We highly recommend getting this water system diagram from FarOutRide.com. It helped us learn how to install plumbing a van and helped us design our entire water system.
Also, as you can see in photo 13 above, Connor is 6′ tall and barely fits – this is with a 1.5″ thick wooden bath mat. You must duck to fit under the shower head anyway, so it’s not essential to be able to stand up fully.
We each take showers every 3 days on average. Our 27 gallon water capacity lasts us about 6 days total, including 2 hot showers each.
We used 1/2″ PEX pipes and crimp rings for our water system.
This PEX kit has everything you need!
We use this single-stage water filter before the hot water heater to help keep it clean. This is separate from our 3-stage drinking water filter under the sink.
Nature’s Head Toilet Review
While we are definitely glad to have a composting toilet instead of a chemical toilet, we think it’s pretty outrageous to pay $960 for essentially a piece of plastic. Now, the Nature’s Head works very well, and we would recommend it for anyone who can afford it, but here are our qualms:
- You have to expose the solid waste bin when emptying the liquid container. This immediately fills the van with a musty compost odor.
- The liquid container lasts us 2 days at most before needing to be dumped.
- The solids container lasts us 10-20 days on average. We have to store peat moss in 1-gallon Ziploc bags to be able to change it on the road. This takes up a lot of space. It takes 3 gallons of peat moss per change, every 2 weeks. At that time, we have to find a suitable place to dump a garbage bag full of our compost waste.
- Sitting on the Nature’s Head puts our legs to sleep. Whether male or female, you have to sit every time you use it. This is why we added the wooden bath mat to bump up our feet by 1.5″ and reduce the strain on our thighs when seated.
- Our compost always seems to mold after 2 weeks, even when we turn it daily. I believe our hose outlet is too long and makes too many bends, so the airflow is not adequate.
For another composting toilet option that addresses many of these problems we have with the Nature’s Head, check out the Airhead Composting Toilet.
Our Shower Build Mistakes
Our first drain hole hit a framing member under the van! If you stick a standard 24″-wide RV shower pan at the edge of a Promaster, your drain hole will align directly over a fore-aft support beam underneath the van. We found this out the hard way by actually starting to drill in this location. To get around this, we added two 90-degree bends in the drain, so that the drain would come out in an empty cavity under the van. We used this shallow 90-degree drain, braided hose, and another 90-degree elbow pipe that goes out through the van floor into an empty cavity.
Second problem: a metal ceiling rib sticks out into the shower stall where the ceiling meets the wall. We tried our best to add thicker wood framing to the van wall to bump it past this metal rib, but it would have moved the shower pan a full 2″ away from the wall. To save 2″ of aisle space, we just FRP’d and caulked around the little piece of the metal frame that extends into the shower stall, which worked out very well. See the close-up picture of the upper corners.
Third, the wooden shower mat punctured our plastic shower pan after about 6 months of use! This was due to the small feet of the shower mat applying focused pressure along the edges of the shower pan. Essentially, the mat’s feet are too small and too close to the edge of the pan. We solved this problem by adding more feet to the shower mat and moving the feet more inboard, away from the edges of the shower pan. We fixed the holes in the shower pan with JB WaterWeld, which thankfully worked like a charm.
Thanks For Reading!
We wish you the best of luck building a shower in your van. If you have any questions about how to build a DIY wet bath / shower in a van, feel free to ask us in the comments.
If you’ve found our van building resources helpful, we would greatly appreciate your support!
