The Sunflower's New Sink Setup

After going to my most recent teardrop trailer gathering, I realized we needed to come up with a different sink setup. The Sunflower does not have a built in sink, but we do use a few portable plastic sinks to do dishes, wash hands and faces, etc. However, whenever we want hot or just warm water, we have to constantly be heating up water on our Coleman stove.

A friend of mine had the brilliant idea to use an air or vacuum pot. It's one of those hot beverage dispensers you see at convenience stores or cafés. They are also used to keep coffee and tea hot at special events. She fills the dispenser with hot water in the morning and has hot to warm water all day long that is dispensed into a plastic sink pan for washing. Brilliant! Why didn't I think of this?

However, I had to have my air pot match the bright, yellow Sunflower. I found a vintage Japanese Peacock brand vacuum dispenser on eBay and snapped it up for less than $10. Not only is it yellow and orange striped, but it has TWO dispensers so I can dispense either two hot or hot/cold or even cold/cold water when I want. To make it even more streamlined, I put the pot with the sinks on a small collapsible table that can also hold our five gallon Aquatainer. This system will most likely be used the most when we don't have access to a picnic table.

We still use our folding table and the galley for cooking and food prep, but having a separate area for "water" will be handy when camping.

How do you wash your dishes?

The romance of camping in the great outdoors can be brought back down to earth with dirty dishes. Doing the dishes while on the road is necessary, but not very fun. Unless you are lucky enough to have a trailer that is hooked to campground water and a galley sink, you will find yourself hauling water and washing dishes out of a plastic pan. We've set up our own dish washing system when we go camping that seems to work for us. We do have one rule: whoever does the cooking, doesn't have to do the dishes.

Our dish pans do double duty as a holder for dish towels, garbage bags and a cast iron frying pan.

Because we don't have a galley sink, we use two plastic dish tubs to wash our camping dishes. We sometimes use water from the supply we brought with us, but most of the time we just grab water from a local water source: a camp spigot, a creek, lake or river. We boil the water on the stove or the fire pit and either take it off when it's lukewarm or mix some cold water with it so we don't burn our hands.

We've noticed that we need more water to rinse dishes than to wash them, so we put about a third of the warm water into one pan and the rest into the second pan. We then use a sponge and very little dish soap to wash. Silverware and less dirty dishes go into the wash tub first; our greasy dishes will get wiped with paper towels and will be washed last. After rinsing, we place all the dishes on two dish towels spread on our pop-up table or on the picnic table. That's one thing I've noticed about teardrop camping: you can never have too many towels. I am also very picky that everything should be dried and put away before we go anywhere. I really dislike a messy campsite.

This is a wonderful sink setup from Debbie and Randy Pontius of Northern Nevada. The water is sprayed from a metal hand pump.

So what if you don't have access to a lot of water or you don't like to wash camping dishes? On some camping trips, we've exclusively used paper plates or my friend Nancy's spray bottle technique. When we teardrop camp at Burning Man, we have to bring all our water with us, and there's no reason to use it for washing dishes. I don't particularly like the waste of paper plates, but we will use them for our basic meals and then put the plates in the public burn barrels that dot Black Rock City.

The spray bottle technique is just a simple spray bottle from a drugstore filled with water and dish soap. We leave it out in the sun to warm up then spray it on our dirty dishes and wipe off the food with a paper towel or a cloth. This doesn't work so well for very greasy dishes, but for simple cleaning, it saves a lot of time and effort.

Because most campgrounds or public parks don't like you tossing your dirty dish water on the ground or (please don't) in a fresh body of water. You will need to dump your dish pans in a pit toilet or outdoor sink. In fact, parks like Yellowstone, will have enclosed sink areas where you can wash your dishes without fear of bears sniffing around at your leftover bacon and eggs.

Teardrop Trailer Sinks: Pros and Cons

The decision behind whether or not to have a sink in a teardrop is just as varied as the owners and styles of these tiny trailers. Having a sink already built into a galley can be very convenient and allows for quick cleanup of dishes or your hands and face while camping, however they do add a bit more complexity to a rather simple trailer. Many expensive and high-end teardrop trailers will have a sink and many smaller, less expensive teardrops will not.

Teardropper Doug Holser has a small sink with a 2-gallon tank in his Little Guy 5-Wide Platform

So, what are the other pros and cons having a sink in a teardrop trailer? I asked a few members of the TNTTT board their opinion and received a mix of answers. It will really depend on the type of teardrop you have, are building, or want to buy. It will also come down to how much work you want to do, repairs you want to make or how simple you want your teardrop life to be.

48Rob's teardrop trailer has everything and the kitchen sink

Pros 

How nice would it be to set up camp and have your water all ready to go for a cup of coffee? The pros of having a sink installed in a teardrop is that the water receptacle is ready and most likely your water tank is full of water. There is no need to fill up a water container at a campground for washing dishes or making dinner. Even though the tanks in most teardrop trailers are small (between 5-15 gallons) and the waste water tanks are sometimes about half the size or don't exist at all (the water is dumped via a hose into a portable waste water tank) having that water available for a day or two makes teardrop camping a little easier. The portable waste water system also keeps used graywater from being thrown into various parts of a campsite, which might attract critters.

A portable waste water tank can be placed under a teardrop trailer.

Having a sink with a faucet and a plug is also really useful for keeping yourself clean. I know when I camp, my hands and face seems to need to be washed of dirt and fire pit ash constantly. However, you will want to really think about how you use your sink. Do you want it large enough to wash a couple of dishes and frying pans or will a small bowl to wash your face and hands be enough?

"Yes, we have a sink with pull out sprayer faucet and a six gallon gas electric water heater. We love it because meal cleanup takes no more time than at home." 

Shadow Catcher on TNTT

webbaldo on the TNTTT used a dog dish for his teardrop sink.

Cons

One of the biggest cons mentioned on the forum was that a installed sink in a teardrop trailer can have multitude of problems. When you add plumbing into a very small space that bounces down the road, you have the potential of running into leaks, busted pipes and loose tubing. If you are a DIYer, this may not be an issue, but if you are purchasing a teardrop with a sink, take into consideration that you will probably need to make repairs down the road.

The type of pump to draw up water to the faucet is not really a con, but if you install an electrical pump, there are more issues that you will have to deal with if something happens with your battery or wiring. There are some water pumps that work off a 12V plug like the Whale GP1352 which can be submersed into a water tank.

You can also get a hand or foot pump for your sink. They don't rely on electricity, but are only good for a few squirts of water rather than an entire sinkload. Several complaints on the forum were about when a teardrop trailer is not quite level on the ground, the pump will not draw correctly from the tank.

The Combination Hand Pump and lowboy can be ordered from Tweety's

Many teardroppers decide to opt out of having or installing a sink since they do take up valuable galley and food prep space.

"I thought we would have a sink in Miss Piggy just because most teardrops I had seen in the past had one. I assumed it was part of the build. But once I started reading the comments here on the forum, I changed my mind. And so far I am glad I did! It was less work in the build, saved money, took up less of our much valued space, and gives us more flexibility at clean up time."

Vedette, owner and builder of Miss Piggy 

"If had a bigger trailer and could easily afford the counter and storage space that the tanks, plumbing and a decent sized sink would occupy I would have most likely installed it. But with a 4-1/2' wide trailer it just didn't seem worth it."

Oldragbaggers on TNTT

Alternatives to Teardrop Sinks

Teardroppers are the most creative people, if I do say so myself. If they don't have a sink, they make one. I personally do not have a sink in my teardrop trailer and have had to come up with my own system. We have about one or two five gallon water tanks that we use for storing water, another 1.5 gallon tank that is our "faucet" and two dish washing pans that we use as sinks. For hot water, we just heat up a pot on the stove or over the fire.

Our "faucet" is a slimline, fridge jug from WalMart.

Debbie and Randy, the builders and owners of Monstro on TNTT, have built an ingenious little sink washing station out of PVC, a dish basin and a metal water hand pump.

If you don't want to do your own pumping, Coleman sells a All-In-One Portable Sink that comes with a dish drainer, two tubs and a 2.5 gallon sink that pumps water with four D cell batteries or a
CPX™ 6 rechargeable battery.

If you want the luxury of hot water all the time, Coleman's On Demand Portable Water Heater will help keep that coffee warm and dirty hands clean.

Trailer photos courtesy of dholser and 48rob.