As some of you already know, I am currently traveling around the country while living in a converted camper van. This diary is part of a series on why and how to live fulltime in a van.
Part One: Why I Live in a Van:
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Part Two: Selecting a Van http://www.dailykos.com/...
Part Three: Bureaucracy
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Part Four: The Logistics of Living in a Walmart Parking Lot
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Part Five: Internet, Cellphone, and Staying in Touch
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Part Six: Electricity
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Whenever people find out that I live fulltime in my camper van, their first question is always either “where do you take a shower?” or “where do you poop and pee?” Yes, my van does have a bathroom, though it is a mini-version of one, and is based on functionality, not on aesthetics.
Many of the Class A motorhomes and the larger of the Class C campers now come with built-in shower stalls. These use small heated water tanks which run through a shower head and drain into a waste tank underneath. Most Class B camper vans simply don’t have the space for one of these—though a few models do. Most often, these come with a little stool to sit on since there’s not enough room to stand up.
I have seen homemade shower systems fitted into converted camper vans: they are based on adding a long hose to one of the hand-pumped water sprayers that are available at any garden shop. These can hold a gallon or so of water, and by pumping up the handle a few times, it pressurizes the system and allows you to spray a (rather low-powered) jet of water for a few minutes before the pressure gives out and you have to pump it again. By adding a long hose and a better spray nozzle (the ones used in kitchen sink hoses work just fine), you can rig up a “shower” that can reach far enough to spray you from head to toe. (And if you paint the sprayer black and sit it outside for a while, you can even get solar-heated water.)
For a shower stall, I’ve seen people use a plastic kiddie pool or a large plastic basin tub to stand in, and rig up a shower curtain to a hula hoop hung from the ceiling. The curtain keeps the water in, and the tub prevents it from soaking the floor of your van. You’ll have to either dump the tub out when you’re done, or rig up a hose that you can open and drain out the door.
My van, alas, doesn’t have room for such a luxury. So if I want a nice long hot shower, I use my membership at Planet Fitness, which has branches all over the country and always has showers available 24/7 (and also provides an overnight parking spot if I need one in a pinch).
But mostly I just wash up in the sink. There are portable sinks commercially available for campers that have a storage tank on top which uses gravity to feed water down to the faucet, and the used wastewater then drains down into another storage tank on the floor. Anyone with some carpentry skills could probably make one of these.
My version is a bit more crude, but it does the job. For the sink, I used a large stainless steel mixing bowl. By cutting a hole in the bottom with a Dremel tool and fitting a drain and rubber plug from the Home Depot, I converted this into a sink bowl with a drainpipe. Then I took a set of wooden shelves and cut a hole into the top, fit the sink bowl into this, and sealed it under the rim with plumber putty. To use the sink, I put in the rubber plug, pour in a gallon jug of water (I heat up a potfull of this on my alcohol stove to get hot water), take my sink/sponge bath, then pop the plug and let the waste “grey water” drain out into a five-gallon bucket underneath. Then the bucket gets emptied outside. As a backpacker, I’ve always used biodegradable soaps.
I also keep a supply of baby wipes and a pump-bottle of alcohol-based sanitizer on hand for quick cleanups.
Dishwashing is something I never need to worry about—that’s what paper plates were made for. For soups and canned spaghetti, I just cook and eat right from the can.
Well, what about the other part of the “bathroom”?
Many commercial Class B vans now come with built-in chemical toilets. Some of these, originally designed for boats, have an upper chamber and a lower; liquid and solid wastes drop into the lower chamber with some disinfecting and deodorizing chemicals. The upper chamber then detaches from the lower, allowing it to be dumped into a standard toilet and flushed.
Other RVs hook the toilet up to drain directly into a “blackwater” storage tank. This must then be periodically emptied through a hose into disposal tanks, found at RV parks, specially made for this purpose.
Mostly, though, I can pee and poop during the day wherever I happen to be. And since the Walmart is open 24/7, I always have a place to pee or poop at night when I get home, before I go to sleep.
For those middle-of-the-night emergencies when I don’t want to leave my nice warm bed and go into the cold outside (and I also don’t want to go into the Walmart at two in the morning and announce that I am sleeping in their parking lot), I have facilities inside the van.
For peeing, I use an old backpackers trick called a “pee bottle”, which is just what it sounds like—an empty plastic bottle with a tight-fitting lid (I like large Gatorade bottles with the wide mouth). In the middle of the night, without even leaving my sleeping bag, I can open the bottle, pee inside, close it tightly, and empty it out in the morning. A dash of chlorine bleach inside takes care of any sanitary problems. Of course this is best-suited for guys, though I have seen female backpackers make ingenious use of a funnel for this.
For pooping, I have a campers toilet (known as a “Lady Jane”), which is basically just a bucket with a hole in the lid, lined with a plastic bag and some cat litter. The poop gets tied up inside the plastic bag and then gets disposed of in the morning.
And that takes care of the bathroom business.