Materials/Spend
- Shower Unit - £239.00
- Mounting Bracket - £59.00
- 12mm Water Pipe - £18.99
- Ball Valve - £4.71
- 20mm Pipe Clips - £6.59
- 12mm Jubilee Clips x4 - £3.48
- Hose Barb Fitting Female - £3.21
TOTAL: £334.98
You can see a diagram of my full water system here.
I made the decision fairly early on that I wasn’t going to install a shower inside my van. The majority of indoor shower solutions take up a lot of space, you need to think carefully how to deal with the dirty water and it just encourages the chance of mold forming from the water vapour.
Having said that, I was still keen to install some sort of shower unit to let me take showers outside of the van. One such unit that seemed to keep popping up on my Instagram feed was the Joolca Hottap. After doing a bit of investigation it seemed like a great product and was priced around the same as other units I’d been looking at.
The unit is designed to be able to be dragged around wherever you are and ideally used outside. I figured as I would be mounting this right at the rear of my van, this should be more than adequate.
Mounting the unit
After spending a couple hundred quid on the shower unit and excitedly unboxing it, I found that you needed to buy a specific wall bracket for it for even more money.
I begrudgingly ordered it and after it had arrived (and I’d gotten over this devastating news), I fastened it to the plywood wall of my van’s garage with six wood screws.
Once the bracket was in place, the shower unit clipped into place very nicely. The bracket is designed to allow you to quickly and easily dismount the unit and it’s very effective.
Gas supply
All the demonstrations on the Joolca website have the shower unit hooked up to a propane gas bottle but after researching the product, it looked as though LPG could be used as well.
I paid someone to install my underslung LPG tank and as part of this, they kindly hooked this up to my shower unit through a small hole in the van’s floor.
Water supply
I’d previously run some 12mm pipe across from my water pump to the other side of the van and installed a T-connector to allow me to branch off and supply both the shower unit and my kitchen tap.
I cut a small length of 12mm hose and fastened this to the T-connector with a jubilee clip and then fitted a ball lever valve to the other end. I want to be able to isolate the shower unit from the rest of the system if need be.
The water inlet to the shower unit initially had a domestic hose connector but this can easily be screwed off and I replaced this with a female 12mm hose connector.
I then ran some water pipe from the other end of the ball lever valve to the water intake valve of the shower unit. I fastened the water pipe to the plywood in a couple of places with some 20mm pipe clips as well.
Fixing the shower hose
The shower unit comes with a shower hose that can be attached via a domestic hose connection. The shower head is magnetic which comes in handy when being used in a metal van.
The last step is just to add the batteries that are supplied with the unit and you’re good to go!
If you have any questions at all, feel free to ping me an email or drop me a message on Instagram!
