Van Life Hack: How to Refill Water Off Grid (for free!)

Why Do You Need to Refill Water Off Grid as Van Lifers?

Water is by far the biggest limiter to staying off grid as a van lifer for long periods of a time. We have extremely small water tanks compared to the endless supply of water when living in a city. Let’s look at the numbers. The average home dweller uses 3,000 gallons of water per month. In a van you have a fresh water tank that can hold, give or take, 20-40 gallons. So, as soon as that is up, you have to refill it. Typically this is via spigots; however, that limits you to leaving campsites and finding spigots. Today, we are sharing a solution that will allow you to refill water off grid from any fresh water source allow you to stay out there longer!

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DIY Campervan Water System

If you are looking for an in depth guide to camper van water systems, this isn’t it. This is our secret hack to refilling our water tank off grid. But, have no fear: you can head on over here for a complete water system building guide.

Learn More:

Complete Guide to Van Water Systems

The Typical Way to Refill Your Van Water Tank

Our first year of van life was spent doing the typical van life water refills:

RV dump stations
Flowing wells
“Fresh water” spigots (find on IOverlander or Sekr)

However, it is important to either confirm this water is potable and have a good water filtration strategy.

Learn More:

Complete Guide to Water Filtration

Our Struggles with Water Fill Stations

While the above sufficed for our initial van life journey, we developed a few struggles filling our fresh water tank this way:

We constantly had to leave our beautiful camp spot in the woods to head into a town and fill up with a hose that sometimes reached, sometimes didn’t.
Despite labelled as “potable” we really questioned the cleanliness of some fill ups often.
We are snow chasers, so as the seasons turned, we found almost every water fill station winterized and we had to resort to pouring jugs of water from indoor water fountains. Not ideal, or fast, and sometimes not free!

I will never forget driving around in Upstate New York and trying 5+ spigots that were all winterized. This exact day was the day we discovered the following…

Vanlife's Secret Hack to Refilling Water Off Grid

Getting free and safe water became a chore we dreaded. After much research, we ended up with the Blue Tech MRX+ Open Water System. This is a compact portable 2 stage water filtration unit that has an onboard pump (12V for bonus points 😉 ). You can place one end into any fresh water source: think glacial stream, river, etc, and then pump the water directly through 2 stages of water filtration and into your water tank.

The only limitation we had was the length of the hose from the water source to our van; but, we solved that really quick by buying a 5 gallon bucket.

How to get fresh water into your van water tank for free from ANYWHERE

Refilling our van water tank now goes like this:

Boondock near a river (or stream, or lake)
Run out of water (or just desire some because it looks delicious)
Pull out Blu Tech MRX+ Open Water System
Fill up 5 gallon bucket with water from water source
Pump water into fresh water tank
Repeat until full (about 6 trips for us)

A note on “anywhere”: The Blu Tech MRX+ Open Water system we specifically have filters down to .2 microns which means we can really use any water source, we just prefer to find ourselves near sparkly glacial streams and rivers. Additionally, there have been some times in cities where we will just fill up out of a spigot and still run it through the bucket -> filtration -> van water tank because it makes us feel better.

The 5 gallon bucket really does change the game for us. You can see above the size comparison.

Blu Tech MRX+ for Refilling Water Off Grid

There are a couple of systems like this on the market. The only one we have personal experience with is the Blu Tech MRX+ Open Water Filtration System.

Blu Tech MRX+ Open Water System

2 Stage Water Filtration
- “Tasty” – granulated activated carbon for aesthetic taste and smell
- .2 micron electro-adhesive filtration
Filters at 3 gallons per minute ( we can confirm this – our 5 gallon bucket takes about 1.5min)
On board pump charged via 12V
Compact (see exact weight and dimensions belo

Below you can find our comparison with a similar system, the Clearsource Nomad. This is the most comparable system we were able to find that allows you to refill water off grid.

Learn more about the Clearsource Nomad here.

Watch Us Fill Our Water Tank with this System!

Suprise! We are getting in the YouTube game. Check out our full demo and thought about using the BluTech MRX+ Open Water System:

Level Up and Add This Capability to Your Water System

In 2023, we took the idea of this system and added it natively to our onboard water system! This system is awesome out of the box, but if you want a fun DIY project to try, check out our DIY version of this system at a fraction of the cost!

Our DIY Version

for Filtering and Filling Off Grid

How we Refill Water as Van Lifers

Ever since we discovered this new system, we have yet to do the ‘ole spigot to hose to fresh water tank fill up. We really love that it gives us more confidence in terms of water filtration. But, also that this system opens up doors for many more water fills than we had previously: open water, fresh wells without a threaded hose, spigots too far from the van, and more.