Fill up in a coastal town and your water's fine. Fill up west of the Divide and it's a lottery. Bore water at the station stay. Rain tank at the free camp. Town water that smells like a swimming pool one week and tastes like dirt the next.
Your tanks collect all of it. Whatever went in is what comes out of your tap — unless something's in between.
Here's what's actually in Australian travel water, and how to filter it without the marketing fog.
What you're actually filling your tanks with
Town water is treated and safe, but treatment varies wildly between councils. Heavy chlorine in one town, hard mineral water in the next. Safe to drink, often rough to taste — and chlorine taste in your tank lingers for days.
Bore water is groundwater, and its quality depends entirely on the ground it came from. Common passengers: high mineral content (calcium, magnesium — the crusty white stuff on your kettle), iron (metallic taste, brown staining), sediment, and sometimes salinity. Many outback bores are perfectly drinkable. Some are supplied for washing only — if there's a “non-potable” sign, believe it.
Rain tank water picks up whatever was on the roof and in the tank: dust, leaf litter, bird droppings, and whatever's been growing quietly in the bottom since last summer.
The practical problem isn't one bad source. It's that you're mixing all three in the same tanks, week after week, and the tank itself becomes the fourth water source — with its own sediment layer and its own biology.
Why the servo-special filter clogs in a fortnight
The cheap disposable inline filter is a single thin carbon cartridge. Carbon is good at one job: grabbing chlorine, tastes and odours. It is terrible at handling sediment.
Feed it mineral-heavy bore water and the fine sediment blinds the carbon within weeks. Flow drops to a dribble, you toss the cartridge, buy another, and repeat. You're not filtering water so much as subscribing to landfill.
The fix is old and boring and correct: stage the filtration.
- Sediment stage first. A coarse, cheap filter that catches the dirt, rust and grit. Its whole job is to be sacrificial.
- Carbon stage second. Now protected, the carbon does what it's good at — chemicals, chlorine, taste, odour — and lasts the way it's supposed to.
Cheap filter does the dirty work, dear filter does the fine work. That's the entire principle behind every serious caravan filtration setup, including the VANKOR Pro Flow 12 high-flow caravan filter.
Micron ratings in plain English
Every filter has a micron rating — the size of particle it stops. Smaller number, finer filter.
- ~20 micron: grit and visible sediment. Pre-filter territory.
- ~5 micron: fine sediment, most rust and dirt.
- ~1 micron and finer: where filters start stopping nasties like Giardia and Cryptosporidium cysts — but only if the rating is genuine, and at a real cost to flow rate.
Two traps in the marketing:
“Nominal” vs “absolute”. A nominal 1-micron filter stops most 1-micron particles. An absolute rating stops effectively all of them. For anything health-related, only absolute ratings mean much.
Finer isn't automatically better. A super-fine filter on the tank inlet turns a 10-minute fill into a 40-minute fill and clogs constantly on bore water. That's why flow rate matters as much as micron rating for the filter you fill through — do the coarse work at high flow going into the tank, and save the fine treatment for the water you drink.
The honest limits: what no filter fixes
This is the part most retailers won't print.
Salinity. If bore water is brackish, carbon and sediment filters do nothing about salt. Only reverse osmosis touches dissolved salts, and that's a different class of gear. Salty bore water is wash water, not drinking water.
Bacteria and viruses. Sediment and carbon stages handle taste, odour and grit — the microbiological layer is a different job. That's what a 12/24V UV-C steriliser is for: it sits in the line and treats water as it's used, targeting the bugs a standard filter can't. If you're regularly filling from bores and tanks of unknown history, the filter + steriliser system kit covers both jobs in one setup — full breakdown in our filter + UV-C guide. Even then: treat genuinely unknown creek and dam water with caution, and drink from known sources where you can.
A setup that actually suits Australian travel
Pulling it together, the system that works for the way Australians actually travel:
- High-flow filtration on the fill line — so every litre entering your tanks is filtered, and filling doesn't take all afternoon. This is the job the Pro Flow 12 is built for.
- UV-C on the delivery side if you're drinking from mixed sources — or grab the complete water system kit and set both up at once.
- Replace cartridges on a schedule, not on taste. By the time water tastes off, the filter's been done for a while. Mark it in your phone. Replacement cartridges here.
- Tank sanitising 2–3 times a year.
- Know your source. Ask at station stays whether the bore is potable. Carry enough known-good water to cover the gaps.
None of it is complicated. It's just plumbing done in the right order.
FAQ
Is bore water safe to drink in a caravan?
Often yes, sometimes no — it depends entirely on the bore. Potable bores are fine, especially filtered. Non-potable or brackish bores are wash water only. If it's unmarked and you can't ask, don't drink it.
Will a caravan water filter remove the bore water taste?
A carbon stage removes most taste and odour issues, provided a sediment stage ahead of it keeps the carbon from blinding. It won't remove dissolved salts.
How often should I change caravan filter cartridges?
On sediment-heavy travel (bore and tank water), the sediment stage works hard — inspect it every few months and replace on schedule per the system's rating rather than waiting for flow to die.
Do I filter going into the tank or at the tap?
Into the tank, as the baseline — it protects the tank, pump and lines. Add treatment on the delivery side, like a UV-C steriliser, for the water you actually drink.