Water and Gas Usage Rates

[doghouseman]

I am new to RVing and I am pretty sure I would like to do some boondocking.

If possible, could someone give me an estimate of water usage rates for one person?

I am looking at a trailer with a 78 gallon fresh water tank, which seems sufficient. I guess I am wondering how quickly I would go through that water?

Also, lets say I am in a warm environment and want to run my generator during the middle of the day for AC? How much gas/propane can I expect to go through?

I am looking at getting a Cummins Onan 3.6K with a 60 lb propane tank.

Thanks

[JAC1982]

As already very much mentioned, it depends on your usage. But for reference, we do a boondocking trip in hot weather every year for 5 days. We never come close to running out of water or filling up the gray, but we have a 112 gallon tank. I'd say we might use up 1/3 of the water if we arrive with a full tank. Gray tank is 44 and we maybe use up 3/4 of that. I navy shower every day, including hair washing, husband will every couple days. We use paper plates/plastic utensils, the only thing I wash/rinse out most of the time is the coffee cups and percolator. Our black tank is 44 and it gets on the full side. But I will add that my husband has Crohn's disease, and well, needs a lot of water to flush sometimes, and we both drink a lot (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages) on this trip, so the toilet gets a lot of use.

We also run the generator (built in Onan 5500) for 10 hours a day to power 2 AC units, but it's hard to gauge gasoline usage because we just top it off whenever us or someone in our group runs to town and fills up some gas tanks. We don't keep track because we all take turns.

Personally, the only thing I really worry about running up to the limit on is the black tank, because that is hard to dispose of and you can't exactly stop using the toilet if it gets full. But, we have once made it to 7 days boondocking on Forest Service land without dumping... husband used a bush for #1 during the day on that trip though 🙂

[Dirtclods]

?

[Dirtclods]

Check your showers rate WHAT?? Yep grab a bucket adjust your shower to how you would normally take a shower and measure who much water you use in one minute. My shower uses 3 Gallons in a minute. Note: You can have restricted shower heads that flow less and save your water.

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[Veebyes]

Living fairly normally on utilities provided by the unit figure 8-10 gallons of water per day per person without being too stinky. A 40# bottle of propane lasts a month without using it for heating or running a genny.

Water capacity & battery capacity is king. Can't have too much of either.

[All_I_could_aff]

When I’m alone, I can make it 4 days on 26 gallons of water, but I use gallons of spring water for coffee and cooking.

[campigloo]

Our trailer has a 35gal fresh tank, 35 gal black and 70 gray. Wife and I can g ppl o at least a week on fresh. We spit bath for a couple of days and then shower. When running the shower waiting for warm water we catch it in a half gallon milk jug and use it for flushing. We use purell for hand cleaning after using the toilet. Baby wipes are good too. I rigged a pump in the front storage area near the tank fill. I run the hose in the jerry can, flip a switch and in about 10 minutes can pump 15 gal into the tank. Waste water we can get two weeks without dumping.
Get a gas gen and dive in. We travel to places that suit our clothes, wheels are a wonderful invention. You’ll come up with all kinds of tricks to make it work.
Boondocking; it made me hate sardine parks.
Happy travels!!!

[rexmitchell]

Drink bottled water, use paper plates and shower with as little water as possible and you can make water last. IMO I would get a gas generator and not propane. Gas can be acquired at a pump at any time of the night. Propane requires way more effort and planning.

[JimK-NY]

I often camp in the desert southwest where filling an RV tank can be an issue. The minimum I use is about 2 gallons/day for cooking, drinking and washing dishes. It is hard to get under that and that means heating water to wash dishes and then using just a trickle out of the faucet for rinsing. A shower is about 1 gallon/day. Clearly that is a Navy type shower: wet down, soap up and then rinse again with a low flow and little wasted water. Flushing is not an issue for me. I have a cassette toilet with its own 6 gallon water supply. That amount lasts for at least a couple of weeks.

[DrewE]

doghouseman wrote:
Maybe I should change the question.

How much water usage for showering, cooking, and flushing?

I am guessing around 2 gallons for each? Give or take? So about 6 gallons per day for 1 person?

Flushing would generally be well less than two gallons per day. RV toilets use very little water when compared with residential ones.

Showering depends on how long you run the water in the shower for when bathing, and how frequently you shower. Two or three gallons for a navy shower seems about reasonable as a very rough guess.

Cooking doesn't use that much water. Dishwashing uses more typically, though not if you use disposable dishes. Handwashing also uses some water, as does toothbrushing and drinking and tea/coffee making.

Five to six gallons a day sounds about right for me and my typical usage when dry camping.

[doghouseman]

Maybe I should change the question.

How much water usage for showering, cooking, and flushing?

I am guessing around 2 gallons for each? Give or take? So about 6 gallons per day for 1 person?

[dcmac214]

You got to experiment to find out what YOUR needs are.

Boondocking 90% of our water use is toilets.

Bathing when boondocking we use disposable hospital wipes, much bigger and thicker than the little packaged finger wipes. Not quite as good feeling as a real shower but quite satisfactory. I've got short hair (what hair I have left), DW has pixie-cut shortish hair, so one wipe for the body and another for the 'shampoo' works good.

No dinnerware to wash, we use only paper plates & bowls, plastic or bamboo utensils. When we're out in the RV we're on vacation, neither of us want to spend any more time than absolutely necessary washing dishes. The only washables we use are the coffee mugs, DW's wine glass and my Scotch/Irish/Bourbon glass (all unbreakable plastic very thoughtfully provided by our dinosaur friends from ages ago).

Cooking is one-pot, over a fire/grill or microwave.

Get out there and do it. You'll do just fine.

[pnichols]

doghouseman wrote:
I am new to RVing and I am pretty sure I would like to do some boondocking.

If possible, could someone give me an estimate of water usage rates for one person?

I am looking at a trailer with a 78 gallon fresh water tank, which seems sufficient. I guess I am wondering how quickly I would go through that water?

Also, lets say I am in a warm environment and want to run my generator during the middle of the day for AC? How much gas/propane can I expect to go through?

I am looking at getting a Cummins Onan 3.6K with a 60 lb propane tank.

Thanks

Concernig the reduction of fresh water use from faucets: A neat little trick is to install onto each faucet outlet a water restrictor that is rated at around 0.5 gallons per minute.

We did that on our RV's two fresh water faucets - the one in the kitchen sink and the one in the bathroom sink. These restrictors don't cost much (around $5-$7 each), and just screw into the end of the faucets in place of the little screw-in screens that are normally on the outlets of faucets.

Our restrictors squirt the water out in a bunch of little streams that are spread out into a nice circular pattern - so it makes it easy to rinse off dishes without even noticing the lower flow rate ... you don't notice the reduced fow rate. It's obvious that 0.5 gallons per minute will just sip the fresh water - as compared to the stock faucet flow rates of 1.5 to 2.5 gallons per minute.

[DrewE]

I have around a 35 gallon fresh water tank (I don't recall the exact size), and figure one week for one person with modest efforts at conservation--basically navy showers (daily) and generally not wasting water. That includes dishwashing as I don't really like eating off of paper plates.

Propane usage is quite low for me, but that's with a gasoline generator. Probably about a month of fridge, stove, and water heater usage on a tank fill (60 or 80 pounds or so nominal usable capacity...not entirely sure without looking). During cool or cold weather, with furnace usage, it would not last nearly as long. As others have said, a propane generator uses a lot of propane relatively speaking.

The level of conservation one practices varies a good bit from person to person. Still, you should have no real trouble at all going at least a week or so before needing water.

[ktmrfs]

how to predict water and propane useage is pretty much a guess. With DW&I, two grandkids, daughter and SIL we have gone 6-8 days with a 35 gallon black and 70 gallon grey tanks, with no problem. Including quick showers.

In contrast one time on a 6 day trip when I still had close to 30% of the black tank and grey tanks left with the above "passengers", the couple we were with with 1 kid had filled the 40 gallon black, 60 gallon grey by the end of day 4 and had to hook up the trailer to dump the tanks and come back and park again! On day 6 when we left I still had room in the tanks.