Camper Trailer Hot Water System Temperature Adjustment

Does your camper trailer hot water system need a temperature adjustment?

Do you have a camper trailer with its own hot water system, similar to the MDC Robinson?

Now, they’re great, but there’s a couple of pain points, which you’re probably aware of. That is, the water comes out of the camper trailer hot water system at 60 degrees. So it’s just about impossible to get a decent shower without stressing that you’re going to burn one of your kids.

The second pain point is there’s no external tap, so when your hands are dirty from hooking up the camper or taking the kids for a bush wee or something, there’s nowhere to wash your hands.

Here’s a couple solutions we’ve come up with to sort out those problems completely.

Meet Ben from Beautiful Plumbing. A part-time camper, part-time plumber and gas fitter, full-time husband, and full-time dad to four kids.

The Two Issues

If you’ve got a MDC Robinson, you’re very lucky to have this beautiful hot water system. It can crank out some serious hot water on demand, which is great. One problem is that there is a real safety problem. The hot water system can crank out water up to 60 degrees. And if you flick a switch, it could even go up to 70 degrees. Now, if that was installed in a house in Australia, that would be totally illegal. And if a plumber hooked that up, there’d be some serious consequences if one of the kids or someone got third-degree burns.

Just to give you a little bit of info, water at 60 degrees will give you third-degree burns in about a second. When you drop that only 10 degrees to 50 degrees, it takes about three minutes. So, plenty of time to get your kid or a loved one out of the shower. The trouble with this is that it hooks straight up to the hot water system. You wouldn’t really want to leave your kids out there to shower by themselves. It’s too dangerous that the water could creep up to 60 degrees and give them a burn. And if you’re out camping remote, that’d be a terrible thing to have to pack up and try and get to a hospital.

The First Solution

The cupboard where the hot water system’s installed is a massive cupboard. So, plenty of room for a plumber to install a temp valve for you. With this setup, all we’ve done is put in a temp valve only for the shower, so it limits the water back to 50 degrees. That means that the parents of the kids or whoever can adjust that water from 50 degrees, or even lower, whatever you’re happy with your kids showering at.

We set this one to about 42 degrees. That means when the kids come out, jump in the shower, all they have to do is turn on the hot tap. The temp valve sorts out the temperature, comes out at 42 degrees, no hotter. There’s no way that it could come out at 60. That means that frees up your time as parents to be lighting fires, washing sand out of kids’ eyes, making dinner, doing all the hard work of camping, so these kids can have a great time and make some memories with them.

The good thing about this setup too, because it’s only for the shower, in the kitchen sink, it still has that beautiful, hot 60 degrees water for cleaning your pots and pans and stuff to makes it so much quicker and it uses less water as well.

The Second Solution

Now, if you do get a plumber to come out and to install the temp valve in your camper like this, while he’s there, ask him to put an external tap in for you as well. That’s the second thing that is a little bit annoying about the Robinson. When you’re out there camping or you’ve pulled over on the side of the road and you’ve tightened up the wheel nuts or even taking the kids for a bush wee, there’s nowhere really to wash your hands unless you open the kitchen up. So, while they’re working in here, it’s very easy to bring in a water main underneath. That’s what we’ve done here. We’ve installed a tap. All you’ve got to do is turn that on and you can wash your hands, wash your face, whatever it is, wash their nappies, their bottoms. And it’s really discreet. It’s not going to get smashed with a bush or anything. And then it just makes it that little bit more easier camping, getting rid of those pain points. That’s what we’re all about.

So, if you like some of the mods that we’ve done, check out other videos we’ve done. And if you need a plumber to do any of this stuff in Perth, give us a call.