Water filter system
We have had a few inquiries on how we deal with the water in Mexico and in
general. We are not believers in
bottled water as a main source of drinking water as they tend to be inconvenient
and pricey. So we got ourselves as
educated as we could on what the issues, problems and fixes there are with
drinking water from unknown sources and set out to put something together that
works for us.
We have an A and a C motorhome. There is lots of room in the A for various filter components
but not so much in our little C/B+ Vanguard Motorhome. I’ll touch on the differences of what we put in the A but
concentrate mostly on our little C as this is what we take to Mexico.
Although we are in no way experts on this sort of thing from what we could
gather off the net most of the problems one encounters in Mexico with the water
(or anywhere else for that matter) are the Giardia and Chryptosporidium
problems. (Beaver
fever etc). These can be
causes of the dreaded Montezumas revenge etc.
We looked for a system that would be effective against these types of
things as well as VOC’s or volatile organic chemicals (pesticides, herbicides
etc). We found an “Ultimate
Duo” system that uses pleated filter coupled with a carbon type filter (GAC/KDF).
The GAC stands for granulated activated carbon which also removes
chlorine, the KDF is a component that helps keep standing water in the filter
from becoming stale during storage.
In Mexico it is doubtful you will find high enough water pressure to push
water through a filter and then pressure up your RV.
It is common practice instead to simply fill your tank with filtered
water and then run off the tank with the pump.
Because we don’t have enough room to mount the filter permanently
inside somewhere we just set it on the ground, hook the hose up to the spigot,
turn it on and let it run for a few seconds, hook up the hose to the filter and
proceed to fill the tank. Now remember we said that the carbon filter removed the
chlorine?, Great idea but now you have water sitting in the tank with no
chlorine to stave off the multiplication of critters that were either in there
already or that the filter might have missed.
So we throw in an half an ounce of Clorox to get rid of anything still
alive. From there the pump pressures
up the coach. At the kitchen sink
we installed a drinking water spigot. On
the input to the spigot is a small inline carbon filter that again removes the
chlorine and then it gets sent through a UV filter which scrambles the DNA of
anything including viruses that are still alive.
That’s pretty much it for the filter side of things.
In our case we send it from the last stage into an Instahot beverage
dispenser that boils the water so you always have hot water for coffee etc.
This has the added effect of boiling the water which is also a plus.
We dispense into a jug, let it sit for awhile and then put it in the
fridge so we always have cold drinking water handy as well.
Keep in mind we are not experts but this system works for us.
There are links to the components we have selected below but there are
many suppliers out there with equivalent products.
I have intentionally not listed specifications of products as I would be
lying if I said I understood all of them. I
have figured out though that the filtered product should be going through a 3
micron nominal or minimum 1 micron absolute filter to get the nastys out.
Here’s the links..
Main Outside Dual Filter
The under the sink inline filter to re-remove the chlorine.
Here is a link to the Watts site which has a variety of inline UV products.
Ours is a ½ GPM inline with push on John Guest Fittings.
For our big A class Motorhome we also added an arsenic filter under the
sink. If you get water from a well
that hasn’t been tested this is something you might consider as well.
Hope you found this info useful.
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Design by Angela 2007
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