Water Cooler/Filtered Water

kimberlysmoore wrote:
UPDATE:
Currently going with extremely clean fresh water tanks and Costco bought bottled Arrowhead (healthy pH water). Might work something out with onboard water cooler down the road, but not in this RV.
Priorities changing.
Thanks for all the input. These forums are great!

You might find an InSinkErator type sink mounted instant hot water setup a better choice than taking up space with the water cooler. This one draws 500 watts.

UPDATE:
Currently going with extremely clean fresh water tanks and Costco bought bottled Arrowhead (healthy pH water). Might work something out with onboard water cooler down the road, but not in this RV.
Priorities changing.
Thanks for all the input. These forums are great!

Thanks for everyone's input.
I'm addicted to fb like buttons.
It would be cool if this forum had a like button or a thanks button so it was easier to respond with a quick thank you to everyone ?

Yeah, go ahead and use it. It should be OK.

i should have put in our rigs info: pace arrow 36 with big generator (6000 i think).
water cooler is primo with the bottom load bottle. bottle is not upside down. pump dispenses water into 2 tanks. a gallon of cold and a gallon of hot sits in tanks, at the ready. machine does not need to be plugged in to dispense the 2 gallons from saved tanks. hot stays hot for days but cold does not. no surprise there- refrigeration without continued electricity is a tough one to accomplish. dispensing room temp water comes straight from water bottle so the pump is needed for dispensing that. i included watts of dispenser. if the generator is 6000, it should be fine yeah?
thanks for the info on the rattling and shaking, m. im sure your right, other stuff doesnt shake apart. i just remember someone explaining that some televisions are not best for rvs because of road rattle.. it got me thinking.

I've seen folks at several campgrounds that bring their own water coolers. The ones I've seen have been kept outside, but if you have the room inside, why not?

Everything else in the camper holds up fine, so I would imagine the cooler would hold up as well as long as it is secured and doesn't flop around.

-Michael

I believe the water cooler you describe would wind up being more of a "worry" and a "bother" then a "benefit". I don't know what kind of rig you pull now or your future plans but you might want to think more along the lines of a residential refrigerator with "door water", or perhaps a hot & cold filtered water system at the sink, perhaps an RO system. These are all stick and brick solutions however and, like your water cooler, not often found at campsites. What you do see more often are portable ice makers and campfires. Maybe some sort of solar hot water system might interest you?

The power limitations of your RV and the physical problems Drew noted make this a bad idea. Keeping a five gallon water container at the ready and boiling water on the stove are a better solution. It does require the effort of filling the pan so you may have stumbled onto a new convenience. Let's call it the California Cooler, lol.

The water bottle to cooler connection seems to me to be the tricky part to keep solid. A five-gallon water bottle is a relatively heavy weight to have perched on top of a plastic housing, and would cause some significant stresses when going around corners etc. Possibly if you devised some good solid means of holding the water bottle in position it would work reasonably. I am not sure I would want to chance it myself. (Even better might be having a separate mount for the bottle and rigging up some sort of a hose arrangement to connect to the cooler, so that the two are completely disconnected mechanically. You still have to figure out how to hold a five gallon bottle of water securely, of course.)

Does this cooler require 120VAC to dispense, or are the taps mechanical? If you need electricity, bear in mind that you'll need to run an inverter (presumably capable of powering the cooler and heater) to get at your water, and that's a potentially heavy load on the house batteries if you use much hot or cold water that must be replaced and heated/cooled.