A brand new 2020 German caravan apparently doesn’t come with a permanently mounted grey water tank. After looking over a few different caravans lately it’s impressive to see how many different system configurations there are, and interesting to see that some caravans don’t have fixed tanks as one might expect.
In this case our client Joerg had imported the caravan from his homeland Germany and was seeking self containment certification and the ease of use obtained from having a fixed tank grey water system.
The caravan had 4 beds and so to meet the NZS 5465 requirements for self containment we needed to have fresh water storage for 4 liters per person per day for 3 days. That’s 48 liters. And you need to have equal or greater grey water storage capacity.
The caravan did come with a compatible fresh water storage tank, stowed inside under the main bed. So all we had to do was fit the grey water tank and connect the plumbing.
In order to have a simple gravity feed system this meant mounting the tank under the floor between the chassis rails. A steel cage was constructed to support the weight of a full 100L/100kg tank and firmly secure it to the chassis without welding to or drilling through the chassis as that could weaken the chassis.
We then connected to the existing caravan plumbing and then added our own visual tank level monitoring system and breathers. we also supplied and installed a quick connection point and drain hose for easily emptying at the dump stations.
We then went on to fit a simple 12v solar system to the caravan to run the lights and usb chargers without the need for plugging in. We also installed an automotive 12v port to run a particular plug that powers a 12 volt TV.
A small 100 watt panel 
Additional 12V automotive socket 
100 AH Gel battery. 
A small PWM solar charge controller (the blue thing) installed to manage the charging of the battery. This was supplied by the client, we don not recommend these types of charge controllers.