When you live in a house, you probably don’t put too much thought into your drinking water. Most suburban neighborhoods have safe, good tasting water.
This all changes dramatically after you move into your RV full-time.
If there’s a water hook-up at your campsite, you feel lucky. And pretty soon you’re getting water from a variety of sources that you know nothing about. That’s kind of scary when you really stop and think about it.
Playing Russian roulette with our water quality every time we switched campgrounds was not my idea of fun.
The cost of fresh drinking water
There’s only so many ways to ensure you’re getting clean water if you forego what’s coming out of your campsite’s water hook-ups.
The default answer for some RVers is to buy gallons of bottled spring water. Sure, this solution will give you clean water that tastes good. But it isn’t very cost effective or environmentally friendly if you’re living in your RV full-time.
We’re a very active family. We run and hike, and do lots of outdoor activities from our RV. So, naturally, we go through a lot of drinking water. Between the three of us, we drink approximately two gallons of water each day!
Each gallon jug of spring water at the grocery store costs about a dollar. So meeting our family’s drinking water needs in the full-time RV life was going to cost us between $60-$70 extra dollars EVERY month if we relied on bottled water. That’s around $800 extra dollars each year!
There’s also the ancillary problem with all the plastic waste created by purchasing bottled water. Every gallon purchased results in an empty water bottle that we need to recycle.
I’ve already blogged about our recycling woes, and how ridiculously hard it is to find recycling cans at campgrounds. So, creating more waste was definitely out of the question.
Our solution – the Berkey Water Filter
After a lot of research, we ultimately decided to purchase a Berkey water filter.
The Berkey is actually of a water purification system. It’s doesn’t just duplicate the existing water filter that came with our RV. It can purify our RV’s water from viruses, bacteria, chlorine, pesticides, herbicides, and other harmful toxins.
Our Berkey
That’s a pretty big deal! We literally could fill it up from a lake and still have purified water if we needed it.
If you haven’t seen a Berkey in person yet, it’s a very distinct looking system. Some folks think it looks like a giant coffee urn. But personally, I like the modern stainless steel finish. It reflects the light, which means it doesn’t seem bulky sitting on the RV’s countertop.
What size Berkey did we to pick?
There are five different sizes of Berkey systems. They start with the Travel Berkey, which holds 1.5 gallons of drinking water. And they move all the way up to the Crown Berkey, which produces a whopping 6 gallons at a time.
We settled on the Big Berkey, which holds 2.25 gallons. As the second smallest model in their lineup, it strikes a nice balance between its portability and the amount of water it can produce.
Our Big Berkey stands 19.25 inches tall, so it fits nicely under under the kitchen cabinets right next to the sink. This spot also makes refilling the Berkey a cinch. Our kitchen sink has a pull down faucet that extends about 24 inches. To refill our Berkey, we just remove its lid and fill the upper chamber with the sink’s faucet.
And since the Big Berkey produces 2.25 gallons each time we fill it, we only have to do this simple process every day or so.
Height wasn’t the only consideration in our Berkey choice. With precious little room in our RV, I didn’t want it to take up too much counter space. I didn’t need to worry though. The diameter of the Big Berkey is only 8.5 inches.
There was already a small area of dead space behind the sink where it would fit perfectly. And this location allows the spigot to hang right over the edge of the countertop when we need to fill our water bottles.
Our Big Berkey – ready for action!
Preparing the Berkey for use
Once we decided on the Berkey, we ordered it online and had it delivered to the campground where we were staying. It arrived within a week’s time, and it came in a much smaller box than I was expecting. That’s because you’ll need to do some assembly before using it.
Don’t worry. Putting your Berkey together is much easier than assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. Essentially, you have a few pieces you need screw together with your fingers (no tools needed). Then you need to use your water source to prime the filters that come with it.
I’d seen a few online reviews about priming the filters. These reviews made it seem like it might be a tricky process. But, it’s a critical step to ensuring they work properly. So, just to be safe, I watched a video on how to prime them on YouTube.
Once that was done it was my turn to try it. With only one sink in our RV deep enough to fit the filters, I had no choice but to try the process in our kitchen sink. Unfortunately, the spray nozzle on the faucet wouldn’t allow me to get a tight enough seal to effectively prime anything. So, I had to go look elsewhere.
After a bit of searching, I ultimately just used the tap from our water hook-ups outside. Once the two filters were primed, all that was left was to screw them securely into the top chamber of the Berkey.
With everything finally primed and assembled, there was only one step left. You need to do a test run to make sure everything works. To do this, fill the upper chamber with water and allow it to work through the filters and drain into the bottom chamber. You can even add a few drops of food coloring to make sure the water runs clear into the bottom chamber.
Once that first batch of water filters itself through the system, just throw it away. Now your Berkey is ready to fill up for real.
So, is the Berkey worth the cost?
I had to do a little cajoling to convince Keith that the $260 price tag for the Berkey system was worth the money. This wasn’t too difficult though. As I mentioned above, the cost buying bottled drinking water would exceed the price of the Berkey in just four months.
We also worried that we’d have to buy a bunch of expensive replacement filters, and that would eat into our bottom line. But, according to their website, each Berkey filter lasts for 3,000 gallons. With two filters, our Big Berkey will continue to effectively filter water for up to 6,000 gallons before we need to replace the filters.
At our current water consumption rate, that means we won’t have to change the filters for 8 years! When that day eventually comes to change out the filters, a set of two replacement filters only costs $107 dollars.
So, while the upfront cost may seem pretty high, it’s a net savings for us to have purified water on demand wherever we travel.
A few challenges with our Berkey
Overall, we’re tremendously pleased with the Berkey water filter. The water tastes great. And I have confidence that I’m not going to get some wild stomach virus as we travel around North America.
However, there are a few things we noticed about it in our first few months of using it that are worth sharing with other RVers.
Make sure to secure it for travel
Our Berkey has a rubber edge around the bottom chamber to keep it from sliding around on the counter. Despite this, you definitely can’t just leave it sitting out when you’re driving to a new campground. I tend to put our Berkey in the kitchen sink when we hit the road, and then I put a few softer items (kitchen towels, sponges, potholders, etc) around it to keep it from moving around, just in case we have to take a tight turn.
Filtering takes time
While it’s super easy to refill the Berkey’s upper chamber, don’t expect the water to be ready to drink instantly. The filtration takes time (about 45 minutes for the entire chamber). You can add additional water filters if you want your water to drain more quickly, but we chose to stick with just two that came with it. Thus, I tend to refill our Berkey in the evening before we go to bed so the water is ready when we need it the next day.
Gauging how much water is left
The Berkey’s stainless steel exterior means you cannot see how much purified water is left in the bottom chamber. Instead, you have lift the top chamber up to peek inside. Berkey sells a spigot accessory that actually measures the water level without this step, but we opted not to buy it. With all the travel we do in our RV, it seemed like there was too great a risk of it breaking on the road. So, for now, we’re sticking to the simpler method of lifting the top chamber and peeking inside.
Overfilling the bottom chamber
There’s another side effect to not knowing how much water you have in the bottom chamber of your Berkey. You may be prone to overfilling the top chamber when there’s not enough room for all that water to drain below. After reading other reviews about this risk, we worried about overfilling our system. However, we successfully avoided this issue though by either waiting until the bottom chamber is virtually empty before refilling it, or only filling the top chamber to the 2/3 point.
Final Thoughts
Overall, the Berkey is a great addition to any full-time RVers set-up. With questionable water purity at some of the remote campgrounds and boondocking sites out there, it’s given us incredible peace of mind. We have safe, clean drinking water wherever we go.
