😳 I Survived a Month Off-Grid in my Van (With NO Water!)

I have just spent the last three and a bit weeks in my motorhome full time without any running water whatsoever. Now I know there are plenty of people who live in their campervans without any water, without new toilet, whatever, but they have planned to live that sort of lifestyle and they're also probably not touring Norway and Sweden for two months without any of the appropriate kit in order to let them live that sort of lifestyle. But for me it wasn't planned, I certainly wouldn't have chosen it, I didn't have any of the kit that I would recommend that you have if you are going to live in a van without any running water. But I had two options when it happened, I'll talk about what happened very shortly, but I had two options. I could either let it ruin the trip or go and find a garage and spend days trying to get it all fixed or I could just deal with it, find ways of coping with it and actually in the end it didn't affect the trip hardly at all. So what I want to do is share with you the way, and I'll answer three of the biggest questions I got as well, but share with you the ways that I discovered to carry on touring around Europe and the UK as well if something goes wrong with your water system in your van or in your motorhome without it needing to destroy your entire trip. And I want to answer these three popular questions that I have been getting a lot. Before I dive in, if you are new to the channel, hi my name is Kat, I've just come back from a two-month tour of Scandinavia focusing mostly on Sweden and on Norway and that's where all this exciting drama happened with the water. So if you are new to the channel and you want to see more about that trip, videos will be coming very soon once I sit down and edit them. Then by all means hit subscribe and you can follow along with the adventure. So there were three questions I have been getting a lot, well actually technically four, because I had a question. So when this first happened, actually first, let me tell you what happened. So here we can add, well actually a couple of disasters with my water system. About two weeks into the trip I got, this was, this bit was my fault, I went down a track that I really had no business taking a motorhome down and either a tree root or pothole or something hit the bottom of the van and caused the grey waste pipe to come loose. Now I managed to get that fixed, I did actually take that bit to the garage, it got fixed and that was absolutely fine. But then about two weeks after that, woke up in the morning, emptied out all the waste, so all the grey waste was all emptied, filled up with fresh water, emptied out the toilet, did all of that stuff and then when we got to our destination, neither of the pipes or the taps for our water system were there. So that's both the grey waste and the fresh water totally disappeared. So not just the taps had fallen off and the pipes were still there, no, all had gone. But what's weirder is the bracket that I broke on the first bit a couple of weeks ago that they fix at the garage, it's still beautifully there. So how does the pipe and the tap disappear without any noise? There were two of us in the van at the time and neither of us heard anything, where when it first happened it was so loud, like the pipe and whatever was dragging on the road. I don't understand how two had disappeared and we didn't hear either of them. I've never had an issue with my fresh water pipe at all, ever. So I don't really know where they went, I have my suspicions that they unfortunately were stolen, which sounds really dramatic, but either way, whatever happened to them they disappeared, which meant that I lost all of my fresh water because the pipe had been completely removed, lost, whatever. So all the fresh water that we'd filled up with that morning had disappeared somewhere and then obviously the grey waste had been emptied as well, which I'm not very happy about, but luckily there wasn't a lot in there because we'd emptied it out that morning. So no water in my van whatsoever. So like I say, since that happened I've had three main questions from you, but the biggest question that I had when this first happened was, would my heating still work? Because I am never entirely sure with the trimmer system that I've got in my Swift motorhome if you needed to put water in the system or not. And when people have asked me this, I've always said I put a little bit of water in when I want to put the heating on in the winter or whatever, just in case it does any damage to the system. I can now report, having had weeks of experience with absolutely not a drop of water at all, that you can use the trimmer system, certainly the one that I've got in my van, without any water in your system at all. You won't have any hot water, don't forget that, and make sure you never turn your hot water on, but the heating works just fine and given that it went down to like minus five, minus six most days in Norway, it was cold and I was really worried about it and it was absolutely fine. Now obviously if it hadn't been fine and the heating had been broken then I would have had to go to a garage and I would have had to go get it fixed or I would have had to stop the trip, cut it short, whatever, but that was not the case. So that was my biggest question, my biggest worry sorted. Brilliant. So the three questions I've been getting the most, the first one is about how you deal with showers. So this was actually a heck of a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. The gross option would be like, no I didn't have a shower for three and a half weeks, but I can't live like that, I don't want to live like that, I hate it when my hair gets greasy and I think when you get to the point that you can smell yourself you need to have a bit of a personal intervention on yourself. So I don't want to live like that, a shower every other day is my absolute minimum. Now I, before I actually came on the trip to Norway, Scandinavia, I was concerned because of the time of year I was going, September, October time, I didn't know how cold it was going to be and I didn't know how the facilities would work, so I didn't know if people were like going to turn their taps off and indeed there were a couple of places where the taps had been shut down completely for the winter because it is going to get really crazy cold up there and I do believe as it gets further into the winter more and more taps would be shut down, so what I actually ended up doing would be a bit more difficult, but before I left the UK I did bring with me two bits of kit just in case I struggled getting a lot of water top up from taps and things. The first of those was a pack of body wipes, now these were just a generic make off Amazon and as you can see I've actually got half a pack still left, I didn't really need to use them all that much, but I did bring them with me just in case they were useful and don't get me wrong they were for the odd day for freshening up or whatever, but mostly I didn't need them because I was able to find showers and I'll talk about that in a second, but the second bit of kit that I brought with me just in case was a dry shampoo. Now to be honest I always have dry shampoo in the van, I hate having greasy hair and especially if you've got long hair you know how awful it is when it's all greasy and gross and disgusting, but a can of dry shampoo is really really helpful. So showers, I discovered using the Park for Night app and if you've followed me for a while you'll know I love this app, I think it's £9.99 for the year, totally worth paying for it and using that app you can actually find a setting that will allow you to search for showers, public access showers, and I discovered this whole network of showers across Scandinavia and I've looked since and they've got it all across Europe and in the UK as well, there are a network of places which will allow you to have showers. Now some of them were really easy to access, so things like big major roads and major motorways, major network, major a roads, all those things, a lot of them had big service stations and again not all of them do, so you use the app to find them, but a lot of them had the big service stations where you can go in and you can either, some of them were free, you just had to give them your van keys and they would give you the shower key and then you swap it back, that was easy. Most of them in Norway had like a five knock, no 50 knock, 50 knock charge, I'm trying to remember the exchange, I think it was 50 knocks, it was about four pounds I think. I always did it as kind of 10 to 1, so 50 is about 5, but it's a little bit under that in reality, but it was 50 knock charge and for that you got unlimited water, they were spotless, they were so lovely showers and you could just go in there and use them and get on with your day. It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but also Norway have got a whole range of other places, so obviously leisure centres, swimming pools did a few things, we did, oh my god the park run in Bergen was horrendous, if you like park runs that one was awful, it was basically uphill or downhill the entire way in all the worst ways, it was rubbish, but after that we went into Bergen centre and this was planned to be fair, it was the only thing that got me through the park run, there was this incredible, or is this incredible, open air swimming complex that's got heated saltwater pools with views out over the bay, it's gorgeous, absolutely got in the water temperatures, magic, and we went in there, paid to go swimming and then used all their facilities to have lovely showers afterwards, brilliant. I did also do a dip in the sea and there was a lady next to me, probably 60s, 70s, she was in there for like five minutes in the sea, it was breezy. I'm the girl who swam in Antarctica water this year, oh I say swam, I jumped in and got out quite quickly and I did the exact same thing in Bergen, I'm not cut out for cold water swimming, it's cold and I lasted about 0.3 of a millisecond. Even the air is cold, the air is 16, the water's 11. So we've covered petrol station showers, we've covered using leisure centre facilities and things like that, the last places that I found which were brilliant, up in the mountains, obviously you don't have so many leisure centres and you're not on the major road networks, you don't have so many service stations for showers, but what they did have were hiking cabins and these hiking cabins I didn't expect, but they were lovely, really modern, really clean, goodness knows how many people came up there to clean them, but they were spotless. And all you do is you walk in, they had free toilets that you could use, but you could walk in, you select which shower you want to use, you swipe your card or I used to use my phone, use Apple Pay on my phone, selected the shower and then you got, I think it was like four or five minutes of hot water. Perfect! And these were up in the middle of nowhere, this was the one I used or one of the ones I used, was at the highest mountain pass in Norway, it was like absolutely miles from civilization, it was brilliant. So they've got this network, all you do to find all of them is use the Parks for Night app and then you just filter it by finding showers, really simple. And then of course campsites, airs, other places have got them as well. If you are going right in the thick of winter, I would recommend going to proper campsites rather than airs, unless you can see on a recent thing that the showers and stuff are still on because a lot of them get turned off apparently when it's in thick winter because of burst pipes and damage and frost and all the rest of the stuff. Whereas campsites which open all year are more likely to be protected, but also to be able to turn the water on if and when you need showers, so that's worth looking into. Second question I've been asked a lot is what do I do about my toilet? Now thankfully the toilet was still absolutely fine, but I have the integrated flush in my toilet system, so I don't have a separate water filler that you fill up for the mine all comes off the drinking water tap. So all I did for that was I got a plastic bottle. Now I was really really conscious that I didn't want to buy a lot of plastic bottles here, something that I felt quite quite strongly about. So I didn't want to buy a lot of plastic bottles, so I actually only bought three and I bought one this sort of size what I'm going to call my medium size and this one was just for the toilet. So this is what I use for the flush and then every time I went anywhere near the nice thing about Europe is it's so easy to find places and you can often find places where you can empty your toilet waste in an appropriate area for free, but a lot of times they've also got tap. Make sure if you're going to use the tap for drinking water that it's got the little cup or the little glass sign on it because otherwise it's not always drinking water. Now you can use them to then fill up bottles like this if it's just going to be used as like a toilet flush or whatever, but don't drink or cook with it or use it to brush your teeth or anything like that. So I just bought one of these bottles and then kept refilling it over and over again as I needed to and just use that as the toilet flush. Then the third thing that I was concerned about, and again with a little bit of a faff but it wasn't horrendous, was over cooking and washing up and all of that kind of stuff. So for that I bought one of these big five litre ones. Now if I had been planning to stay off grid without any water for weeks on end, you can actually get these brilliant collapsible containers that have got the taps on the bottom, they're really useful, you can stick them on the side. Much better than this but this is what I got from a local supermarket in Norway and it worked really well and again I just refilled it whenever I refilled the other one and just make sure it's drinking water. And this I used to fill up the kettle mostly and what I would do is when I was filling up the kettle I'd put extra in the kettle so that I had hot water to do washing up afterwards. And I found as well I have a spare travel mug, one of the Contigo travel mugs that I love. So when I was making myself, excuse me, when I was making myself a cup of tea or coffee or something in the morning I would put an extra load of water in the Contigo travel mug so that lunchtime or whatever when I stopped to have some lunch I had a little bit of hot water left to wash up a plate or knife or whatever that I had without having to boil the kettle over again which worked really well for me. So that's how I got through the cooking and the washing up. Now the only problem I had was obviously when I put grey waste down my sink it just fell out the bottom which I'm not happy with. So what I did was I only use a tiny bit of water for washing up anyway. I always have. I think that's a remnant from living on a boat for so long. I'm quite good at conserving water but all of this made me really conscious about how much water I use. But what I did was, I mean I didn't tend to cook anything that was particularly greasy or needed a lot of scrubbing anyway, but then what I did was whenever I passed a toilet emptying place, which again there are loads of them around Scandinavia, they've often got the grey waste points as well that you can just pull over and empty it. So all I did then was I pulled over in my van and then emptied out my bowl from the sink of which I had all the washing up stuff in there and I did that once a day. You can always find somewhere, normally if you're on main road you'll see the little motorhome signs and you can just follow that and they've pretty much all got grey waste emptying points but I just, like I say, I emptied my sink bowl down there rather than shoving it in a bush or something disrespectful like that. I didn't do that. And then obviously for drinking water, if I was planning on this kind of lifestyle without any running water I would have brought my brilliant drinking water bottle and in fairness I will always bring it with me on trips from now on. I've got a drinking water bottle that's got a filter built into the actual bottle. I live in an area in the UK that's got really hard water and although it's fine when you're cooking or using it for tea or whatever it's not particularly nice to drink straight out the tap so I put that in my little filter bottle and it's absolutely fantastic. I'll leave the link for the one I've got below in the notes for you. But that's how I dealt with showers and toilets and cooking and washing up and drinking water. It was a learning curve and I think a couple of the things that I learned the most are well a to be more mindful about how much water I use and like I say I'm actually quite good at that. I've always been quite good at showering quickly and not using a lot of water for washing up and all of that kind of stuff so I was able to use those skills without too much of a change in how I live my life in the van anyway. But also you then become really mindful about planning trips around water stops around taps so pretty much every day I would plan my trip based on where the next shower was going to be or where the next tap was and although it didn't take me miles out of my way it was one extra thing to plan in my day like I want to go see this and I need to go this route rather than that route because this way's got a shower or this way's got it's like when you're filling up with LPG if you have LPG in your van you'll know that you might go you know half an hour slightly further because it goes past an LPG station and it's exactly the same thing when you're looking for showers or taps. I think the only other thing like I've said all along is that if you are going and to consciously live off grid or live away from big campsites without any running water if you use campsites all the time it's absolutely easy it's fine but there are a couple of bits of kit that I would invest in. As it turns out I'm going to take it to a garage and get it all fixed but I'll probably invest in certainly in the collapsible water bucket which is really useful and also I'm going to get another one of my my drinking containers just for the van so I don't ever get in the situation I was in where I didn't have fresh water again to drink. So those are my tips for living in a motorhome or a van without any water even if you don't plan to because things do go wrong in the van especially when you use them as much as I do. I've been very lucky says Touchwood that do not have more things go wrong and there are different hierarchies of things going wrong like if the heating had broken that would have been a big issue but it wouldn't be in summer but it would be you know September October time in Norway it was cold. So I hope those tips were helpful if you want to see more about my van and a lot of people have been asking what the van's like how it's all set up for long trips this is the video to watch and you might also find this video useful as well. Thank you as always for your time if you're new to the channel by all means hit subscribe and I'll see you on the next video. Take care, bye!