The RV fresh water fill connector is where you can fill the fresh water tank inside the RV with water to take with you somewhere fun.
RV Fresh Water Fill Connector :
There are times when you are traveling with your RV when you’ll want to take fresh water with you for an activity called “boondocking”. I can think of a few activities here :
- Parking at the “big event” ( like a football game ) for a weekend
- Parking at a VERY remote state park
- Parking at a remote place – not necessarily a state park
- Traveling for a long enough stretch that you might want to park at a Walmart or similar place
For these activities you’ll need to carry fresh water with you so you have something to drink, cook, and use for limited showers. Of course, you’ll want to make sure you fresh water tank is clean and disinfected. That is a whole article or chapter on its own. Just know that it important.
You’ll be pretty amazed at what you can do with RV fresh water and power ( battery or generator ). We took our RV to a Texas A&M football game without a generator and the RV did pretty good overall.
With an RV with ONLY a battery and fresh water you should be able to do the following…
- Take a hot shower
- Cook on the range
- Use the oven
- Take a shower
- Have good water pressure ( there is a pump that makes pressure )
- Use the toilets
- Have lighting ( especially if you have LED lighting – 5x longer battery life )
- Microwave
- Use the refrigerator – just like usual
- Put the awning out and in
The only activities you really cannot do…
- Air conditioning – too much power
- Heating – I think the furnace FAN requires too much power
- TV – TV requires 120AC
All in all – most things work. If you have a generator you can have a full blown home anywhere you can get your home to. If you are really careful, you can even baby your generator and get lots of life out of a single tank.
To me, a big part of the magic is having fresh water. So you have to fill up the unit and for that, you’ll do it using a connector that looks pretty much like a standard water hose connector. You should be able to locate it on the drivers side of the RV in amongst all the different connections and controls. Just look around for it.
WARNING: Water is very heavy – in fact it is 8 pounds per gallon. I would HIGHLY recommend traveling empty whenever possible and filling your fresh water tank as close to your destination as possible.
On a representative Jayco, this is done via the city water connector.
In the picture above, on our Open Range, you would turn the red-blue-black levers all pointing to the right. When you do that the fresh water would be directed to fill the fresh water tank. As you see it here, I’m NOT filling the fresh water tank, but instead, the settings for the red-blue-black levers are set to deliver the fresh water from the shore to all the pipes in the RV.
We never boondocked with our 40 foot RV. We have with the Tiny Texas Tumbleweed though.
In the above picture you can use this black spout to inject antifreeze into the Open Range System. I could appreciate the fanciness of the Open Range system, but I thought it was a little over fancy or over complex.
I went ahead and put a nice collection of pictures which will show the fresh water tank fill connectors. Don’t confuse this with the city water or shore water – this is about filling the fresh water tank in the RV.
emmett moore says
HT31RGR 2017