Water Hoses

There are many types of hoses on the market, but as far as your RV water hose is concerned, you want to buy one that is safe to use for drinking water. That means that most green garden hoses are out!

Hoses that are safe to use for a drinking water supply hose are usually white, or there could be something printed on a label that says it is safe to use for drinking water.

There are typically two types of hoses, round and flat.

Round hoses are like your typical garden hose…round. One disadvantage to the round hose is it can take up a lot of storage space. A product that may help solve the problem of taking up too much storage space is the CordProXL. I haven’t tried this product, but it looks like it could work just fine. Originally designed for household extension cords, the new XL version seems to have many applications for RV use.

Here are the round hoses I used to use.

A flat hose usually comes on some sort of reel that takes up very little space. One disadvantage of the flat hose is that the hose must be unwound completely to use it. Here is one type of flat hose available at Camping World, and here is another.

The flat hoses are a bit more expensive than the round ones, but if storage space is at a premium, it may be worth the extra money for a flat hose.

I have a 25' and a 50' flat hose plus two 4' hoses.

My usual setup is to connect a 4' hose to the campground water faucet, then the water filter, the pressure regulator, then whatever length of hose I need to get to the city water inlet. It's usually the 25' hose, but I have been close enough on occasion to use another 4' hose. If the campground water faucet is close to the rear of the trailer, I obviously won't need 25' of hose to finish the job, but I will have to unreel the entire hose. In that case, I route the hose towards the front of the trailer and loop it back towards the rear underneath where the slide-out overhang is. This way, all of that excess hose is out of the way. I usually need to use the 50' hose to fill the fresh water holding tank.

When hooking all of this up, I will turn the water on and let it run through each piece before connecting the next, just to give it a little bath to clean it out a bit.

To connect the hose to the RV, I use this type.

At a minimum, you should use at least a 90 degree elbow such as this one to reduce stress on the city water inlet connection

NEVER, EVER use your fresh water hose for anything else!!! Remember that the water that goes through that hose will be the water you could be drinking or cooking with.