Over Complicating Systems

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One of the great things about living in a nomadic home is the ability to reduce the stresses of every day life. Unfortunately many people starting this lifestyle are mislead by marketing that states the need for every conceivable gadget to make life easier. This leads many to the erroneous belief that living in a nomadic home is necessarily both expensive and complicated.

I'm not of the belief that being spartan to the extent of hardship is a good way to go, but simplifying systems often leads to much more reliability, which in turn lowers time and money spent on maintenance, not to mention first costs. In my opinion this can markedly improve quality of life.

Water systems are a good place to illustrate. Most people contemplating entering a lifestyle based around a nomadic home would expect anything less than a pressurized water system to be a compromise in comfortable living. Now, if we look at what is involved in running a pressurized water system, we see that there are electric pumps that can and often do fail. The pumps require electricity which needs to be produced and water consumption will be increased, which also needs to be replenished more frequently.

The simplified system would involve either a hand or foot powered manual pump system. My preference is using a Whale Gusher foot pump such as the one pictured to the right. These are very reliable pumps. Because they are powered by foot, you can still use both hands, as you would with a pressurized system. Because you are manually operating the pump, you only tend to pump water while you are actually using it. This dramatically reduces water consumption and thus how much time needed to be spent refilling the water tanks and you don't need to tap into the electrical system either.

For a shower, the best system I know of being used on boats is a six litre garden sprayer, fitted with a low pressure shower head with on/off control in the head. These give a good shower, use very little water and are very cheap and simple to assemble. I don't see any reason that this system would be any less advantageous on a road based nomadic home either. To operate, just fill with water of a temperature to your liking, give a few pumps and enjoy.