Flexible Water Tanks - Thoughts?

[Uglydog56]

I sized my tanks and fridge etc for 2 weeks boondocking, because that's how long you can stay in one place on the blm land.  Then I ordered the biggest that would fit anyhow.    Tanks, money, boobs & horsepower!  I ended up with 175 fresh, 150 grey, and 45 black.

[TomC]

My bus has 130gal fresh, 85gal gray, 45gal black.  The only tank I'd like bigger is the gray-like 110gal-but it wouldn't fit. 
On my truck conversion, that's a different story.  I have 2-98gal fresh water tanks (tied together to act like one tank), 141gal gray, 69gal black-because I can.  With these tanks, could last 2 weeks.  The smaller bus tanks will do a week if careful.  Good Luck, TomC

[jjrbus]

I had to get my ruler out and check 38mm? Not a sanitation expert or a boater, but no way, no how would I want to depend on 38mm discharge pipe or hose buried up under the bus! It just looks like a problem waiting to happen.

I did have a back up macarator on the bus that discharged through a 1 1/4" (30mm)? hose. It worked most of the time. But it was mounted inside a bay door on the end of a tank where it was easily accessible.

Hybrid might be the way to go, a couple freshwater flex bags and hard-walled black/grey tank.  HTH  JIm

[Dave5Cs]

Yep Fresh would work but I don't think I would do the black. By the time you make and mount all these boxes to hold them you could of had Ronco build you custom fit tanks for less and faster. No problems down the road. If you ever did get a hole in the flex Black you would have a real mess in trying to get it out unless you had a quick release under there. Just saying.

We have 40 40 and 40. Fresh last 2 days for 2 of us with showers and grey will fill after 4 showers but 40 Black will last us 7 days.
Would like to have 100 fresh 110 grey and 60 Black, with a shower diverter which I will put in soon. We are almost always plugged in.

Dave5Cs

[Jeremy]

Just an update on this:- I spent most of the weekend studying water tank catalogues and crawling about under my bus with a tape measure. I haven't made any final decisions yet, but the configuration that seems to work best at the moment is to use a total of seven different tanks (and that's not including the two water heater tanks). This number of tanks seems ridiculous, but it gives me ample volumes of black, grey and fresh, and also puts the grey tank storage right in the middle of the bus (rather than towards the back, as I had originally planned), which makes the pipe runs from the sink, shower & washing machine drains much shorter.

So, I now have two large fresh tanks water at the back of the bus, and five smaller tanks in the middle. The five tanks would either be two black and three grey, or possibly five black/grey combined (not decided about that - I can see advantages both ways).

The other outcome of the weekend's work was that I am considering again whether I should make at least some of the tanks myself. The three largest tanks (the main black tank, and the two fresh tanks) are definitely ones I would buy ready-made. But the other four are really good candidates for making myself out of GRP - they are all 'long-and-thin' tanks which could be made strongly and simply using plain GRP, without needing to worry about extra re-enforcement or stiffening. And, crucially, although the lengths vary, they all share the same cross-sectional area (around 10" square), so I could make a single male mould (male because, unlike most GRP items, the good finish needs to be on the inside), and use that one mould to manufacture all the tanks fairly quickly and cost-effectively.

So my current thinking is that this seven-tank approach will take a bit of effort, but will achieve all my watery needs with the major advantage of not losing any bay-space. But there may well be downsides to having so many tanks linked together.


Jeremy

[jjrbus]

We are not there to crawl around under your bus, but I am sure if 20 of us showed up we would come up with 32 different ideas Most of which would be pretty good!

Hmmm 10" square, would large PVC pipes work? Would save manufacturing and all fittings, mountings and other doodads are available.

                                                                                                                                      Just a thought  JIm

[Lin]

A ten inch pipe would have almost 25% less capacity than a ten inch square tank.  As far as the flexible tanks go, I am reminded of an old quote (was it Milton or Jefferson?) that says, "what can go wrong will go wrong."

[dougyes]

One schoolie conversion I saw had a tall skinny fresh tank mounted vertically into a wall next to the bathroom. The way it was fitted did not take up a lot of space.

[TomC]

That's a good thing the Doug said to remember.  The Ronco plastic tanks can be mounted in any direction.  Good Luck, TomC

[Jeremy]

I'm sure the Ronco tanks are very good, but what someone really needs to invent is Tardis tanks. Bigger on the inside than on the outside.

I'm not actually short of space in any way, it's just that the spaces I've got are funny shapes and difficult to get tanks into; three of my seven tanks will actually go side-by-side and could be replaced by a single tank, if only it were possible to manoeuvere a single tank into the space.

But if the idea of multiple separate tanks connected together doesn't cause apoplexy to the board, then that's what I'll probably do. It's more work, but gives me a lot more capacity than I was originally expecting, which is good. I've considered tanks installed in all sorts of orientations, incidentally, and also tanks mounted at angles. In fact the main black tank will be mounted at a slight angle in order to fit the largest tank possible into that space.

I must admit that I haven't given any thought to tanks mounted in the main body of the bus, but then my 'problem' is mostly to do with the grey tanks, and water doesn't flow uphill. And remember that I've still got completely empty bays that the tanks could be mounted into if required. The idea of tanks inside the bus does remind me that I once saw a modern (high value) bus conversion for sale on Ebay that had it's fresh water tanks in the roof space. Probably not a bad idea in some ways, but it must have affected the handling on corners.

Any thoughts on the separate or combined black and grey tanks? Combining them would seem to allow me to make more use of the storage capacity, but I assume much less flexibility in terms of being able to dump the contents.


Jeremy