Do you drink the water from your fresh tank?

[Dennis and Melissa]

To my surprise, our answer has become NO.

We use it for cooking and washing dishes, but not for filling our water bottles.  

Water bottles always get filled from one of 2 places:

1) Buy bottled water from the store

2) Some places (like certain visitor centers in national parks) give away GREAT water.  In the truck, we have about 20 gallons worth of collapsible water "bags" to take advantage of this when it happens.

I would love to stop doing #1.  But my adorable wife is very picky about the taste of her drinking water.  😃

[DaveAndBecky_NorthernMI]

We carry 5-gallon refillable plastic water bottles with a pump. We have found the refilling stations are easy to find and reasonably priced. We had an incident at a state park where drinking water was treated with potassium permanganate. Rangers had added wrong amount, and we had some gastrointestinal distress after drinking.🤮

[routlaw]

This subject has come up numerous times on the forum. We never ever drink or even cook from the fresh water holding tank and never will. We do carry BPA free 5 gallon container along which we drink and cook from. Even if you filter the water from the holding tank it has a "plastic" taste which should tell you something. I totally agree with your "adorable" wife too. We also bring along a Brita water pitcher and filter the house water on a trip and try to avoid buying bottled water jugs if at all possible. 

 

[Patriot]

We do sanitize our fresh tank seasonally but never drink from it. We use it for everything else, also big NO to CG water…nope, notta, never. @DaveAndBecky_NorthernMI give a great example of why we carry our own drinking water.

Edit- Campground and SP water sources can be questionable at times and we just to err on the side of caution.
 

Yep, I guess you can say we are great tasting clean water snobs here. 😂

Edited Saturday at 08:17 PM by Patriot

[jd1923]

2 hours ago, Dennis and Melissa said:

1) Buy bottled water from the store

2) Some places (like certain visitor centers in national parks) give away GREAT water.  In the truck, we have about 20 gallons worth of collapsible water "bags" to take advantage of this when it happens.

I would love to stop doing #1.

No, not drinking from RV water tanks! And as @routlaw wrote, we do not use it for cooking either.

We too had been doing your #1 until more recently we started with your #2 idea. I didn't want 5-gal containers, too heavy, and we have ample room with a long-bed truck so don't need collapsible. I purchased some 2.5-gal and 1-gal food-safe PBA-free plastic containers from Hudson Exchange:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G9MT3MB?th=1

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XVZ3X49

I fill two or more 2.5-gal containers, stored in the truck bed with an insulated cover (to keep out of sun since we have an open bed). And fill four 1-gal bottles kept on the closet floor, with one handy on the floor under the dinette. On average, we use at least 1-gal a day for coffee, cooking and Charley's drinking water. 🐶

Last time out was a 6-day trip and we had all the filtered drinking water we needed filled from home. When three 1-gal bottles empty, I refill 3 about 85% full using one 2.5-gal jug. We also bring the Clearsource 2-filter system so water from a campground is filtered.

And we purchased these to keep cold drinking water ready in our new Dometic CFX5 45L cooler! Drinking from good quality cups or Thermos bottles instead of endless plastic water bottles of which I could easily consume 6 water bottles a day!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VFK4WS6?ref=fed_asin_title&th=1

We really like how this is working and should have done it sooner. A lot less trips to grocery stores or Walmart merely to buy water! 

[Zodd]

We don't drink from it at all, but we do cook if the water will boil. We have a 5-gallon water container in the truck bed. The challenge we face is that we prefer cold water. While the refrigerator can hold more food than we anticipated, we don't have an effective solution for keeping cold water on hand. We often forget to fill small plastic bottles and put them in the refrigerator and like our bigger Stanely-style water containers. 

[Mountainman198]

No drinking or cooking from on board water tank. Wont even use it for filling pet water dishes. 

[John and Debbie]

50 minutes ago, Zodd said:

We don't drink from it at all, but we do cook if the water will boil. We have a 5-gallon water container in the truck bed. The challenge we face is that we prefer cold water. While the refrigerator can hold more food than we anticipated, we don't have an effective solution for keeping cold water on hand. We often forget to fill small plastic bottles and put them in the refrigerator and like our bigger Stanely-style water containers. 

I like cold water too to drink so I freeze ice cubes in the freezer and pop out a few in my glass then add the room temperature water from our jugs.  I will pop out the rest of the ice cubes and put them in a quart freezer bag.  I then make more ice for later.  It's worked for me.

Jihn

[John Dorrer]

Yes. Never had an issue. Sanitized several times a season and especially if sitting for over 2 months. I never leave water in the tank.

 

We use the On The Go Water Softener, which helps prevent any calcium build-up. We also use a high quality water filter, as post previously by Steve Morris (not the cheap blue Camping World Special).

[John and Debbie]

1 hour ago, John Dorrer said:

Yes. Never had an issue. Sanitized several times a season and especially if sitting for over 2 months. I never leave water in the tank.

 

We use the On The Go Water Softener, which helps prevent any calcium build-up. We also use a high quality water filter, as post previously by Steve Morris (not the cheap blue Camping World Special).

I turn the FWT valve to empty as I drive from the campground dump station.  I figure that it's mostly empty by the time we get home.  It probably gets a bit of sloshing around as it empties.

John

[jd1923]

6 hours ago, Zodd said:

We have a 5-gallon water container in the truck bed. The challenge we face is that we prefer cold water. While the refrigerator can hold more food than we anticipated, we don't have an effective solution for keeping cold water on hand.

I felt the same way until recently. There could never be enough cold water, with room in the fridge for at most 6 water bottles. We make ice too, but for drinks other than water.

I long pooh-poohed the idea of an extra fridge, but it makes all the difference in the world to ALWAYS have fresh cold water! We keep 1-2 of these pitchers full in the outside fridge and one inside. When the inside one empties, I bring in one from outside and refill one so we always have one cold in and another cold one outside. Another 6-8 store-bought water bottles outside too for anybody who needs one.

Now I'm getting thirsty! It's how we roll. 🤣
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VFK4WS6/?th=1

https://olivertraveltrailers.com/forums/topic/11018-dometic-cfx5-refrigerator-tow-vehicle-installation-with-solar-power/

 

[HDRider]

Has anyone here got sick from drinking, or using the water for cooking, brushing your teeth, from the Ollie tank? 

[Dennis and Melissa]

That's a reasonable question, from a scientific perspective, I suppose.

But, even if the answer is a hard NO, it's not likely to sway the argument in my household.  🤣

Our concern is more about taste (and maybe a bit of a YUK factor?).

I can imagine us using the fresh tank for drinking only if there is some post-tank purification (like a fancy filter or RO or whatever).  So far, I haven't come up with a practical way to pull that off. 

[Steve Morris]

We have quite a bit of chlorine taste at the home tap. So all of our drinking water goes through a 3 gallon Berkey filter. I know that's not a purifier, but it at least tastes good. When travelling, we use the Berkey to fill eight 1-gallon square water bottles, as found at Wal~Mart. We bought them once, and have refilled them dozens of times. The square jugs fit nicely on the floor of the closet, next to a crate where we keep the Keurig and a counter-top pitcher. (Actually, a Brita pitcher, but without the filter, which we found *added* a nasty taste.) Eight gallons lasts us a long weekend.

For extended stays where we will have access to water, I can refill using my home-made filter system. I just use the output hose to refill the gallon jugs.

 

Or if no potable water is available, I can use my Lifesaver Jerrycan water purification system. https://lifesaverusa.co This is what we used when camping in the square drop before we got the Oliver.

Edited Saturday at 02:36 PM by Steve Morris

[Ronbrink]

I use the LifeSaver Jerrycan water purifier for our drinking water, coffee and ice. Fill it and the freshwater tank before leaving on a trip, and on occasion refill the LS from the freshwater tank when traveling. If ever our home water in the freshwater tank is exhausted, I would not hesitate to use sourced water with this water purifier. However, we do carry Ozarka Spring Water as a backup and for convenient cold water stocked in our Dometic DZ portable cooler. If our Oliver is in storage for a couple months, the freshwater tank will be drained and sanitized prior to next use. I do carry the recommended Clorox in the event remote sanitation is deemed necessary. 
 

[Trailblazers]

Yes, we drink and cook from our fresh water tank. I sanitize the tank if it sits for more than a month and use two water filters. Never had a problem. 

[bugeyedriver]

Yes I do.  After sanitizing the water system before this year's walkabout, I used a hospital-grade water filter, the Ultra Mini, by Clearsource and filed and emptied the tank three times to remove any residual taste from the sanitizing process.  We've been on the road for almost three months now and every drop of water that goes into the tank first goes through the Ultra Mini filter, which removes tiny bacteria, like Giardia and even viruses.  Water from the faucet then goes through a BRITA pitcher. Tastes great.  Weighing in under 8 pounds, it is very convenient to use.

Edited Saturday at 04:50 PM by bugeyedriver

[dhaig]

@Steve Morris, could you please provide details on the water filtration system shown in the photo you posted.  Also please include details on how you mount the filter system to the side of the waste hose storage compartment.

Thanks, Don

[Ollie-Haus]

We’ve always drank the water from the fresh tank. A properly sanitized RV fresh tank is no different than any other plastic container that is used to carry and store water. But then again I drank from garden hoses, hand pumps on old farm wells and public water fountains and even artesian springs in many locations without a worry our ill experience most of my life. Unfiltered well water was all I knew until I was an adult. We use a Costco pitcher filter these days for consistent flavor in our morning coffee or tea. 

[Gliddenwoods]

[aaronorange]

We use a Zero water filter for drinking.

Before our water goes into our sanitized holding tank we use the Blu Technologies water softener and the 3 stage filtration system. They sell filters that claim you can use lake or river water if you want to.  Yep we are water snobs.

[FloraFauna]

On 8/22/2025 at 1:33 PM, Zodd said:

We don't drink from it at all, but we do cook if the water will boil. We have a 5-gallon water container in the truck bed.

Same with us. But then we fill our FW tank and our 35 gal supplemental tank with soft water from home to avoid scaling in the water heater and that gets us through most outings.

[Steve Morris]

19 hours ago, dhaig said:

@Steve Morris, could you please provide details on the water filtration system shown in the photo you posted.  Also please include details on how you mount the filter system to the side of the waste hose storage compartment.

Thanks, Don

Here you go:

 

[Ronbrink]

On 8/22/2025 at 1:33 PM, Zodd said:

While the refrigerator can hold more food than we anticipated, we don't have an effective solution for keeping cold water on hand.

A dedicated electric cooler would be useful if space allows, not that difficult to source power.