Water Filtration in the Wet Bay of your RV

Since the onset of Covid and the related lockdowns and travel bans, it's not surprising that we've seen an uptick in the number of questions we receive about how to purify the water for a recreational vehicle (RV). Many customers come to us asking which pieces of equipment make sense for them to consider, and the big question is always: will it all fit in the wet bay?

The good news is that water filtration equipment has become more compact and more effective over time. So some very small systems will deliver excellent results and ensure that no matter where you hook up your RV or camper, you'll have access to safe, high-quality water.

What Equipment Do I Need?

There are three basic categories of contaminants that need to be addressed with any water filtration system: suspended solids, dissolved contaminants, and micro-organisms.

Suspended solids (often called "sediment") are bits of material that are floating in the water. They can be visible to the eye, but most are smaller than this. The gold standard in removing suspended solids is to use a filter element that is rated to 5-microns. This will get pretty much all of the suspended material out of the water for your RV. This can be accomplished with an inexpensive spun polypropylene disposable filter cartridge in a housing. Here's an example of this kind of cartridge, and the necessary housing to hold it.

Dissolved contaminants are a big group and include things that cause bad tastes, bad odours, and colouration to the water. A carbon block filter cartridge is used to filter these out of your RV water. The one thing that most carbon filters miss is dissolved metals, and there are some nasty ones: mercury, lead, and chromium to name a few. A few companies make carbon block products that have been modified to handle everything carbon normally handles, plus these dissolved metals. We sell a great one that you can see here. It would be used in the same housing as the one for the sediment filter cartridge.

The last step in RV water filtration, but probably the most important, is addressing the potential for dangerous bacteria and viruses to be present in the water. These are especially concerning because of how quickly they can make you sick, and the potential severity of that illness. UV technology is the most effective, most reliable, and most cost-effective way to address this concern. UV systems used to be very large, and there was no chance they'd fit in the wet bay of an RV or camper. But technology has advanced and now very compact UV systems can deliver enough performance to treat the water for the entire RV - shower water, kitchen water, drinking water - all of it! UV systems require electrical power and the vast majority of them will want standard 110V. Here's a very compact, and very high performance UV system that is enthusiastically recommended.

Where Do These Go in the Wet Bay?

This is usually the million dollar question. Since the dimensions of RV and camper wet bays can vary quite a lot, the best thing to do is to take a snapshot of your open wet bay and send it to us. Please also include the dimensions:

Width: distance from left to right

Height: distance from top to bottom

Depth: distance from the opening of the wet bay to the back wall of the wet bay

Once we have your photos and your dimensions we can quickly and easily make recommendations of what products will fit.