Vintage Airstream plumbing was built to last – house grade copper water pipes with soldered joins, full-size drainage pipes and two roof vents!
Overall our plumbing plan would be much the same – although I wanted to simplify and gain some space in some key areas and reduce cut outs through the floor.
One key change was to replace all the waste traps with HepvO water-less traps. This gave me more clearance under the kitchen and bathroom sinks – and meant I could keep the bathtub at the original height, but not have to cut a hole in the floor for an s-trap.
Hot and cold water pipes were replaced with house grade Smart-x piping and push fittings (pex), and for the kitchen sink, we installed a house grade faucet connected to a Brita water filter for fresher drinking water.
We installed a 240v only Suburban hot water heater – we mostly planned to be on grid in caravan parks, but if the rare opportunity presented itself to go off grid – I added an additional hot water inlet for the shower that could be connected to an external, portable gas hot water heater.
The original water tank for the Airstream sat in the perfect place above the axles. I knew however with the reconfiguration of the interior I might need some flexibility to move weight aft. It’s also hard to find water tanks that would happily fit in the original space locally and importing an Airstream replacement would be expensive.
In the end I was able to fit a standard local water tank where the original black tank had been at the back of the chassis – and then connected that to a Shurflo pump and switch for water if we ever found ourselves without a town water connection.
And then new town water and water tank filler inlets added at the back of the Airstream.
Over the years we had found that the water didn’t drain particularly well in the existing drainage pipes and water pressure in the kitchen sink wasn’t great. The end result with our new systems is good water pressure all round, hot water on tap and free flowing drainage!