4 Ways to Save Water While Teardrop Camping

The majority of our teardrop camping time is spent in dry campsites. This means we don't have access to (or want to pay for) hookups like electricity and water. In fact, because our camper is so small, we don't really need to have hookups. Our deep cycle battery takes care of most of our electrical needs, we don't have a toilet or shower to dump, and we are super efficient when it comes to water.

While camping we usually have access to campground faucets, lakes and spring water. However, we can only carry so much with us in our one gallon galley container and our five gallon Aquatainer. Over the years we've found several ways to save water while teardrop camping—especially in desert or high-drought areas.

1. Don't wash dishes

When we have little access to water, we don't actually wash our dishes. Instead we use a spray bottle filled with a little bit of water and Dr. Bronner's soap, spray the dirty dishes and then use a paper towel to wipe them off. This gets off most of the worst offending foods, but very greasy dishes will need to be washed. If we do need to wash dishes, we use just a cup of two of hot water and a soapy sponge to scrub up and then a few cups more of warm or hot water to rinse.

2. Cook foods that don't require water

While camping we don't make too much pasta, rice or other dishes that require water. We tend to grill meat or vegetables on the stove or over the fire, and make dishes that use very little water like couscous or instant mashed potatoes. We also use our grill multiple times without having to clean it.

3. One pot showers

I've already done a post on my minimalist camp shower. We used to set up elaborate showers with solar shower bags, but I've come to the conclusion that simple is better. I take a small metal cooking pot and fill it with about four cups of water, heat it until warm on the stove, and take it and another cup into the camp shower. I've found out that it takes about 1.5 cups of water to get wet and soap up and another 2-3 cups to wash off the soap and shampoo.

4. Drink beer

Drink enough water to keep yourself hydrated. After that, drink beer. :-)

How do your wash your clothes?

I recently got back from a three week trip to Europe and only took two sets of clothes in one small carry on piece of luggage. Traveling so lightly requires a lot of hand washing in various sinks in different countries and washing out items actually becomes a nightly ritual. The same holds true for teardrop camping. Because our teardrop trailer closets are so small, we carry very little clothing and on longer trips, we have to do a fair amount of hand washing along with taking our clothes to a laundry facility.

If we're traveling for a few weeks, we usually take our clothes to a laundry facility every week. However, I do try to wash out underwear, socks, dish towels, T-shirts and tank tops every night and hang them up to dry on our camping clothesline that is strung up between two trees. We keep the clothesline, the clothes pins and some packets of laundry soap in the storage area under the bed, but I will sometimes just wash with Dr. Bronner's soap or even just biodegradable dish soap. Washing usually takes place with water from a spigot or even a river or stream in our regular dishwashing containers. We dump our used water in a campground toilet or a utility sink and never on the ground.

This inexpensive clothesline allows you to hang up clothes without the use of pins. Just shove the edges of the clothes into the twisted sections of the bungee.

Since we usually camp in the desert, high desert or the mountains of the West, our clothes dry quickly in the sun and wind, so we can take them down and wear them again in just a few hours. Unlike some hyper-controlled or HOA areas where people live, it doesn't seem to be much of a faux pas to hang your clothes up outside on a clothesline at a campground. We have yet to run into a campground that doesn't let you hang up your clothes to dry.

If we ever need to dry some clothes while on the road (like our swimsuits after bathing in a hot spring), we leave the clothes on the teardrop trailer bed and then drive with the teardrop windows up, letting the wind and sun come in through the screens as we tow the trailer down the road.

* Several Tiny Yellow Teardrop readers responded to this post with some ingenious ideas for washing clothes on the road. Thank you NetDep and AnetaCuse!

The Scrubba Wash Bag is a little pricey at nearly $70, but this Australian designed washing bag with a built in washing board can probably be taken on any kind of trip...not just a teardrop camping trip. It's very portable and the design is so fun. The Scrubba also donates some of its proceeds to the World Vision Emergency and Preparedness Fund and the Charity:Water fund.

The portable 14 inch Laundry POD washes clothes like a salad spinner. It lets you do a small load of laundry with no electricity. It's designed to fit under sinks, so it could probably fit into a small storage area in a trailer.

The Wonder Wash is a little bit larger than the POD, but I have seen it being used by many tiny house dwellers. It may be too unwieldy for teardrop camping, but could work for people who camp in larger trailers.

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.

How do you shower?

One of the questions I get about teardrop camping is how we bathe or shower when our tiny trailer doesn't have a bathroom. Even though I love to camp and don't mind the dirt and grime that comes with it, I am extremely picky about keeping clean while camping. I have to have a nightly shower before going to bed and after a day of hiking, kayaking or exploring. My husband is totally the opposite, he thinks that you should stink while camping, so I have had to battle him when it comes to our individual camp shower needs.

Sometimes we will camp at a campground that has hot showers. These can be either free or fee showers. Campgrounds in drought prone states like California, Utah, Nevada and Arizona will charge a dollar or two for a 3-5 minute shower. States with plenty of water like Oregon and Washington usually have free hot showers.

When we are boondock camping we usually bring along a pop-up shower tent. The particular tent we have is simple and does not have a floor, so I purchased a plastic water heater tank catch pan to use as a floor. I also built a small platform out of 2x2 redwood to stand on while bathing.

Our first few attempts at using a solar camp shower failed miserably because either the water would not heat up in time to take a hot shower or it cooled off too fast at night. The typical solar showers are also really heavy when filled up and nearly impossible to lift over your head to a branch or a hook on a car roof rack so you can take a shower. However, my camping girlfriend and I have come up with our own solution. We just heat up a small pot of water on the fire or the stove, grab a cup and take it into the shower tent. We then just dip the cup into the pot and dump the warm water over our heads. It feels fantastic and we have more control over how much water gets used, which is necessary when camping in a place with limited water.

Another solution (but not available in all areas) is to utilize local hot springs. We camp quite a bit in the Eastern Sierras which has hot springs dotted all around the area. We lounge around in a hot spring for an hour or so and then wash off with some soap and a bottle of water. Also, if you don't mind a cold bath in the middle of the summer, you can always jump into a lake or river to wash off, just be sure to use biodegradable soap and shampoo.