Water & Waste

A full hookup is three connections: power, fresh water, and waste. This section covers the last two, and the thing to understand before you buy anything is that fresh water and waste need completely separate equipment that never touches. A hose that has been near the sewer connection is a sewer hose forever. Buy a white drinking-water hose for fresh water, keep it coiled separately, and never improvise.

What to buy first

A drinking-water-safe hose, a pressure regulator, and a sewer hose kit. In that order, because you will use water on the first trip whether or not you dump the tanks.

The pressure regulator is the item people skip and should not. Campground water pressure is not regulated to anything in particular; a pedestal can deliver well over 100 psi, and RV plumbing is generally designed around something closer to 40–60 psi. A burst fitting inside a wall is an expensive, slow-to-find repair, and the regulator that prevents it costs less than a tank of gas. Adjustable or preset is the only real decision, and a gauge is worth the extra because it tells you what the pedestal is actually doing.

What decides sewer hose price

Wall thickness and fittings. The cheapest hoses are thin vinyl accordion that kinks, crushes under a foot and splits along a fold after a season. Mid-range hoses use a reinforced wall that holds its shape when you pull it across gravel. The premium options go further: metal-reinforced polyolefin, or a smooth-bore hose that does not trap residue in accordion ridges at all. If you camp a handful of weekends a year, the mid-range kit is genuinely enough. If you are out most weekends, the owner report is consistent — the thick-walled hose outlasts two cheap ones.

Then there is the support. A sewer hose needs a continuous downhill run, and without support it sags between the trailer and the connection. The sag holds waste, the waste stays there, and the smell you blame on the hose is actually the sag. A rigid folding trough gives the most consistent slope and takes the most storage space; a coiled spring support compresses to almost nothing and gives a less precise slope. Most people are better served by the one they will actually carry.

Filters: what they do and what they do not

A standard inline RV water filter is a carbon cartridge. It improves taste and smell and catches sediment. It does not make unsafe water safe, and the honest versions do not claim to. If you are filling from a tested municipal supply — which most campgrounds are — taste is the actual problem and a cheap carbon filter solves it. If you genuinely need bacteriological protection, that is a multi-stage system with a cartridge rated for it, at ten times the price, and you should know which problem you are buying for.

One sequencing question comes up constantly and has a clear answer: the regulator goes at the spigot, upstream of the filter, so the filter housing never sees full pedestal pressure. The reasoning, in full.

Finally, the fittings. A brass 90-degree elbow at the trailer’s city-water inlet removes the sharp bend that eventually splits every potable hose, and a stepped 4-in-1 sewer adapter is what makes your hose fit whatever strange connection a dump station has. The fittings, explained is worth ten minutes before your first trip.