp so look the pump's been going there for a little while now and the amp draw is still at 3.15 again take away that point five for the current background stuff running on the car you're looking at just over two and a half amp uh which is hardly any at all it's going to take about just over 20 minutes to fill up both the 90 liter tanks on my jayco journey outback so 108 litres in total so just over 20 minutes you'd be lucky to draw maybe just over one amp in that hour with the pump running like it is so the power usage usage is really negligible which is why jayco chose to run that particular pump in their vans and also another reason i chose to run the pump in the pump box as well there you have it guys that is my solution to endless water when we're off-grid caravaning and camping look in uh in all honesty i probably wouldn't be using a filter like this twin canister filter it's definitely overkill it's large it's bulky and it's quite heavy when it's full of water uh weighing in that six kilos something like this would be perfect um to be honest depending on the water source obviously but it's a fairly clean water source i'd be happy drinking something that came out of this and some careful clever packing inside this box you can actually fit this inside the box meaning that everything you need to get filtered to clean water can all be packed inside this one box inside of your setup so we've got 10 liters of water there they're all packed up we've seen it doesn't draw much power it's quite effective in the way that it sucks up the water and overall i'm really happy so in terms of cost this particular box and everything that came with it came in just over 330 australian dollars that is and the filters here you're looking at about 80 bucks for the inline filter about another 80 bucks for the twin canister there as well so again depending on what kind of filtering you want would depend on how much this particular setup would cost but overall it's pretty inexpensive considering it's got the water pump in there all the electrical connections um the fuses the water fittings and everything else that go with it so like i said before all the products i use and to build this box are all in the description below if you want to buy them for yourself otherwise guys i hope you found this vid video informative and helpful and hopefully it motivates you guys to go out and build something like this for yourself it's a nice simple easy half day diy job and uh look it's gonna provide a lot of benefit to us and probably give them some decent showers in the caravan when we're off grid camping as well which is always a good thing so uh thanks for watching guys and we'll see you in the next video cheers [Music] you

Channel: XploringOz

Views: 282,979

Keywords: water, pump, 12v, volt, vehicle, caravan, camping, diy, box, australia, oz, aus, os, aussie

Id: bLiTn8YacWo

Length: 27min 46sec (1666 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020